Bettisfield

Ordnance Survey reference SJ 461360.
Bettisfield was originally in the parish of Hanmer. The parish church was an inconvenient distance away, and therefore in 1851 the Vicar and schoolmaster began to conduct Sunday evening services in the village shop for the villagers of Bettisfield. These proved very popular, and a wooden chapel was built, opening on 12 October 1851. The chapel, dedicated to St. Chad, was extended in 1852, and licensed by the Bishop, who preached there on 13 October 1852.
The present Church, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, was erected at the expense of Lord Hanmer in 1874, and was consecrated by the Bishop of St. Asaph on 16 October 1878. The wooden chapel was demolished in 1875.
(N.B. The wooden 1851 Chapel at Bettisfield was in fact dismantled, not demolished, and components of it re-erected at St Mary Magdalene, Tallarn Green, in 1876 as a private room for visiting ministers. There is currently (in Dec 2011) a planning application before Wrexham County Council to demolish this 'shed'.) (M Woodhall)

The Clwyd FHS website has a photograph of the church.

Bettisfield became a separate parish, within the Diocese of St. Asaph, on 24 January 1880.

Nonconformist Churches

"Welsh Church Commission - County of Flint - The Statistics of the Nonconformist Churches for 1905" lists the following nonconformist place of worship in the Civil parish of "Bettisfield":

• The following nonconformist registers for the Bettisfield area are held at the Shropshire Record Office, Shrewsbury.
  They have not been filmed; and they have not been incorporated into the I.G.I. :

When Civil Registration was introduced (on 1 July 1837), the parish of Bettisfield was assigned to the No. 2 ("Hanmer") sub-district of the Ellesmere Registration District, which was co-extensive with the Ellesmere poor law Union.

In the GRO indexes to civil registration, entries for Bettisfield are in the format :

• Years 1837 - 1851: Ellesmere XVIII.nnn
• Years 1851 - 1930: Ellesmere 6a.nnn

(GRO index references have no relevance at the local Superintendent Registrar's Office)

Bettisfield Railway Station

'Bettisfield Hall' by Moses Griffith, c. 1770-1800 (watercolour) on the People's Collection Wales site

• Geograph
• Flickr

The transcription of the section for this place from the National Gazetteer (1868), provided by Colin Hinson.

• Ask for a calculation of the distance from Bettisfield to another place.

"North-East Wales Churches and Ancient Parish Boundaries" produced by Clwyd Record Office in 1994, published by Genuki with the permission of Flintshire Record Office and Denbighshire Archives

Map of the township of Bettisfield in the parish of Hanmer and County of Flint on the People's Collection Wales site

View a map of the boundaries of this town/parish.

You can see maps centred on OS grid reference SJ461353 (Lat/Lon: 52.912408, -2.802962), Bettisfield which are provided by:

• OpenStreetMap
• Google Maps
• StreetMap (Current Ordnance Survey maps)
• OpenStreetMap Cymru (Welsh counties only)
• Bing (was Multimap)
• Old Maps Online
• National Library of Scotland (Old Ordnance Survey maps)
• Vision of Britain (Click "Historical units & statistics" for administrative areas.)
• Magic (Geographic information) (Click + on map if it doesn't show)
• GeoHack (Links to on-line maps and location specific services.)

• All places within the same township/parish shown on an Openstreetmap map.
• Nearby townships/parishes shown on an Openstreetmap map.
• Nearby places shown on an Openstreetmap map.

• In 1831- Bettisfield was not a separate parish.
• In 1901- the population was 384.
  [Royal Commission on the Welsh Church - October 1907]