Whales and Churches

Not two words that you often read in the same sentence, but on the walk this morning to post the shop parcels (most parcels get delivered to the local post office 2 miles away as we walk the dogs), we called in at our local church where the two things are definitely linked!

When they were doing work on the Mallwyd village church in the 1700's they found some old whale bones. Some claim they're a tusk and a patella, but dragging up my memories form Biology degree they look more like a rib and some other joint, but definitely not a patella. Either way they're pretty unusual objects, who knows how they got 10 miles inland?



The rest of the church is pretty unusual as well, the wood at the top of the bell tower has holes in it which spell out a phrase in Latin, unfortunately my GCSE latin is far too rusty to make a bash at translating it. There's also a lovely old gravestone, with a fantastic example of olde english.



Interestingly the older gravestones are in English and it's not until the 1800's that they start to be written in Welsh. We live in a very welsh speaking area, though nearly 50% of the population are incomers from England (mostly the West Midlands), so English is pretty commonly spoken as well.