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Before 19th-century local government reform, as explained in The Parish of Ruabon, the ancient parish was made up of a patchwork of townships, each with its own name and identity even while sharing a single parish church. The township of Ruabon itself took in the hamlets of Belan, Bodylltyn, Hafod and Rhuddallt — names still attached to houses and places in the village today, a rare direct survival from the medieval landscape.
Two of the townships took their names directly from their position relative to Offa's Dyke: Morton Anglicorum, the “English Moreton” lying below the dyke, and Morton Wallichorum, the “Welsh Moreton” above it — a naming pattern that shows just how directly the great earthwork shaped everyday administrative geography for over a thousand years after it was built.
The remaining townships — Cristionydd Cynrig (also called Y Dref Fawr), Coed Cristionydd, Cristionydd Fechan (Y Dref Fechan, or Dynhinlle Uchaf), and Dinhinlle Isaf — covered the industrial land to the north that would later become Cefn Mawr, Rhosllannerchrugog and their surrounding villages, once those areas were split into new parishes in 1844.
Local and family historians researching Ruabon ancestry will still encounter these older township names in parish records, tithe maps and 19th-century censuses, often well after the 1844 boundary changes formally superseded them — making a basic grasp of the old township geography genuinely useful for anyone digging into the area's genealogical records (see Genealogy & Family History).
The old townships have no formal boundary markers today; their approximate extents are best traced through historic tithe maps and parish records held by Wrexham County Borough Archives and Denbighshire Archives, both offering free public search rooms by appointment. The People's Collection Wales also holds digitised material relevant to the area's township history.
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