Returning through the park to the high road, I crossed the Dee over a recently erected iron bridge; and entering the parish of Chirk, I soon regained Offa’s Dyke, the peculiar features of which plainly distinguish it. The Dyke crosses the road to London about two hundred yards to the west of Whitehurst’s new toll gate, and about four miles and a half from Llangollen. Pursuing the line of the Dyke towards Chirk Castle, I found in it a number of large and long grey stones, mossed over, and lying confusedly at the bottom. They are very remarkable, as there are no quarries in the neighbourhood, from which such stones could be procured; and as they all lay in one spot, I conjecture that they have been used to mark the graves of the slain in the year 1165, when Henry II. made his first expedition against North Wales, by way of the Berwyn Mountains:—“He assembled a large army at Oswelt Tree, and detached a number of men to try the passes into Wales. There was a narrow way through the Dyke, near Castell Crogen, now Chirk Castle; they were set upon by a party of Welchmen, as they would have passed this strait, and many of them were there slain, and buried in that ditch; where (says my Author) their graves are now (i.e. 1697) to be seen.” {20} The place was called Adwy’r Beddau, i.e. Pass of the Graves. There is a field or two near the place still called Tir a Beddau, i.e. Land, or Field of the Dead. I visited this place, and found the field under cultivation; and it is possible that the stones may have been removed out of the way of the plough, to the place where they now lie. On examining an old survey of Chirk Lordship, I found two or three parcels of land lying contiguous to each other, and on each side of the Dyke, at this place, bearing the same name, Tir y Beddau. From this field of the dead I bent my way along the Dyke, through bramble, bush, and brier, to the no small disturbance of its numerous inhabitants, the nimble squirrels, the rabbits, and the pheasants, springing before me every thirty or forty yards. At length I arrived at the brink of a sheet of water called the pool, on which numbers of wild ducks, coots, and other aquatic birds were disporting. The ditch and rampire continued through the middle of that pool, and the rampire is still traceable from the boat house on the opposite side; and running along the ley in front of Chirk Castle to a wood yard on the west side of it, it again deepens, and assumes its form. As it approaches the Ceiriog river, which skirts the south side of the park, it appears indeed a barrier. I took the depth a little from the farm or wood yard, and found it about fifty feet, a little farther on sixty feet, and near its termination at Pont Melin y Castell, or the Castle Mill, it is about eighty feet. At this point there is a bridge over the river, up whose banks, at about half a mile distance, is a farm still retaining the name of Crogen Isaf, or Lower Crogen.