Corwen, on the Dee below the Berwyns, is a small market town with a big history; Owain Glyndŵr was proclaimed Prince of Wales near here in 1400. Its parish church stands close to the town square and has a legend about why it is exactly where it is.
The story, as the diocesan historian D. R. Thomas recorded it, is that the builders tried to put the church up in other places, and every attempt failed because of the influence of what he called certain adverse powers. The only place they could build was where there stood a particular stone, Carreg y Big yn y Fach Rewlyd, the pointed stone in the icy nook.
The account does not say what the adverse powers were, and Elias Owen found that people were reluctant to say either. Forty years before he wrote, when he asked the old people of the district about it, they would shake their heads in an ominous kind of way and fall silent, as if it were wrong to talk of such things. Others, more willing, guessed that it was the work of a spirit, or of the fairies.
The story is one of the church site legends Owen collected from across north east Wales, and the idea of a church founded beside an older standing stone has encouraged the suggestion that Corwen was a pre-Christian sacred place. A stone identified with Carreg y Big is built into the church porch, and should not be confused with the tall standing stone of the same name on the hills above Llangollen.
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