The Sands of Dee

The highway from Chester to North Wales passes over the southernmost tip of the Dee Estuary. The view is not impressive. Huge steel, coal, and gas works dominate a flat landscape covered with industrial estates and crossed by mammoth transmission lines. As the highway crosses the Dee itself, nothing of it or its great estuary is visible, only a wide ditch lined with boulders. This is the impression most visitors get of the Dee River—an area where the changeless British landscape has become barnacled with 20th century industrial sprawl.

In fact, the Dee Estuary may well be the least changeless countryside in Britain. For two millennia the Dee has been the scene of economic upheaval and military violence, industrial activity and environmental change. The Dee of today—wide, grassy sand flats on its east and industrial ports on its west—is only the latest in a parade of landscapes.

The River Dee drains out of the mountains of central Wales to enter the broad, fertile plains that border the Midlands' western edge. Within that plain the Dee loops back and forth between Wales and England, passing the quaint Welsh villages of Erbistock and Bangor-on-Dee, becoming the national border between Welsh Holt and English Farndon, then running solidly through England to pass by the wonderful small city of Chester. Beyond Chester the Dee dives into Wales, becomes captured by a large canal, then slowly sinks into the wide and sandy Dee Estuary that forms the northern border between England and Wales.

When the Romans first reached the Dee, what they found looked nothing like it does today. At that time the Dee estuary was long and deep, its waters accessible to their largest ships as far as modern day Chester. This was important to the Romans, as was the Dee's location between two warring Celtic tribes. On the Dee's eastern bank, the Cornovii willingly became allies and servants of the Romans; to the west of the Dee, the Ordovices fiercely resisted the foreign invaders. The Romans built a major legionary fortress at the head of the Dee Estuary at a spot where they could bring in supplies by sea and send out troops all over the disputed lands—the original foundation of the city of Chester.

That legionary fortress still exists, its buildings long gone but its streets and walls emerging from the ground, covered with later construction but their lines and paths very much visible. The fortress's wall, although buried by medieval improvements, shows the signature Roman form of a rectangle. It remains nearly complete, with a three mile walkway along its top, built in 1707. The inside of this rectangle—now downtown Chester with its rows of tall half-timbered shops—was the interior of the fortress, built to protect barracks and administrative offices. The streets inside the walls form rectangles as well, preserving the Roman layout rather than being replaced by the organic medieval tracks, and still connect the wall's gates at right angles. None of this consistency can be found in medieval construction, as the medievals built piecemeal to reflect the needs of the people of the day, rather than all at once, planned with obsessive regularity. Outside the walls a parade ground extended eastward along the course of modern Foregate Street; the Roman amphitheater, built on the parade ground's southern edge, can still be visited two blocks south.

Despite its long history, Roman Chester was not a center of civilization. Rather, it was a military outpost that guarded a hostile frontier. That hostile frontier was already there when the Romans arrived; evidently, the Romans were invited in by the Cornovii (inhabiting what would become England), to oppose their enemies, the fierce Ordovices (inhabiting modern day Wales). After the Romans left, the descendants of the Cornovian Celts formed a minor kingdom that softly and quietly vanished into English Mercia -- probably through diplomacy and trade, rather than conquest. In contrast, the heirs of the Ordovican Celts would not go gently into that good night. They fought the English; they became Welsh.

The Dee became the battle zone between the English and the Welsh, but the actual boundary depended on who was winning at the time. The Mercian English under King Offa pushed the Welsh well back beyond the Dee, and marked the boundary with the long earthwork known as Offa's Dyke; that dyke can still be seen many miles inside modern-day Wales, running along the A5151 a mile east of Trelawnyd. A mile east of Offa's Dyke, on its English side, stands the Maen Achwyfaen, an eleven foot high Celtic cross, richly carved, commemorating a later Welsh victory over the English.

By the 13th century the Welsh had reconquered land deep in English territory, all the way to the Dee, but their moment of victory was short lived. England's Edward I, alarmed at Welsh strength, set about systematically subduing all of Wales. Edward knew he had one great advantage over the fierce Welsh armies: money. Edward had lots of it, and the Welsh didn't. Edward used his money to build a type of castle the Welsh had never seen—huge, government-owned military fortresses, each housing a professional garrison dedicated to suppressing rebellion in its home territory and conquering adjacent lands.

Edward built the first of these castles at Flint, on an outcrop extending into the Dee Estuary one day's march from Chester. Sailing into Chester, he sent his huge army ahead to smash the Welsh's small Ewloe Castle that guarded the road from England. That done, he quickly sent in a second army—an army of English stonemasons and carpenters, fully armed with all the equipment and supplies they needed to quickly build a great castle from the ground up. The walls of Flint Castle still stand below the town of Flint, surrounded by the Dee Marshes, just as the abandoned ruins of Ewloe rise out of an ancient forest on the hillside above. Both are now in the care of Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments and are open to the public.

