shewhomust | Entries tagged with shropshire

Our return from Shropshire was altogether more leisurely: taking a reasonably direct route and breaking it almost exactly halfway would allow us to spend a day in Halifax. How could we resist?

But first, we visited a friend who lives in Wem, which is still in Shropshire. Shropshire is a large county; the largest of the shires without a coastline. (And the County Flower is the Round-leaved Sundew - though Wem is the home of the Sweet Pea.) We had such fun, and were made so welcome, that what we had intended as dropping in for coffee turned into a very leisurely lunch, we hit end-of-day traffic and barely reached our hotel in time for dinner.

I had wanted to visit Halifax - specifically, I had wanted to visit the Piece Hall - ever since J. told me about her visit. Somehow it had been just out of range when we spent our week in Saltaire, but now my chance had come. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting: I knew it was connected with the wool trade, J. had enjoyed shopping there, so I pictured something along the lines of Salt's Mill.

Actually, Halifax does have something very much like that, but it's not the Piece Hall, it's Dean Clough, which also looks worth a visit. The Piece Hall belongs to the previous generation of the textile industry, before the huge mills when weaving was still farmed out to individual handloom weavers, and the lengths ("pieces") of woven cloth were traded at this immense market place. Each clothier had an individual room, a little cell arranged in arcades around a vast open square, and these are now occupied by independent businesses, mostly arty crafty shops and cafés.

This is impressive, but pretty much impossible to photograph. In addition, it is used as an occasional summer music venue, and on the day of our visit was set up for a concert, with a marquee in one corner, and random barriers scattered about. So it wasn't looking its best overall, but there were still plenty of details to entertain us: the arcades, the displays about the history of the Piece Hall, the truly magnificent cast iron South Gates (newly restored), and yes, I admit it, the shops...

One thing that puzzled us was a church spire looming above the arcades. It must be very close outside the Piece Hall: was it the Minster? We asked a couple of staff members for directions, and they warned us that Anne Lister's grave wasn't easy to find; so we explained that we hadn't actually been thinking of Anne Lister, we were just intrigued by the spire. That, they told us, wasn't the Minster, it was the Square Chapel. Most of the Chapel had been demolished and incorporated into the arts centre (pointing to a big copper cube - and now that I've read a bit more about it, I wish that I'd looked more closely) but the spire had been built into the library. We were a bit startled at this, but yes, they said, really, it's in the library, you can go and look. So we did.

And the next day we came home, via Booths in Ripon.

I was intrigued by

sovay's post about this detective story, even before I registered what an apt coda it made to our recent adventures in Shropshire, Peters being, of course, a deeply Shropshire author. I had liked her Cadfael books well enough when I read them to have worked my way through most, if not all, of the series, but had never ventured into her other novels, and had no idea that she had set a murder mystery at a residential music college which is a hosting a week-end course on folk music.

"[A] residential music college" does not begin to describe Follymead. The opening of the novel is contrived to show it to the reader through the eyes of the astonished Liri. Two major aspects of the book each reveal the other, the singer and her reaction to the extraordinary location: the disproportionate grandeur of the gates, the full set of eighteenth century follies, the Grecian temple, the hermitage, the ruined tower ("No pagoda?" complains Liri, as the car rounds a corner and yes, there is the pagoda), the decoratively arched bridge over a river gleaming innocently like Chekhov's gun, the one element of genuine wildness in this artificial landscape... And then the house itself, a riot of towers and turrets and steeples and vanes - I enjoyed all of this enormously, and half-expected Michael Innes's Appleby to turn up. I cannot quite believe in it as a music college, especially a college in the ownership of the County Council. Peters offers some justification for this - the last of the family, for want of an heir, left it to the county with a handsome endowment fund, it operates under the aegis of a university - and plays up, too, quite how precarious it all is (the threat to Follymead is as urgent a concern of the narrative as any other) but even so... Ellis Peters was, says Carol Westron in an illuminating essay, passionate about education, "very active in the WEA (Workers' Educational Association) and helped to establish the Shropshire Adult Education College at Attringham Park. She also played a great part in setting up an Adult Education music college." In Follymead she gives free rein to a fantasy of a music college valued locally (Detective George Felse and his wife consider attending a forthcoming course on Mozart) and nationally.

