Oswestry: The English town that belongs in Wales

In the border town of Oswestry, Welsh is heard in shops, on signs and in daily life – despite the town being firmly in England.

"You're the first person I've spoken English with today," Sian Vaughan Jones said, with sudden realisation as I stepped into Siop Cwlwm, a Welsh-themed shop in the Shropshire market town of Oswestry.

"You'll hear Welsh all over town," she added, as I browsed shelves lined with Welsh-language books, CDs, calendars and greetings cards. "There are some days when I don't speak any English at all."

A Welsh business staffed by Cymraeg (Welsh) speaking locals like Jones, should not be a curiosity in the United Kingdom, where more than 500,000 people speak the Celtic language. But this one is, because, as Jones proudly told me, Siop Cwlwm – which means the "Knot Shop" in Welsh and promotes Welsh language, culture and heritage – is one of the few Welsh shops in England. "Because Oswestry is right on the border," said Jones. "We're so connected to Wales."

"Connected" is a diplomatic description of Oswestry's relationship with Wales. Some might say it's on the "wrong" side of the border entirely. Look at a map, and you'll see the border between England and Wales lies no more than six miles away – to the north, south and west – enclosing Oswestry within a small wedge of "English" land protruding unnaturally into Wales. Tourist information signs across town say Croeso (Welcome); flyers advertise a Siop Siarad (a Welsh language get-together); and the local football team, The New Saints, is the most successful club in the Cymru Premier, the Welsh national league.

"When you look at a map, the border goes around Oswestry," said local curator Mark Hignett, whom I met later at Oswestry Town Museum. "One story I've heard says the cartographer had a hiccup. Another, that it was drawn to punish Oswestry by placing the town in England," he half-joked. "In reality, it was likely drawn where it is because Offa's Dyke is to our west." 

Hignett explained how the Cornovii – a Celtic tribe who spoke a Brythonic language, from which modern Welsh descends – once dominated this part of Britain. It's thought they constructed Old Oswestry Hill Fort around 800 BCE, and a short walk from town, its Iron Age ramparts still rise above the countryside.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th Century CE, however, Anglo-Saxon invaders, who spoke dialects of Old English, began displacing native Brythonic speakers. Around the 7th Century, a defensive boundary known as Wat's Dyke was formed to Oswestry's east, dividing the Anglo-Saxons from their Celtic counterparts. In the 8th Century, an Anglo-Saxon king named Offa built another dyke, a vast earthwork of ditches and parapets, to the west of Oswestry. Stretching for some 80 miles, Offa's Dyke still marks much of the modern border between England and Wales.

To the Welsh, Oswestry became part of "The Lost Lands" – places where Cymraeg was once spoken. Yet being so close to this ancient boundary also left the town in the midst of a hazy and often bloody borderland. "We were either trading with the Welsh, or we were fighting the Welsh," said Hignett, summarising Oswestry's medieval history. 

Next to Oswestry's Town Hall lie the ruins of an 11th-Century Norman castle, from which English kings attacked Welsh princes who refused to bend the........

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