Chirk Castle stands on a ridge above the Ceiriog valley on the English border, a square Marcher fortress begun by Roger Mortimer at the end of the 13th century. In 1595 it was bought by Sir Thomas Myddelton, a London merchant who became Lord Mayor, and his family held it for more than four hundred years. Visitors arriving by the main drive pass through the elaborate wrought iron gates made in 1719 by the Davies brothers of Bersham, and in the middle of the ironwork is the Myddelton coat of arms, with a red hand.
Nobody at Chirk was ever short of a story to explain that bloody hand. The most common is that two young members of the family quarrelled over who should inherit the castle. It was settled by a race. As the front runner reached out to touch the winning post, his rival drew his sword and hacked off his hand. Another version makes the rivals twin sons of a dying Lord Myddelton, who did not know which of them had been born first. He told them to race on horseback round the castle to the gates, and the first to arrive would inherit. The twin who was losing, seeing his fortune slip away, cut off his own hand and hurled it over the line ahead of his brother. A third story holds that the red hand was a curse put on the Myddeltons, and that it cannot be removed from the family's arms.
The prosaic explanation is heraldic. The red hand of Ulster was granted as a badge to baronets, and Sir Thomas Myddelton was made a baronet in 1660, so the hand on the gates is a mark of rank. The legends are good examples of a family emblem gathering a gory origin story.
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