The Gremlin – a Never-ending Story

Most people don’t notice the gremlin sitting on the roof of the little electrical substation next to Pritchards Chemist at the bottom of Ffordd Tanrallt. He came to Meliden from Lancashire at the beginning of April in 1715 when steam engines were first installed in the lead mine. He created considerable mischief until 1884 but then the mine closed and so he needed somewhere else to throw his spanners. Luckily, he was quite interested in transport and had already been dabbling with something he called Dangerous Corner.

Until the 1930s, everybody knew about Meliden’s Dangerous Corner—especially the men whose living was made by driving carts—remember it was mostly horse-drawn traffic. Ffordd Talargoch was less than half its present width and very bumpy with a loose stone surface. The traffic going past the Star Inn and down the hill from Mount Pleasant towards Prestatyn had to take a very sharp left bend in the road to avoid a building in front of the Miners’ Arms which was used as a slaughterhouse. The building has gone but the bend is still there. If you wanted to go to Prestatyn in those days, you had to go around Dangerous Corner, pass the school and the church, then go down the hill where the golf course is now. Head-on collisions and near misses were daily events on Dangerous Corner. If that was not enough, there was another difficulty—the turn up to Tanrallt was on the same bend.

Until the1860s, Prestatyn was an unimportant little hamlet controlled by the Meliden Parish Council but it has done quite well for itself since the Lancastrian invasion of the 1890s. Did you know that by 1911, every third person living down on the other side of the mainline railway had been born in Lancashire? These days it seems, everyone wants live or spend some time and money in Prestatyn, so Meliden has become a corridor. Remember, next time you drive down Tanrallt to join the main road and peer into into the low sun in an effort to see the traffic coming past Mount Pleasant, you are making use of a traffic scheme created by a 350 year-old gremlin.

In 1905, the gremlin resolved to make Meliden more accessible—he wanted to double the population. He used his special powers to make the Prestatyn Weekly suggest a passenger railway service from Rhyl to Dyserth, via Prestatyn and Meliden. The railway company were not keen but a new kind of steam-powered railway carriage had already been introduced elsewhere by its competitors, so it decided that it might try something similar. The engine-builders needed a quiet backwater to test their prototype and the Rhyl to Prestatyn to Dyserth branch suited them perfectly. The venture was far more successful than anticipated and even though most passengers arrived on foot, there was a remarkable increase in road traffic as Meliden become popular with settlers and holidaymakers—from Lancashire. Then came the speculative builders and the large amount of building materials arriving at the warehouse started to cause traffic jams—especially under the Tanrallt bridge, where long queues of carters—under the gremlin’s watchful eye—refused to give way to each other. A horse and cart requires considerably more skill to control than a car and carriers travelling down from the railway warehouse on Pen y Maes often overturned their carts as they turned towards Dyserth. From the other direction, horses were in the habit of cutting the corner because the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

The number of accidents and near misses on Dangerous Corner increased and the railway company and villagers were eager to find someone or something to blame—and they found it! Motorcars had seen travelling at 8 to 10 miles per hour! [The speed limit for cars at this time was 20 m.p.h.] A typical complaint appeared in the Rhyl Journal, May 25, 1907:

A Dangerous Spot.

During the past season two—if not three—accidents befell motorcars, with rather serious consequences in one case at least, at an abrupt turn of the high road near the Miners Arms. Bearing this in mind a petition was numerously signed by the inhabitants requesting that something be done to do away with this dangerous spot. It seems that to accomplish this it will be necessary to secure about 400 yards of agricultural land abutting on to the main road. The land in question being glebe land, the Parish Council communicated with the Bishop of St. Asaph and the Vicar of the Parish, and the last heard of the matter was that the Bishop and Vicar Were not prepared to give the land but would consider a reasonable offer for it, The petition mentioned was forwarded about three months ago and very little headway towards accomplishing this very desirable improvement has yet been made. What is the Meliden Parish Council doing? This is an opportune moment to carry out the work, before the travelling season is upon us.

A meeting to consider the whole road from Prestatyn, through Meliden and Rhuddlan to Rhyl took place but only one County Councillor attended. When the councils, whose areas the road passed through, learned of the likely cost from the County Surveyor, they lost interest. It was not a main road so the County Council also washed its hands of responsibility except that Dangerous Corner, was considered a special case and the County agreed to take action—but did nothing. The editor of the Prestatyn Weekly expressed an opinion:

If a steep incline in a road, a sharp turn at the bottom, and a village school with its many possibilities just beyond—if this does not constitute a dangerous spot, it would be interesting to hear the Flintshire Highway Surveyor’s definition of one.

It became a tradition every April at the Annual Meeting of the Meliden Parish Council for the Clerk to be instructed to write to the Flintshire County Council calling their attention to Dangerous Corner and twenty-five years later, the bypass was built. And what of the gremlin? Although retired, he remains very energetic and still supervises the traffic at school times. His current interests include building houses and even though he has been seen sitting on the roof of County Hall, he is quite contented to allow others to claim all the credit—I told you that this story has no ending.