Walk 16 Norbury Hill from Wentnor
Walk 17 Minton Hill and the Packet Stone
Walk 18 Adstone Hill
Walk 19 Pole Bank and Devil’s Mouth
Walk 20 The Long Mynd and Ragleth Hill
Walk 21 Caer Caradoc
Walk 22 The Long Mynd skyline
Walk 23 Plush Hill, the Batch and Castle Hill
Walk 24 Ridges Three: Hope Bowdler Hill, Caer Caradoc and the Lawley
Walk 25 The Lawley
Walk 26 Hope Bowdler Hill from Cardington
Walk 27 The Betchcott Hills and Duckley Nap
Walk 28 Much Wenlock and the Wenlock Edge
Walk 29 Earl’s Hill
Walk 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
