Gaynor points the way back home – about twenty miles in that direction!

We don’t often venture out of North Wales for our walks – occasional forays over Offa’s Dyke into the Shropshire side of the Borderlands is about it. And yet, there are hundreds of miles of fantastic Shropshire walks within a short drive of The Hand. The North Shropshire Way, for instance, has recently been waymarked to join up with the South Shropshire Way, and Oswestry has – just this spring – signed up as a Walkers are Welcome town.

So we decided to venture a little further afield this week – to The Long Mynd, near Church Stretton and Craven Arms, south of Shrewsbury in Shropshire. It’s about an hour’s drive away through beautiful rolling countryside – down the Montgomery canal from Oswestry towards Welshpool and then south east across farmland towards the dramatic rise of the long escarpment of the Long Mynd and the headwaters of the River Onny. I’ve always liked this part of Shropshire – it’s so different from home. With its open fields and soft hedgerows, it feels properly “English”. Caught between the hard edge of the Berwyns and the twin spines of the Long Mynd and Wenlock Edge, it also feels very much like a mountain pass, and it’s history is visible everywhere.

There are Iron Age celtic hillforts here, remains of the Cornovii who occupied much of Shropshire, Cheshire, Powys and Staffordshire. Under the Romans there was the large military and civilian settlement at Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury, and this part of Shropshire is criss-crossed by Roman roads leading towards what was one of the largest towns in Roman Britain. After the departure of the Romans, it became part of the Welsh Kingdom of Powys, and then, in the eighth century, it was taken by King Offa and absorbed into the Kingdom of Mercia – and Offa built several long dykes down the borderlands to demarcate and protect it from Wales. After the Norman Conquest, the region was controlled by large castles at Ludlow and Shrewsbury, and was settled with abbeys and many newly-organised villages. During the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda, the region found itself on the front-line of Stephen’s campaigns against David of Scotland in 1138, in the middle of “The Anarchy” of 1135-1153, and finally the four-way power-split of England between Stephen, Matilda, Ranulf of Chester and the Welsh Princes; South and Mid-Shropshire are pockmarked by battlefields and memorials to this war of attrition. 

During the Middle Ages, the borderlands were the site of civil strife – the constant battles between the English and the Welsh; perhaps the unstable nature of the region also attracted Henry Percy – “Hotspur” – to Shrewsbury, where he was ultimately defeated by Henry IV. Finally, during the English Civil War, the county was largely a base of Royalist support, and suffered as a result in the aftermath of Charles I’s defeat and execution.Various small town churches hold memorials to families who fought under the royalist banner at the Battle and Seige of Oswestry, the Seige of Bridgenorth, or the battles at Ludlow, Stokesay, and Shrewsbury. Family names such as Benbow, Price, Mytton and Myddleton all have ancestral connections to commanders and generals who fought in the Civil War, commemorated locally in the names of pubs and inns.

This part of Shropshire is also famously one of the engines of the Industrial Revolution. Coalbrookdale, in the Ironbridge Gorge, was where Abraham Derby first smelted iron ore with easily-mined “cooking coal” – although coal had been mined to smelt iron ore in the region around Wenlock Edge since the 1570s. The hill-edges around Wenlock Edge and the Long Mynd bear the industrial scars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mining, quarrying and milling, as well as the lines of the railways built to service them and the communities they supported. In the Second World War, this part of Shropshire played host to various Prisoner of War and training camps, as well as specialised industrial and storage facilities – such as the ordnance depot and railway at Ditton Priors.

All this rich tapestry of local and national history is visible as one walks through the region, interwoven into the landscape. In 1958, the area was designated the Shropshire Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and since then has become a lure for tourism and leisure in all its forms. A huge number of footpaths, cycle routes and bridleways cross the area – the Jack Mytton Way and the southern part of the Shropshire Way being the most notable. As you walk, cycle or ride across the Long Mynd – as we did – or Wenlock Edge, you can see hillforts, dykes, Roman roads, Norman motte-and-baileys, mediaeval villages, disused railway lines, mills and quarries. If walking is one of the best ways of getting out into the countryside, it’s also one of the best ways of getting out in history.

As our outing today was only a taster, we drove down the A489 towards Craven Arms, then turned up at the southern tip of the Long Mynd and climbed to the top of the ridge by car, parking near the landing strips of the Midland Gliding Club on the Knolls near Minton Hill. From there we walked through the sunshine along the Portway – an ancient Neolithic trackway that is now part of the Shropshire Way and the Jack Mytton Way – about four miles to the outlook at Pole Bank and back again. The air was full of gliders overhead, there were cyclists, runners and walkers on the path; there were families parked up near the road, laying out picnics and flying kites; there were buzzards and smaller birds of prey up on the thermals, and green hairstreak butterflies in the whinberries and the heather.

From that vantage point we looked out over the valley of the River Onny, past the Stiperstones and west towards the Berwyns. With the help of the bronze topographic guide, we picked out as many of the landscape features as we could – Rodney’s Pillar, Brown Clee, Cadair Berwyn; we could, literally, see for miles up there. We walked back to the car and then drove along the ridge and down Carding Mill valley, past the waterfall at Lightspout hollow, the impressive hillfort  of Bodbury Ring and the carding mill itself. We stopped for an excellent lunch at The Ragleth Arms in Little Stretton before – regretfully – turning back home again.

This is a fantastic part of the country – stuffed full of wildlife, history and great scenery. Like Wales, it is a place of broad brush-strokes and little nooks. For every hill-top outlook there is an undiscovered corner of a narrow bach; for every wheeling bird of prey there is a flight of rare butterflies; for every battlefield there is the quiet village cross. We left determined to return – to explore the deserted mediaeval villages and the long bachs of the Mynd, the woods and fields of the Dales, and the long curves of the rivers that bind them all together.

We left determined to return before too long to this familiar yet foreign companion country to our own North Wales.

 

“Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows
What are those blue remembered hills
What spires, what farms are those?”

A.E. Houseman, “A Shropshire Lad”

Map: Explorer 217 – The Long Mynd and Wenlock Edge

Midland Gliding Club – Pole Bank loop:

Length: c. 4 miles
Time: c. 2hrs