Not long after conquering the Dee Estuary from the Welsh, the English found themselves in a new battle for the Dee, this time against an enemy they could not defeat—the sea. The Dee Estuary had always provided a deep, clear sea lane to Chester; now it was silting up. Starting in late Medieval times sand bars formed along the mouth of the estuary and slowly spread inland. With large ships increasingly blocked from reaching the Chester wharf, Chester's authorities started building new wharfs further down the river. Finally, they canalized the river downstream from Chester into the ditch you see today from the motorway. This was a mistake. The rerouted river now scoured the Welsh shore free of sediment, and deposited its sand load on the English shore, the Wirral, for centuries a rural backwater with views over a grassy, sandy marsh.

From the first, industry loved the newly scoured Welsh Shore. Before steam engines were perfected, factories needed a mountain stream for power and a port for shipment, and the Welsh side of the Dee had both. A high ridge of limestone rises out of the Welsh Dee coast to form the beginning of the Clwyddian Hills, lush with meadows and rich with springs. One powerful ridgetop spring was well known to early industrialists, as a famous holy site and point of pilgrimage. Located at Holywell and dedicated to St. Winifrede, its large, elaborately carved Gothic chapel and crypt escaped the Protestant Reformation and remains, to this day, a pilgrimage site in the keeping of the Roman Catholic Church. The early industrialists used these holy waters to power a whole valley full of factories, lined up one after the other, as the stream tumbled down the steep hillside. Now the factories are long gone but their foundations and mill ponds make up the backbone of the Greenfield Valley Country Park. Starting just above St. Winifred's Well, walking paths descend the forested vale past vine-covered brick foundations, large ponds and small lakes, and water cascading over dam outflows like small brick waterfalls. At the bottom of the park, a reconstructed farm contains 19th century farm implements, a museum and a petting zoo, while the ruins of the 12th century Basingwerk Abbey are directly across the lane.

While industry continues to hug the Welsh coast, the limestone hills above remain gloriously rural. Narrow lanes meander between hedgerows, past handsome old farmhouses and daisy-scattered meadows, to tiny hamlets with clean, white pubs; occasionally a view opens up over the sweep of the Dee Estuary. Here the carved Celtic cross Maen Achwyfaen commemorates a victory in a lonely hilltop meadow, while the remnants of Offa's Dyke pass nearby. At the opposite end, the handsome ruins of Ewloe Castle guard nothing more important than an old hillside forest in beautiful Wepres Park.

The English side of the Dee, known as The Wirral, has only recently awakened from its long slump into siltation and obscurity. Now far removed from sea lanes that could attract industry, its sleepy, quaint little villages have instead attracted commuters from nearby Liverpool. A series of nature reserves and National Trust lands preserve the old landscape, including a forest-covered hill in the former port of Burton (now 3.5 miles from the shipping channel), and a large village common in Thurstaston, both close enough to the Dee Estuary to furnish views. The Willaston railroad depot, lovingly restored to its 1956 appearance, reminds Wirralians what their borough was like in its days as a sleepy backwater.

The Wirral's Deeside attracts many English tourists wishing to practice that country's fastest growing leisure activity—birdwatching. The Dee Estuary wetlands are protected from pollution and urbanization under British law, and various organizations have created no fewer than thirteen wildlife refuges along its shores. Of these, the most scenic may be Red Rocks and Hilbre Island. Red Rocks is a large red sandstone outcrop in the sandy beaches that line the northern end of the Wirral's Deeside; despite a nearby urban beach they furnish fine wild views over the Dee's mouth. This rocky outcrop continues over the Sands of Dee to Hilbre Island, an exposed sandstone reef crowned with meadows and a scattering of old buildings. At low tide it's a two hour walk across the sands to this beautiful little island—but be careful not to be stranded an hour from shore when the dangerous tide rushes suddenly in. You don't want to share Mary's fate.

The best part of the Wirral may well be its old wharfs, built between the 15th and 18th centuries as siltation forced shipping further up the estuary. The first was at Shotwick, a few miles north of Chester; it served as a major departure point for the ships that opposed the Spanish Armada in the 16th century. Now Shotwick is an isolated, quaint little hamlet of well-kept 17th century cottages grouped around a parish church, far removed from the estuary. The only sign of Shotwick's old wharf is an embankment at the far end of the churchyard, and a stone bridge a short distance down the farm lane that descends from there. The last of the wharfs was at Parkgate, six miles up the coast; when the sands clogged its harbors in the early 19th century the town quickly converted to a beach resort, which it remains to this day.

At the very end of the Dee Estuary, Point of Ayr in Wales marks the place where the Sands of Dee rise almost imperceptibly from the ocean. Here a handsome lighthouse sits on a rock platform a short distance from land. It's a short hop over the dunes to the beach town of Talacre, but at low tide the walk to the see is the length of three football fields over sand flats. It's a good place to sit on the beach, admire a sunset, and contemplate the landscapes of the Dee Estuary, changeable as the sand.