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 great Church Stretton fault, running south-west towards Ludlow and north-east to Newport, has not only moved rockforms sideways past one another; it’s also moved them up and down. To west of the valley and its railway line, ancient rocks have been moved downwards, while east of the line everything has moved up. And so the very old grey sandstones of the Long Mynd look across Church Stretton towards the 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 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 on. 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 the 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.
Volcanic rock on Caer Caradoc (Walks 21 and 24)
History
The first known settlement in Shropshire is at the Roveries near Lydham, just north of Bishop’s Castle. Although the fort is Iron Age, evidence has been found of a Neolithic (Stone Age) settlement dating back to before 2000BC. Shropshire, like most of England at this time, was heavily afforested and the Stone Age people forged highways such as the Portway across the region, erected stone circles and standing stones and buried their dead in raised barrows (tumuli) on the ‘open’ ridges. Axes and other flint tools have been found all over the county.
The first evidence of tree clearing comes from the people of the Bronze Age (2000BC to 800BC). In the Iron Age period (800BC to AD43) the Celts put down roots and began to construct hilltop forts and settlements with roundhouses. Examples of these will be found on many of the walks but the most famous include Caer Caradoc, the Wrekin, and Bury Ditches. In Shropshire the Cornovii tribe ruled and probably had their capital on the Wrekin hillfort. The tribe cleared large swaths of the valley woodland into fields where they grew cereals, peas, beans and cabbages.
The Cornovii, led by Virico, were here when the Romans came to the area in AD47. The Romans, under Governor Aulus Plautius, attacked the Wrekin fort and eventually overpowered it, but Virico must have put up a good fight as the Romans named their city at nearby Wroxeter Viroconium in honour of their enemy. The conquerors rapidly built forts of their own, along with roads such as Watling Street to link them. The Cornovii disappeared into history.
The Roman city of Wroxeter
After the Romans abandoned Britain in the fourth century, much of what we call Shropshire today became the Welsh Kingdom of Powys, and later Pengwern. These border grounds were the scenes of many a battle. In 656 the region was overrun by Saxons and became part of Mercia. In 765 the Mercian King, Offa, built Watt’s Dyke to repel the Welsh before advancing with his troops to take Shrewsbury. In 779 he drove them back into the hills and constructed the Offa’s Dyke earthwork border between Chepstow and Prestatyn. The border has changed little since those days.
When the Normans conquered England in 1066 Wild Edric, a Saxon nobleman, owned much of Shropshire, which was at this time known as Scrobbesbyrigscire. He fought hard to repel the enemy but eventually had to surrender to William the Conqueror. Much of the land, including Shrewsbury, was ceded to Roger de Montgomerie. Over the next two centuries powerful castles were built at Shrewsbury, Ludlow, Clun, Bridgnorth and Bishop’s Castle. Many monasteries and abbeys were also built at this time, including those at Shrewsbury, Much Wenlock and Buildwas.
The once powerful Ludlow Castle (Walk 3)
There were frequent skirmishes between the Plantagenet kings and their Norman barons. When King John was crowned, the Shropshire noblemen opposed it. At this time the Welsh were making inroads into the county too, with Prince Rhys flattening Clun Castle and Prince Llewelyn the Great taking Shrewsbury Castle. In 1216 King John took the castles of Clun and Oswestry, only to have John FitzAlan take them back. In revenge King John had Oswestry burned to the ground and took Clun once more. FitzAlan would be a thorn in the monarchs of England’s side for many years.
The Percy Rebellion against Henry IV came to a conclusion at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 when the Lancastrian king defeated Henry Percy (Harry Hotspur) of Northumberland. The battle was immortalised by William Shakespeare’s play Henry IV.
By the late 14th century Ludlow had over 1100 inhabitants and had become one of the more formidable towns 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 these goods.
Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1535 saw the
