Hillwalking in Shropshire. John Gillham

30 The Wrekin

       Walk 31 The Ironbridge Gorge

       Walk 32 Llanymynech Hill and Llynclys Common

       Appendix A Route summary table

       Appendix B Accommodation

       Appendix C Useful contacts

      On Offa’s Dyke near Llanfair Hill (Walk 1)

      INTRODUCTION

      Into my heart an air that kills

      From yon far country blows:

      What are these blue remembered hills

      What spires, what farms are those?

      … In valleys of springs of rivers

      By Ony and Teme and Clun,

      The country for easy livers,

      The quietest under the sun

      Two verses from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ by AE Housman, in which he yearns for his home county

      Shropshire lies at the heart of England but well away from the cities, the smoke and the noise. It is an extremely rural county with only two sizeable towns – Shrewsbury and Telford. Stand on any of its mountains and you’ll see a patchwork of greenery; pastures divided by hedgerow and woodland copses. It’s undulating country, never truly mountainous but with sufficient distinctive peaks and rocks to keep a walker happy for years.

      The county is divided into two by the River Severn, which meanders from the Welsh hills into Shrewsbury, where it forms a wide loop before threading through a wooded gorge at Ironbridge and, beyond Bridgnorth, out into Worcestershire. To the north and east of the great river the landscape is one of flat, fertile pastures; to the south and west it’s one of fine but little-known hills. The latter area has been designated the ‘Shropshire Hills Area of Outstanding Beauty’. Most but not all of the walks in this guide are here.

      From the magnificent town of Ludlow, the River Teme cuts a fine valley, winding through the south Shropshire countryside to Knighton and the Welsh borders. Here Offa’s Dyke takes us over green ridges to the Kerry Hills and the small town of Clun. Around here, many of the hills are topped with Iron Age forts which will enliven the day and spark the imagination.

      From Ludlow you can look east to Titterstone Clee Hill – a rakish, rugged escarpment crowned by towers and white radomes and a fine viewpoint with some craggy slopes. It’s scarred with mines and quarries, so if you love industrial archaeology then you’ll love this place, as well as Brown Clee Hill a few miles to the north. Brown Clee is the highest hill in the county and its industrial scars have been softened by forests in the east.

      The most spectacular scenery, however, lies to the north and east between the wooded limestone escarpment of Wenlock Edge and the plains of Shrewsbury and the Severn Valley. Here are three distinct ranges: the Stretton Hills, the Long Mynd and Stiperstones. The Stretton Hills are steep-sided whalebacks of volcanic origin, with tremendous ‘free-striding’ ridges. Caer Caradoc is the highest of these and has a huge fort on top, but the Lawley offers the purest of the ridge-walks.

      On the other side of Church Stretton is the Long Mynd, a broad 7-mile (11km) heather ridge cut deep in the east by several crag-fringed, steep-sided batches (small valleys), which provide superb walks to the tops. Across the wide valley of the East Onny lies Stiperstones, another long heather ridge but this time studded with shattered rocky tors. Manstone Rocks on Stiperstones is the second highest peak in Shropshire.

      The hills get smaller as you go northwards towards Shrewsbury, but the volcanic hog’s back that is the Wrekin makes one last stand. Although covered with forest, there’s just enough open ground and lots of rocky outcrops to make this a top priority on a hillwalker’s to-do list.

      Manstone Rock on Stiperstones (Walk 14)

SHROPSHIRE GEOLOGY (BY RONALD TURNBULL)

      Nowhere else as small as Shropshire has so much geology going on. Within the county, 11 of the 13 geological periods are exposed. The fourth of them, the Silurian Period, was first uncovered along the England-Wales border by Roderick Impey Murchison in the 1830s; it takes its name from the Silures tribe, who under Caractacus may (or may not) have fought the Romans at Caer Caradoc. Of the Silurian’s four constituent epochs, two (Ludlow and Wenlock) have Shropshire names.

      For comparison, the Lake District is made of three basic rock types, of two geological periods. A single Shropshire hill, the Wrekin, has no fewer than eight different rock types, from six separate periods.

      Squashed-up Shropshire

      The UK (provided you don’t look too closely) has a relatively simple rock structure. North and west takes you deeper and more ancient: from the clays of London down through the Chalk, the Coal Measures, all the way to the ancient continental crust of the Scottish Highlands. Shropshire compresses most of this sequence into the width of a single county. We’ll survey the county from its eastern edge, where the most recent rocks form fairly intelligible layers.

      The top (youngest) rocks here are from the Triassic and Permian periods. This ‘New Red Sandstone’ forms Shropshire’s north-eastern lowlands and no notable hills. It is seen as the pale brown Grinshill Stone used in the handsome buildings of Bridgenorth, Shrewsbury and Wellington.

      Next down in the sequence, and next west in the county, the Carboniferous Period formed the Coal Measures at Ironbridge, and also the tops of all three Clee Hills, with old bellpit workings on top of Abdon Burf.

      Below the Carboniferous lies the Old Red Sandstone. It forms the lower slopes of the Clee Hills and down into Corve Dale; the reddish stone was quarried at the beautifully named Devil’s Mouthpiece.

      Below the Old Red Sandstone

      These Devonian-age sandstones form a thick, featureless and almost fossil-free layer across the kingdom. For the early geologists, ‘below the ORS’ meant rocks that were deep, twisted, ancient and mystifying. It was in the Wye Valley and in Shropshire that Roderick Impey Murchison started to make sense of what he would name the Silurian Period.

      Wenlock Edge and Hoar Edge show knobbly reef structures and layered sea-floor limestone; some beds are made up of small tubular crinoid (sea-lily) fragments. Patches like nylon dish-scrubber are ancient coral. Shells are also common.

      For casual fossil-hunters, the best places to look are fresh scree and stream pebbles around Wenlock Edge. But also keep your eyes open in villages – especially old drystone walls – for shells and for the wiggly lines that were worm burrows.

      Church Stretton crumple zone

      Down to the west from Wenlock, there’s just space to squeeze in the Ordovician Period around Cardington at the base of Caer Caradoc. And then we arrive into the Church Stretton crumple zone. Here, rocks of the earliest geological periods – Ordovician and Cambrian – are embedded within crumpled and mashed ancient crust stretching back into the Precambrian.

      Ordovician rocks pop back up as the tottering towers of Stiperstones. The ancient earth movements have tilted it almost upright; after 500 million years of hard times, the stones have just been broken up a bit more by freeze-thaw of the Ice Age.

      Even older stones, from the Precambrian, make the Long Mynd’s grey-to-black sandstone. It’s folded and tilted almost vertical in the rocky stream hollows running down to Church Stretton.

      The