Walking the Shropshire Way. John Gillham

in England. In 1472 Edward IV founded the Council of the Marches, whose power was centred at Ludlow Castle. The council presided over much of Wales and the counties of the English Marches.

      In Tudor times Shropshire’s population doubled and it developed a vibrant economy. Shrewsbury became an important cattle market at this time, and the wool and cloth trade flourished, while the navigable River Severn became crucial to transportation of the goods.

      The people of Shropshire were largely Royalists. At the beginning of the Civil War in 1642 King Charles I visited Shrewsbury and Wellington, where he made the Declaration of Wellington, promising to uphold Protestantism, the laws of the country and the liberty of Parliament. Shrewsbury was forced to surrender in 1644, and the Royalist strongholds of Ludlow and Bridgnorth were captured in 1646. In 1689 the Council of the Marches was suspended and Ludlow’s importance waned.

      The 18th century brought the Industrial Revolution. Coalbrookdale in the Severn Valley is generally regarded as its birthplace. In 1708 Abraham Darby leased the Coalbrookdale furnace and started iron-smelting with coke. John Wilkinson, a precision engineer of Broseley, built cylinders for early steam engines and also produced the first iron boat.

      Under instructions from Abraham Darby III, Thomas Pritchard designed the first cast iron bridge in 1779 to link the important industrial towns of Broseley and Madeley in a place now known as Ironbridge. The 30-metre bridge, which has recently been repaired, still spans the Severn to this day and the two towns became known throughout the world for the production of tiles, clay pipes and bricks. The Ironbridge Gorge Museums (www.ironbridge.org.uk) are a must-see if you’re in the area.

      The Iron Bridge at night

      The coming of the canals, then the railways accelerated the march of industry; quarrying and mining were now practised on a large scale in order to feed the new industries with raw materials for roads, factories and furnaces.

      The New Towns Act of 1946 was passed to disperse population. It gave rise to a plan which would eventually create Shropshire’s largest town and one which would re-house people from the slums of Birmingham. The initial scheme of 1963 was to create a new town at Dawley, replacing a derelict area of closed mines and ironworks with houses, roads and schools. In 1968 an amendment order expanded the new town to encompass the Ironbridge Gorge, Oakengates, Shifnal and Wellington. It would be called Telford after the famous engineer, who was at one time Surveyor of Public Works in Shrewsbury. The scheme was supported by the construction of the M54 motorway linking with the M6 near Birmingham, the encouragement of new industries from home and abroad, a new railway station and a huge shopping centre.

Shropshire’s 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 simplish 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 will 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 no notable hills, but Shropshire’s northeastern lowlands. It is seen as the pale brown Grinshill Stone used in the handsome buildings of Bridgnorth, 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.

      Old Red Sandstone at Grinshill (Stage 11)

      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 as 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 such as nylon dish-scrubber are ancient coral. Shells are also common.

      For casual fossil hunters, best places to look are fresh scree and stream pebbles around Wenlock Edge. But also keep 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 is folded and tilted almost vertical in the rocky stream hollows running down to Church Stretton.

      The great Church Stretton fault, running southwest towards Ludlow and northeast to Newport, has not only moved rockforms sideways past one another but it has also moved them up and down. To the west of the valley and its railway line, ancient rocks have been moved downwards; east of the line, everything has moved up. And so the very old grey sandstones of the Long Mynd look across Church Stretton towards even older, and quite different, volcanic rocks of Hope Bowdler Hill and the Lawley.

      Volcanoes of Uriconia

      Uriconium Cornoviorum was the Roman town on the site now occupied by Wroxeter. The Uriconian Volcanics started off as a chain of volcanic islands, which were then crushed and mangled up in a continental collision. So Wrekin and Earl’s Hill, Caer Caradoc, Lawley and Hope Bowdler Hill have the same origin as Lakeland or Snowdonia, albeit 100 million years earlier. And these rugged hills east of the Stretton valley show the same mix of black basalt, grey andesite and pale grey to pink rhyolite; the same sort of lava flows and volcanic ash that make Snowdon or Scafell.

      Scrambled Shropshire is difficult indeed when it comes to puzzling out how the various rock types fit together. But, by the same token, these small hills are a superb sampler of a dozen sorts of stone, from sea-floor coral and limestone of Wenlock Edge through the white quartzite Stiperstones, to the volcanic ash of Caer Caradoc and the ancient mangled crust that makes the Long Mynd.

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