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Ffynnon Nant Dysilio, Oswestry

St Tysilio was a 7th century Welsh missionary, whose medieval cult was centred around Welshpool. He travelled across North Wales as far as Anglesey, and is reputed to have established a missionary station at nearby Rhiwlas. Clearly, Tysilio had a lasting impact in the area, as his cult certainly developed here, despite the competition posed by St Oswald's much stronger cult, centred in Oswestry.

The earliest reference that I have found to this well appears in the first part of Lhuyd's Parochialia, published in 1699, which mentions a "Ffynnon Nant Dyssilio" (Well of [St] Tysilio's Stream) in the parish of "Oswaldstrey". The only information included regarding it reads "ar wylmabsant Kroes ys walht y bydhant yn kynniver idhi", which can be very roughly translated as "on the day of the parish wakes, many would gather there". Clearly, by Lhuyd's time, this tradition had been abandoned, although it appears that the site's whereabouts was, then, still known.

However, the location of Ffynnon Nant Dysilio had been forgotten by the early 19th century, just a over a century after Lhuyd's Parochialia was published. It was in 1820 that the well was mentioned in volume 1 of The Cambro-Briton as "Ffynnon Maen Tysilio", in relation to Maen Tysilio, a large stone located just over the Welsh border in Rhiwlas. This seems to be a mistake, as there are no other historical mentions of a "Ffynnon Maen Tysilio", meaning "Well of [St] Tysilio's Stone", prior to this date, and because Lhuyd clearly placed the well in the parish of Oswestry (Rhiwlas is located within the parish of Llansilin).

Unfortunately, this error made its way into further publications, with the site being recorded as "a well called Maen Tysilio" in a footnote in a piece published by the Shropshire Archaeological Society, in 1883, called The Four Gateways of Oswestry. In this piece, it was suggested that the holy well had become "known in later years as Ffynnon Goulden", a well that was "situate in a field below Park Issa"; this well was destroyed by the construction of the Cambrian Railway in the late 19th century. It seems unlikely, however, that Ffynnon Goulden really was the holy well, simply because of its situation in relation to Oswestry and the site of Tysilio's missionary station at Rhiwlas. Park Issa is located to the north-west of Oswestry, around ten miles from Wales; crucially, Oswestry is located between the Park and Rhiwlas, so it is unlikely that Tysilio's cult would have spread this far without leaving other traces, such as church dedications, closer to the border. Instead, it is more probable that this well was located extremely close to Rhiwlas and the Welsh border.

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