Babell is a hamlet in

Flintshire Flintshire () is a county in the north-east of Wales. It borders the Irish Sea to the north, the Dee Estuary to the north-east, the English county of Cheshire to the east, Wrexham County Borough to the south, and Denbighshire to the west. ...

, Wales. It is part of the

community A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given g ...

of Ysgeifiog. The hamlet takes its name from the Babell

Methodist Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a Protestant Christianity, Christian Christian tradition, tradition whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's brother ...

chapel, built in 1836, but the surrounding area, a

township A township is a form of human settlement or administrative subdivision. Its exact definition varies among countries. Although the term is occasionally associated with an urban area, this tends to be an exception to the rule. In Australia, Canad ...

of Ysgeifiog parish, was formerly known as Gelliloveday or Gellilyfdy. The name was recorded in the

Domesday Book Domesday Book ( ; the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book") is a manuscript record of the Great Survey of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 at the behest of William the Conqueror. The manuscript was originally known by ...

in the form "Cheslilaved", and as "Kelliloveday" in 1602.Davies, E. (1959) ''Flintshire place-names'', University of Wales Press, p.72 It has been suggested to mean "

wych elm ''Ulmus glabra'', the wych elm or Scots elm, has the widest range of the European elm species, from Ireland eastwards to the Ural Mountains, and from the Arctic Circle south to the mountains of the Peloponnese and Sicily, where the species reac ...

wood" (from Welsh ''gelli'', "wood", and ''llwyv'', ''llwyfanen'', "wych elm"),John Gwenogryn Evans, ''Facsimile & text of the Book of Taliesin'', v1, 1910, xxiii but the placename scholar Ellis Davies stated that it probably came from the personal name " Loveday", ("Lyfdy"): "Loveday's wood". There is a section of the ancient earthwork

Offa's Dyke Offa's Dyke () is a large linear Earthworks (Archaeology), earthwork that roughly follows the England–Wales border, border between England and Wales. The structure is named after Offa of Mercia, Offa, the Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxon king of Mer ...

nearby Llyn-Ddu.Sir Cyril Fox, ''Offa's Dyke: a field survey of the western frontier works of Mercia in the seventh and eighth centuries A. D.'', OUP, 1955, p. 22 Although rural the area is dotted with old copper workings from the 19th century. The notable 17th-century

antiquary An antiquarian or antiquary () is an aficionado or student of antiquities or things of the past. More specifically, the term is used for those who study history with particular attention to ancient artefacts, archaeological and historic sit ...

John Jones lived at the hall of Gellilyfdy, to the west of the present-day village.

References

External links

* Villages in Flintshire {{Flintshire-geo-stub