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The story behind the name Bwlchgwyn
Few Welsh place names are accidental. They often describe the landscape as it appeared to the people who travelled through it, farmed it and made their homes there. Bwlchgwyn is no exception.
The name is usually translated as “White Pass”, but exactly what the name originally described is less certain.
Bwlch — the gap in the hills
The first part of the name appears straightforward, although exactly which feature it describes is less certain.
Bwlch is a common element in Welsh place names. It can describe a gap, opening, notch or pass through high ground, making it an appropriate word for this upland landscape.
One possibility is that the name refers to the old routes which crossed the hills here. Long before the modern village developed, tracks passed through Bwlchgwyn between the country around Wrexham and the uplands towards Llandegla and beyond. In this interpretation, the name preserves the memory of a place on the journey through the hills.
There is another intriguing possibility.
Immediately beside Bwlchgwyn lies the steep valley of Nant-y-Ffrith. Before modern forestry and quarrying altered the landscape, this ravine would have been an even more conspicuous geographical feature, and the farming community of Bwlchgwyn extended into parts of the valley.
Remarkably, there is evidence that local people themselves associated the word Bwlch with this landscape. In 1903, the young men responsible for organising the Bwlchgwyn Eisteddfod styled themselves “Gwŷr Ieuainc y Bwlch”, the young men of the Bwlch. The contemporary newspaper report therefore gives us a fascinating glimpse of how villagers understood and identified with the name more than a century ago.
Whether Bwlch originally referred specifically to Nant-y-Ffrith, to a pass through the surrounding hills, or more generally to the broken upland landscape cannot now be said with certainty.
But whichever explanation is correct, the first half of Bwlchgwyn's name seems rooted in the landscape that existed long before the village itself.
Photo of the Bwlchgwyn Eisteddfod
But why “gwyn”?
Gwyn is most commonly translated as white — giving the familiar interpretation: Bwlch Gwyn = “White Pass”
But what was white? - Several explanations have been suggested over the years.
The white rocks
Perhaps the strongest explanation lies beneath the village itself.
Bwlchgwyn sits close to an important belt of limestone, and historically the pale limestone outcrops around Fron Heulog and towards Gwynfryn were considerably more prominent than they are today. Later quarrying transformed much of this landscape. Wrexham's own landscape assessment still identifies the prominent limestone scarp as a defining feature of the area.
The historian Thomas Morgan, writing in 1912, gave essentially this explanation. He translated Bwlchgwyn as the white gap or pass and believed the name probably referred to the white limestone cliffs beside the old road between Wrexham and Ruthin.
Local historian Alfred Neobard Palmer had reached a similar conclusion, associating the name with a long outcrop of white limestone.
Or was it the snow?
There is another wonderfully simple possibility.
At around 333 metres (1,090 feet) above sea level, Bwlchgwyn occupies a particularly exposed position. Snow has therefore also been suggested as the origin of gwyn — the high ground becoming conspicuously white during winter.
It is an attractive explanation, particularly for anyone who has experienced a Bwlchgwyn winter.
But attractive explanations are not necessarily historical ones.
There appears to be no surviving early record which explicitly tells us that the village was named after its snow, so it remains a possibility rather than a certainty.
Was it once Bwlch Gwynt?
There is one final possibility — and it changes the meaning altogether. A local historical tradition records an older form: Bwlch Gwynt
The Welsh word gwynt means wind.
According to an account preserved in later local history, nineteenth-century landowner R. V. Kyrke recalled seeing the form Bwlch Gwynt in an old deed. If that recollection represented a genuinely older form of the name, Bwlchgwyn might originally have referred not to a White Pass, but something closer to a Windy Pass.
Anyone standing on the exposed heights might find that explanation equally believable.
There is a problem, however, earlier documentary evidence also contains forms corresponding to Bwlch Gwyn. Palmer identified the name in a document dating to 1649, where it was associated with a common, while the enclosure notice of 1809 recorded the land as the “common called Bwlch Gwym”, apparently another historical spelling of the familiar name.
An sign in an alternative reality where Bwlchgwyn's name was named after the windy weater
A name older than the village
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bwlchgwyn's name is not deciding between snow, stone and wind. It is its age.
Thomas Morgan reported an occurrence of Bwlchgwyn in 1649, describing it as a common. More than a century and a half later, the enclosure notice of 1809 was still referring to the common called Bwlch Gwym.
This was before the mining boom, before rows of houses spread across the mountain and before Bwlchgwyn became the village we recognise today.
Bwlchgwyn was therefore the name of the place before it was really the name of a village.
The settlement inherited its name from the landscape around it.
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