kieron wrote:I've been wondering about that. There were improvements made to Village Road after the war, as there's a stone with "1921" engraved on it on the Vinegar Hill section. The (1840s) first edition OS map shows both Village Road and Chester Road with the same line width.
I can't remember, is the road through the village very steep? Maybe Telford bypassed it to provide gentler gradients for stagecoaches.
The
Revised New Series map from 1903 does show Chester Road as having been more important, backing up what you've said.
I didn't know those maps were online!
Regarding Bodelwyddan, the thing which strikes me is the junction between the road from the village and the road to St. George just north of the A55. Do you know why it looks so much like two off-slips from the road, or whether it's a co-incidence that one has almost the same shape as the slip road from the A55?
If it needed to be off-line to accommodate an embankment, I would have expected both to be on the same side of the road being diverted.
I don't know why the diversions of St Asaph Road took the lines they did, in the NW and SE quadrants of the former crossroads with Primrose Hill. Maybe a desire to avoid the grounds of Plas Kinmel was a factor? Maybe a desire to discourage through traffic from remaining on St Asaph Road? Though if the latter, they forgot for years to adjust the priority at the A547 junction, as I remarked in a previous post.
Of course, for about five years, between the opening of the East of Abergele Improvement and that of the Bodelwyddan bypass, there was in effect a half-diamond junction with Primrose Hill, though the eastbound on-slip was two-way until near the mainline.
Jam35 wrote:Was Abergele meant to be through-passed too? It's really suspicious as you come in from the west how there's space to the left just wide enough for a dual carriageway to bash through Tesco and line up with Peel Street, which itself has some odd building lines.
No idea. The draft order for the Abergele bypass was published as long ago as 1956, so any online plan must have been earlier than that.
At Bodelwyddan most of the houses seem to be recent enough to date from after the first dualling plan. The original village seems to have been tiny and concentrated on a side road.