On the northern edge of town, set on a low hill above the modern streets, stands an earthwork so old that the people who built it would not have recognised any of the languages now spoken around it. Old Oswestry was inhabited from about 800 BC until the Roman conquest in 43 AD - one of the best-preserved Iron Age hill forts in Britain, with concentric ditches and ramparts still cleanly readable in the grass. The Welsh name for it, Caer Ogyrfan, identifies it as the City of Gogyrfan, who in the Arthurian tradition was the father of Guinevere. In a town that has changed hands between English and Welsh more times than anyone can count, that kind of double-identity is normal.
The town's name is first attested in 1191 as Oswaldestroe - Old English for 'Oswald's Tree.' The Welsh name, Croesoswallt, is first attested in 1254 and means 'Oswald's Cross.' Both versions point to the same medieval association: the death of Oswald of Northumbria at the Battle of Maserfield in 642, traditionally located here. Bede records that the pagan victor Penda of Mercia cut Oswald's body into pieces and mounted his head and arms on poles. A local spring called Oswald's Well was said to mark the place where a bird dropped Oswald's arm. The water was believed to cure eye trouble. Whether the saint really died here is debated by modern scholars - A.D. Mills called the connection 'uncertain' - but the name has stuck for eight centuries, and the town has lived with its borrowed king.
Oswestry is in England now, but only just. It sits five miles from the modern Welsh border, on Offa's Dyke - which ran here as the boundary between Anglo-Saxon Mercia and Welsh Powys. The town changed hands repeatedly through the Middle Ages. The castle was captured by Madog ap Maredudd in 1149, during the civil war of the Anarchy, and stayed in Welsh hands until 1157. In 1400 the forces of Owain Glyndwr burned the town almost to the ground during his rebellion against Henry IV. It came to be known in Welsh as Pentrepoeth - 'hot village' - in reference to the burning. In 1972, ITV broadcast a report asking residents whether they thought the town should be English or Welsh; the answers were mixed. The Shropshire libraries' Welsh Collection is housed in Oswestry. Welsh-language street names survive. The boundary is administrative; the culture is fused.
In 1190, Oswestry was granted the right to hold a market every Wednesday - a privilege it has not lost in over eight centuries. The medieval walls were torn down by the Parliamentarians after they took the town from the Royalists in the brief siege of June 1644, leaving only the Newgate Pillar as a remnant. The animal market - sheep and cattle driven in from the surrounding hills - dominated the town centre into the late 20th century, finally moved out after the foot-and-mouth outbreak of the 1960s. A statue of a shepherd and his sheep now stands in the market square as a memorial. Oswestry School, founded in 1407, is the second-oldest 'free' school in England, second only to Winchester College (1382). It still operates, though its original 15th-century site by St Oswald's Church is now a cafe.
Among the things Oswestry has given the world, the most haunting is Wilfred Owen. He was born here in 1893 - the poet whose lines from the trenches of the Western Front, 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' and 'Dulce et Decorum Est,' became the lasting voice of the First World War. He was killed in action a week before the Armistice in November 1918. His birthplace in Plas Wilmot, on the western edge of town, is still marked. The Wilfred Owen Green commemorates him in the town centre. Oswestry's other artistic exports tell a similarly mixed story: the sculptor Ivor Roberts-Jones, who carved the Churchill statue in Parliament Square, was born here in 1913. Novelist Barbara Pym, born the same year, grew up here too. Ian Hunter, lead singer of Mott the Hoople, was born here in 1939. Jesse Armstrong, the screenwriter behind Peep Show, The Thick of It and HBO's Succession, in 1970. Composer Walford Davies - Master of the Queen's Music in the 1930s - sang in the choir of Christ Church as a boy.
Oswestry was once a railway town - the headquarters of the Cambrian Railways, with its own substantial station and works just north of the centre. The Beeching cuts closed the route in stages through 1965 and 1966, and the original GWR Oswestry terminus was demolished to make way for a supermarket. The main Cambrian station building survived: restored, briefly a visitor centre, now home to Cambrian Heritage Railways and a small cafe called Buffers. A single track still runs through the station. Volunteers have been reconstructing the line southwards toward Llanyblodwel and Pant, hoping eventually to link to the restored Montgomery Canal and run a heritage steam service. Progress depends on lawyers as much as engineers - level crossings on the A5/A483 trunk roads will need formal authorisation. The platform has been rebuilt. Semaphore signals have gone back up. The future of the line remains, in the most British of ways, both visibly alive and indefinitely deferred.
Oswestry sits at 52.86 degrees north, 3.05 degrees west, in north-west Shropshire about five miles east of the Welsh border. Old Oswestry hill fort on the town's northern edge is the most striking aerial landmark - concentric earthwork rings on a low oval hill. The A5 trunk road, originally Telford's London-to-Holyhead route, sweeps around the town to the west. Cruise at 2,500-4,000 feet for the best view of the hill fort and the town centre. Shawbury (EGOS) lies about 18 nautical miles south-east. Welsh terrain rises sharply within a few miles to the west.