The market and industrial centre of Wrexham, by far the largest town in North Wales, is the home of the steeple in the rhyme. It can be seen for many miles around as the tallest building in the town, turns out to be not a steeple at all, but the 16th century tower of the Church of St. Giles.
The richly-decorated tower, 135-feet high, with its four striking hexagonal turrets, was begun in 1506. It is graced by many medieval carvings including those of an arrow and a deer, the attributes of St. Giles. The interior of the church also contains many late medieval carvings and monuments. On a window you can find the words of the 1819 hymn by Reginald Heber, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains." Just outside the church, west of the tower is the grave of Elihu Yale, after whom Yale University in the USA is named, with its long, fanciful epitaph containing the following lines:
Born in America, in Europe bred,
In Africa travell'd, and in Asia wed,
Where long he lov'd and thriv'd;
At London dead.
To enter the churchyard, you pass through the magnificently-carved wrought-iron gates, completed in 1719 by the Davies Brothers of nearby Bersham, who were also responsible for the even more elaborate gates of Chirk Castle, perhaps the finest example of wrought-iron work in Britain. It is well worth a short diversion to the little village of Chirk to view these gates; their painstaking detail makes us wonder why they were not given an honoured place as one of the so-called seven wonders of Wales. The only comparable ironwork is found in two other sets of Davies Brothers' gates: at Sandringham, one of the English monarch's residences and at Leeswood Hall, near Mold in Flintshire. Near Wrexham, too, is the village of Acton, where Judge Jeffreys, the infamous hanging judge of the Bloody Assizes of 1685 was born in 1645.
Bersham is a small village that holds special importance for historians, for not only did it house the workshops of the Davies Brothers, it was one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution. This is the place where British iron making began in 1670 and where John "Iron-Mad" Wilkinson set up shop in 1761. For many years the area was one of the most important iron manufacturing centres in the world. Today, the Bersham Industrial Centre tells the story of the man who bored cannon used in the American War of Independence and cylinders for James Watts's revolutionary steam engine.
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