Cylchgronau Cymru

A FEW REFLECTIONS ON GELLILYFDY AND THE RENAIS- SANCE IN NORTH-EASTERN WALES By P. SMITH, MA., F.S.A., and M. BEVAN-EVANS, M.A., F.S.A. Gellilyfdy, home of John Jones, is a substantial farm standing on an eminence among the hills between the Clwyd and the Dee. It presents the problem of many of the houses of the famous, namely whether the existing house is the actual building in which the great man was born or its successor. For the present farm house may well have been built any time between about 1570 and the Civil War. Some time in those years a single-storey, open-hearth, hall-house of distinction was replaced by a storeyed house complete with stairs and a fireplaoe-a fairly common event at the time. The roof over Gellilyfdy clearly once belonged to such an open-hearth hall. It consists of three arch-braced trusses originally fitted with windbraces. Ornate open roofs of this type are sometimes found in storeyed houses. But this roof is heavily smoke-blackened in a situation where such smoke-blackening could not have taken place, that is above the ceiling of the first floor. Once must therefore conclude that the roof belongs to an older house. It can only have been the roof of a hall-house. For the sentimental there is the satisfaction at least that it was under this very roof, whether in the present Gellilyfdy or its predecessor, that John Jones was born. The plan of the house is peculiar. It consists of two rooms, one heated by a large side fireplace and one unheated. The entrance is directly into the unheated room which also contained a stair. Although this present stair is of no great age, slit windows alongside suggest this was always the stair position. The ground-floor plan is repeated on the first-floor. Although lateral-fireplace houses are common enough in Flintshire none of these are entered through the lesser and unheated room. Most are provided with opposed doorways and a few by the full cross-passage with par- titions between the passage and the hall as well as between the passage and the outer-room. It may be that this is not a complete house and that the Victorian parlour-addition replaces a structure which would have made the plan more easily intelligible. On the other hand the quoins are well made and do not suggest continua- tion in either direction. The house is not a large one and maybe it reflects the well- known financially-straightened circumstances in which John Jones spent his life. On the other hand the detailing is quite good and the slender chimney over the side- fireplace is one of the tallest in north-east Wales, a land of tall-chimneyed houses. It must be admitted that the house itself is something of a puzzle. No such imponderables complicate our understanding of the chief farm building, the great corn-barn, which stands on a hillock to the south of the house. This is clearly dated by a finely-cut inscription on one of the tie-beams ANNO domtni 1586 W.I. and must have been built by John Jones's father, William. It is one of the larger corn-barns in the district and indicates a farm of considerable productive capacity. In his youth John Jones must often have watched his father's labourers loading the sheaves of corn into the great barn after the harvest and threshing them between the great opposed doorways in the long months of winter. The barn was the heart of the