Hawarden
Hawarden (pronounced Harden; Welsh: Penarlâg) is a small town in North Wales a few miles from the city of Chester. Hawarden Airport is the only public airfield in north Wales, although services are intermittent. Its primary function is to serve the Raytheon and BAe Systems aerospace factories in the adjacent village of Broughton, where BAe manufacture the wings of the Airbus airliners before they are flown in a Beluga cargo aircraft to Toulouse, France for final assembly of the complete aircraft. The wings of the A380 Airbus are too large to be flown out, and are instead transported via the nearby port of Mostyn. Hawarden's most famous residents are the former Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), who lived in Hawarden Castle -- the home of his wife's family, the Glynnes; and the professional footballer Michael Owen (b. 1979) who, although born a few miles away in Chester and thus eligible to play for England, was raised in Hawarden and lived a few miles away at Northop Hall until his transfer to Real Madrid in the summer of 2004. Owen famously bought a small street of houses for his extended family in the adjacent village of Ewloe. Gladstone bequeathed his library, now known as St Deiniol's Library, to the town. Near Hawarden is an area of flat land called Sealand because it was formed by silting at the head of the estuary of the river Dee.
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