Eric Gill was an English sculptor and typographer whose work would later define the look of inter-war Britain - he cut the lettering for the BBC, designed the Gill Sans typeface, and produced sculpture for buildings across the country. Chirk's memorial belongs to his early religious period, before the typefaces and the public commissions made him famous. Thomas Scott-Ellis, the 8th Baron Howard de Walden and tenant at nearby Chirk Castle, commissioned Gill to design a monument for the parish's First World War dead, and the result is what you see: a tapered square obelisk of Portland stone, four faces gabled at 45-degree angles so the ridges intersect across the top to form a cross. Gill's posthumous reputation grew darker after his daughters and biographer revealed his sexual abuse of them. That truth has to sit alongside the work, and the work has to sit alongside the names of the dead it remembers.

The west and east faces each carry thirty-three forenames and surnames - sixty-six men of one Welsh parish who did not come home from 1914 to 1919. Lady Howard de Walden unveiled the memorial in October 1920, two years after the Armistice, when the country was still working out how to bury its grief in stone. The south inscription begins TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE HABITANTS AND INDWELLERS OF THE PARISH OF CHIRK and ends IN RIGHTEOUSNESS - language deliberately archaic, designed to sound timeless rather than current. The north face carries the same dedication in Welsh, beginning ER ARDDERCHOG GOFFA AM WYRYWAEN: in glorious commemoration of the men of Chirk. After 1939-1945, nineteen more names were added beneath the Welsh inscription, the lettering slightly different, the gap of two decades visible in the stone.

Around the base, beneath the parish's inscriptions, runs a line in larger type from the nineteenth chapter of Revelation: AND IN RIGHTEOUSNESS HE DOTH JUDGE AND MAKE WAR. It is a startling choice for a war memorial - not a verse about peace or comfort, but about a rider on a white horse coming to judge. Gill, a Catholic convert, would have chosen it deliberately. The parish church of St Mary nearby holds a separate Roll of Honour with the same names, and the relationship between the church book and the public obelisk says something about how the British remembered: a quiet record kept indoors among prayer, and a public stone kept outdoors among traffic, declaring that the war had been righteous. Whether the men whose names are carved would have agreed is, of course, not part of the inscription.

Chirk sits on the Welsh-English border, just south of Wrexham in what is now Wrexham County Borough. Until 1974 it was in the historic county of Denbighshire; then Clwyd for twenty-two years; then Wrexham again. Administrative boundaries shifted around the memorial while the memorial stayed put. In 1998 it was given Grade II* listed status - the second-highest grade in the British system, reserved for buildings and structures of more than special interest. The traffic island sits at the east end of Station Avenue, at its junction with Church Street. Drivers approaching from the railway station pass the soldier in profile first, his head bent over the bayonet, before they round the obelisk and head into the village proper. Most do not stop.