08-Sep-2002 -- An afternoon visit to get the full set of the Welsh mainland confluences and the first of the four that surround my home.

I did not have the Ordnance Survey map of the area and just for fun looked for the spot with just a GPS. This meant that I was unaware of the minor road out of Gyfelia and approached through a mown field off the Rhosllanerchrugog to Overton road instead. At the top of a steep wooded bank, I had a fleeting all zeros, but a more consistent reading was obtained from the brook side of the minor road, after a slither down the bank. There seemed to be no need to wade the watercourse, the spot seemed to be centred on the road, but with the wooded bank hiding the satellites , it did wander about the place rather a lot. This is easily the easiest confluence that I have attempted to date.

I walked back through tiny Gyfelia to the car, noting the old parish pump in an overgrown hedgerow. A quiet spot, yet so close to the town of Wrexham. My parking place was very heavily littered, a sure sign of a nearby large town. Gyfelia is a pretty anonymous sort of place, and a web search only came up with the news that it was named after a blacksmith's forge, Gefail meaning tongs.

The confluence is on the edge of the Cheshire Plain, not far from the English border. To the west is a series of Carboniferous rocks, rising through the now unworked coalfields to a spectacular karst limestone hill range. Afterwards I travelled through the old mining town of Rhosllanerchrugog up onto the hill to get a distant overview of the confluence.

Topo map extract here:
http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dll?G2M?X=332500&Y=345500&A=N&Z=4