The Crown Hotel, Llandegla

The Crown Hotel, Llandegla

This was one of 16 inns at Llandegla which once catered for the drovers who stopped the night here while driving livestock from Wales to England. Droving had died out by about 1870, replaced by railways. Now only two of the old inns are still in use as pubs, and this is one of them. It was previously known as The Crown Inn. The oldest parts date from the 17th century.

The inn’s trade also benefited from a livestock market, held on the opposite side of the road until it was moved to a site near St Tegla’s Church, in the centre of the village.

In the 19th century the tale was told locally of a sow belonging to the Crown Inn which discovered a vat containing waste from the taproom. Having slaked its thirst, the sow staggered across the yard and fell on her side in a duckpond, where she spent the night sobering up.

In September 1891 the Crown laid on an impromptu tea for royalty. HRH Prince Henry of Pless arrived, unexpectedly, with Daisy Cornwallis-West of Ruthin Castle and her parents. He was the eldest son of Prince Hans Heinrich XI of the Principality of Pless, now in Poland but then in Germany. He married Miss West in 1891. She was regarded as one of Europe’s most beautiful royals. The Germans watched her as a potential traitor in the First World War, when she worked as a nurse in Berlin and on the eastern and western fronts, tending British prisoners of war when she could.

During the Second World War, Italian prisoners of war worked grain drying machinery which had been installed in what is now The Crown Hotel’s car park. Tractors and other farm implements were collected for war work in a large shed at the same site.

In the early years of the war, Britain was braced for an attempted invasion by the Nazis. A concrete pill box still stands beside the bridge over the river Alyn, about 150 metres west of The Crown Hotel. It is on the south side of the A525 (the road to Ruthin). The building has small holes for soldiers to fire at the approaching enemy. Two similar loopholes for defensive gun firing can be seen in the wall of the Crown Hotel’s beer garden, facing the A5104 (the Llangollen road).

Sources: Llandegla Then and Now, by the Llandegla Millennium Action Group, and contemporary newspapers

Postcode: LL11 3AD    View Location Map

Website of The Crown Hotel