Pont Dafydd Traditional Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
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You can drive-by this cache or walk along from End of the road (Old A55) cache. Hopefully you will like this cache site, with its history. Another bygone era, where time has moved on but we are left with these memories.
Turnpikes and tolls.
The Chester-Holyhead road was built in 1663, running via Rhuddlan. It was soon re-routed via Holywell and St Asaph, passing though Rhuallt and over Pont Dafydd, to avoid the marshes around Rhuddlan. A Turnpike Trust was set up in 1756 to improve and maintain the road. Road users paid a fee which was collected at toll gates along the route. The tolls were unpopular and many took the long way round to avoid paying! Traffic soon increased along this upgraded road and by the end of the 18th century regular mail coaches and stage coaches ran between Chester and Holyhead. Several of the milestones that marked the route can still be seen.
The gap in the Clwydian ridge at Rhuallt has always been the natural route for an east-west road. The remains of the original Roman road can still be traced to the east of Bryn Gwyn Mawr. A similar route, upgraded many times as the traffic changed, has been used over the centuries by packhorses and oxen carts, livestock, stagecoaches, steam engines and finally motor vehicles.
St Asaph cathedral was the focus of the medieval church in North-east Wales and so the route from Holywell to St Asaph was particularly important. Bishop Dafydd of St Asaph built the cobbled bridge, Pont Dafydd, in 1630, to carry the road across Afon Clwyd. For centuries it carried travellers to and from St Asaph and was carefully maintained by the church. However, when traffic increased, a replacement was built in 1840s. The old bridge was cut off from St Asaph when the A55 was widened in 1969. The river was also diverted so Pont Dafydd, once so highly valued, now sits at the edge of a field with grass growing beneath!
Imagine stagecoaches clattering over Pont Dafydd in bygone times 
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Victorian poet, Felicia Hemans, spent most of her life here, living first at Bronwylfa, St Asapth, and later at Rhyllon, the nearby brick farmhouse.
Reputedly, the opening, lines of her most famous poem, 'Casnbianco' came to her as she stood on this bridge.
"The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but him had fled, the flame that lit the battle's wrech shone round him o'er the dead",
http://www.clwydianrangeaonb.org.uk/uploads/Complete.pdf
Congratulations to Phil (PhilPamAndRob) who was first to find this Geocache on 1/12/07.
27/8/11 Sorry Ian A giving your secret away http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ghup_Ghwsvs&feature=fvwp&NR=1
Nearby caches -
A55 Frustration No3 http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=61eb25d9-2f62-4085-a8d2-9fc75e6113a2
End of the road (Old A55) http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=5df33608-fb94-4f83-a5b0-f8677808bb74
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Vgf gurer fbzrjurer!!
Treasures
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