Tuesday 29 September 2009

OTHER TIMES

Recently this postcard came my way. It is an unposted, undated card published by J.T. Burrows of Prestatyn and titled ‘A bit of old Prestatyn’. Oddly perhaps, it was printed in Berlin – an early example of globalism.

The picture itself serves as a reminder that Prestatyn is an older town than Rhyl. There was a time when the area on which Rhyl was eventually built was described as marshy land in the Prestatyn Hundreds (i.e. in the hundreds of acres administered by Prestatyn).

Unlike Prestatyn, Rhyl as a settlement does not go back to Roman times and beyond, although in the last century some Neolithic artefacts (fishermen’s tools probably) were found on Rhyl sands - including three axes which are now in the National Museum of Wales, Aberystwyth.

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