Tag: Shropshire

Why Shropshire is the place to be this spring for foodies and poetry lovers

A recent trip to Shropshire for Telegraph Travel reminded me how this lesser-visited region is a little gem for country walks and fine food.

Read my guide to the region taking in Ludlow [pictured above, right] for its slow-food producers and Bishop Castle for a consultation at the Poetry Pharmacy [pictured above, left].

Here’s a taster of my feature:

Pub snacks are not the typical culinary delight in Ludlow.

This is, after all, the Michelin-starred Mecca that once boasted the most stars per capita, including one for Shaun Hill, now of Abergavenny’s Walnut Tree.

But while the Shropshire market town remains known for its food and drink, it’s the artisan independents who now grab the spotlight at the annual autumn food festival and a new spring festival from May 12-14 this year.

Tish Dockerty, co-chair of the Ludlow Marches Slow Food group, says:

“Ludlow was the original food festival — even before Abergavenny. The Michelin chefs have gone but the new focus has shifted towards local provenance and slow-food events.”

Read the feature via Telegraph Travel  Is Shropshire the proudest county in England?

Why boutique Shrewsbury should be on your UK-staycation radar this year

A winter weekend in Shrewsbury? No, really.

My first assignment of the new year took me to the Shropshire market town for a UK staycation.

The town is closely associated with the story of the naturalist Charles Darwen, Shrewsbury’s most famous son [pictured above].

It hosts an annual festival of natural sciences, coinciding with the February 12 birthday of man whose 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, forms the basis of our understanding of evolution.

“Darwen was a human being with human failings, but he simply couldn’t stop himself asking questions all his life,” says Jon King, whose book, Charles Darwin in Shrewsbury – The Making of a Marvellous Mind was recently published by Amberley Publishing.

But the town is also booming as a hub for independent businesses with boutique galleries, cafes and shops doing a busy trade, notably along historic Wyle Cop.

The historic market town, set within a loop of the River Severn, first made its money from the wool industry in Tudor times.

Today the half-timbered shopfronts of Wyle Cop, said to be the street with the longest uninterrupted row of independent shops in the country, are again alive with home-grown businesses.

“Shrewsbury is booming with quirky, independent businesses,” says local shopkeeper, Simon Perks. “Like a rubber band, it keeps bouncing back.”

Read the full story via Telegraph Travel, Visitors Thought Shrewsbury was like Middle Earth for years

Walking Offa’s Dyke Path National Trail as it marks its 50-year anniversary

This year marks 50 years of the Offa’s Dyke Path National Trail.

There are local walking festivals to look out for and a revamped visitor centre in the Welsh border town of Knighton to open later this summer.

An ITV series about the Path, Wonders of the Border, will be shown over summer.

The 177-mile national trail, which runs from near Chepstow on the River Severn to Prestatyn on the North Wales coast, divides into 12 day sections.

As lockdown restrictions eased, I walked the trail for a day from Castle Mill [pictured above] near Chirk Castle in North Wales into the Shropshire Hills to get a taste of the path.

The earliest reference to Offa’s Dyke is attributed to Asser, King Alfred’s biographer, who wrote:

“A certain vigorous king called Offa … had a great dyke built between Wales and Mercia.”

Offa was the king of Mercia (the modern-day Midlands) and ordered the construction of the dyke around 785AD to mark a de-facto border between England and the rebellious Welsh tribes to the west.

National Trail Officer Rob Dingle says: “King Offa is something of a shadowy figure from history, but we do know that he was keen to expand his kingdom, and the design of the Dyke was quite deliberate, acting as a warning shot to the west.”

National Trails is encouraging walkers to share their memories of 50 years of Offa’s Dyke. Read more.

Read my feature via the i newspaper here

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How to celebrate Darwin Day in Shrewsbury

He is one of our brightest scientific minds.

His hometown of Shrewsbury marks his birthday on February 12 each year by hosting an international festival of natural sciences. And his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, forms the basis of our understanding of evolution.

But the naturalist Charles Darwin [pictured above] embarked upon his lifelong quest for knowledge as a small boy in the Shropshire market town and often drew on experiences from his great-outdoors childhood in his later writing.

Walking tour

I’ve come to Shrewsbury, with its half-timbered buildings and historic English Bridge, to join a walking tour in the footsteps of the town’s most famous son.

Down House, Darwin’s Kent home since 1842 may be better known, but the lesser-visited childhood haunts reveal a more human side to the man behind the black-and-white photographs of the stern Victorian scientist.

“Darwin’s ideas were revolutionary on a global scale,” says DarwIN Shrewsbury Festival Organiser, Jon King, “but Shrewsbury is where they were formed.”

The tour starts at the Arts and Crafts-era Morris Hall, the public meeting space with the granite Bellstone in the courtyard a symbol of the unique geology of Shropshire.

Darwin was born in 1809 at Mount House, on the fringe of the town’s Quarry Park, and was loved exploring these geological features in the fields behind his house as a boy.

We move onto St Chad’s Church, where Darwin was baptised, and stroll past the town’s historic Market Hall to the Unitarian Church he attended with his mother, Susannah, whose father was Josiah Wedgwood of the pottery empire fame.

Charles had been born into a well-to-do family, his father, Robert, a respected local doctor, and boarded at Shrewsbury School from 1818, the former school building now converted into the town’s library, while the modern-day school has relocated across town to the banks of the River Severn.

The small square in front of the original school building is today home to a statue of Darwin but, as my tour guide Jon points out, he sits with his back to the school entrance, having not enjoyed the drab rote-learning of his schooldays.

Indeed, his teachers at the time branded him “an average student”.

Golden opportunity

Darwin later attended university in Edinburgh and went on to Cambridge, but he rebelled against his father’s wishes for him to train as a doctor or a clergyman.

He preferred to indulge his passion for natural history by studying earthworms and barnacles amongst others on a series of study tours.

It was only when he was offered a place on an expedition ship, The Beagle, in 1831, the chance came for him to prove himself.

Standing outside the Lion Hotel today, we can still imagine the young Charles rushing to take the next stagecoach to plead for his place on the expedition at The Admiralty in London.

The unpaid role as the resident naturalist on the five-year voyage would change the course of history when the ship sailed from Plymouth on December 27 with Captain Robert FitzRoy at the helm.

We finish the walk under Darwin’s Gate, a public art installation with three seemingly free-standing columns symbolising the three key influences of his formative years, namely the local geology, his religious views and his early study of scientific classification.

Childhood memories

“Darwin attracted more criticism than any other scientist, but he simply saw life with more clarity than most of us,” says Jon. “He was an early pioneer of the stewardship of nature, not control — ideas that still resonate today.”

Darwin died in 1882, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, but remained a Shropshire lad at heart. Indeed, the poetic closing words from On the Origin of Species, could have been written about his Shrewsbury upbringing:

“From so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

More information here.

Read the edited version of this story, A Glorious Evolution, in the Daily Mail.