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. He then advanced with his troops to take Shrewsbury before driving them back into the hills. By 779 he had constructed the Offa’s Dyke earthwork border between Chepstow and Prestatyn.
King Edward the Elder merged Mercia into his kingdom of Wessex. The Danes made many forays into the region, mostly unsuccessful or short-lived. They succeeded in destroying the original Wenlock Priory but were eventually driven out by Edward. In 1006 England was divided into shires and Scrobbesbyrigscire (Shropshire) was born.
When the Normans conquered England in 1066 Wild Edric, a Saxon nobleman, owned much of Shropshire. 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 built at this time, including those at Shrewsbury, Haughmond, Much Wenlock and Buildwas. Scrobbesbyrigscire became Salopescira, which is the origin of Salop.
Ludlow Castle
There were frequent skirmishes between the Plantagenet kings and their Norman barons. At this time the Welsh were making inroads into the county again, 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 Fitz-Alan, an ancestor to the Dukes of Norfolk, take them back. In revenge King John had Oswestry burned to the ground and took Clun once more.
The Percy Rebellion against Henry IV concluded 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 powerful 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 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