If the book alloed the author to indulge in creating a fantasy music college, is the depiction of a folk music weekend similarly self-indulgent? She knows her ballads, and uses one of them for the scaffolding of her plot. (

sovay recognised it ewven before the bog reveal, and identifies it as the version sung by Ewan MacColl: I defer to her expertise, and had to refer to the estimable Mainly Norfolk which offers achoice of variants.) But a passion for music and an eye for the potential of a balled do not add up to a love of folk music: maybe Liri is speaking for her author when she refuses the description "folk singer" as being ill-defined. "I'm not even sure I know exactly what a folk-singer is... About a ballad singer you can't be in much doubt, it's somebody who sings ballads. That's what I do ..."

How fortunate, then, that the story is set at a week-end course at which Professor Penrose will help us to examine the nature of folk music, with the promise of much debate, his record collection and some star live performances. I don't suppose Ellis Peters expected her background colour to be appealing enough that I am (at least) halfway to regretting that pesky murder investigation for getting in the way of some interesting music and talk, but there you go, that's what happened. ( The best I can do is to put it under a cut. At inordinate length, then: who's who, and who sings what? )

[Emerges, blinking, from the rabbit hole.]

sovay characterises as misdirection the use of a song - does it qualify as a balled? - to provide the nove's title. Indeed, and not just because Liri's vengeful rewrite invites the reader to anticpate an entirely different narrative to the one which eventually unfolds. It directs the reader's attention to the most obviously romantic pairing in the book, Liri and Lucien, the musical power couple between whom something has gone badly awry: contrast them with the rational observers, Tossa (short for Theodosia) and Dominic (Felse, son of the series detective, which is convenient), treading carefully through their a newly established relationship, and reflect that young couples tend to emerge well from the Cadfael books (this is from memory, but I'm pretty certain of it). Perhaps, then, the black-hearted true love is to be found in the third couple, the one introduced before the others, on the very first page ("only ine woman really existed in his life, and that was his wife.") There's a whole other post which grows from that reading, and considers the novel as it was surely intended to be considered, as a detective story. There's the character of the detrective to be considered, and whether he is a plausible policeman (to be set alongside the question of whether Cadfael is a plausible monk).

There's also a footnote about Ellis Peters' relationship with Czechoslovakia. But somebody stop me, before I launch into either of those...

We might have spent the Sunday of our trip to Shropshire visiting Ludlow Castle; we half planned to do just that. But on Saturday evening, I was poking about the internet, and looking at the English Heritage website, when I came across Stokesay Castle: a short drive from Ludlow, and very impressive:

Surely I had seen this before somewhere? Didn't

poliphilo post some photos, long, long ago? Indeed he did, and I noted it then as a place to visit. Well, there's no time like the present...

( Visit under the cut, with photos. )

We spent the evening with K., who cooked a classic spaghetti bolognese for us, and we told her where we had been - and admired her late partner's photos of Stokesay, which was a pleasant thing to do.

Part of the attraction of Ironbridge as a venue for our family gathering is that it would be very easy to combine with a visit to Ludlow. We'd been contemplating that anyway, not because of the undoubted attractions of the town, but because it's where my friend K. lives. We had travelled to Shropshire in the autumn of 2021 for her partner's funeral; and she had visited us the following spring: time for us to pay her a return visit...

Rather than impose ourselves on K. as house guests, we booked ourselves a bolt-hole, ( which I will rant about under a cut. )

K. joined us on Friday evening, and we ate excellent pizza at the George. A grey and rainy Saturday morning was almost over by the time the two of us were ready to go out again, and perhaps that's why we never really hit our stride as tourists. I'd planned to start my exploration of the town at the market (every day is market day in Ludlow) but we opted instead for the longer-term parking that was less central, and on our way up to Castle Street 9the square where the market happens) we were distracted, more than once. A print gallery here, a charity shop there, lunch - one way and another, by the time we reached the square, the stallholders were packing up, and our parking was about to expire.

durham_rambler left me to explore the wine shop, and went to collect the car. Which is why, although I did photograph some of Ludlow's magnificent half-timbered buildings, the picture I like best is a detail of the war memorial, which just happened to be on the corner where I was waiting, in the rain, to be collected:

These unexpected doves of peace are the work of Walenty Pytel, and if you like metal animals, the internet has plenty more.

At this point, we had every intention of spending Sunday visiting Ludlow Castle. In the end we did something else instead, not because we didn't want to see Ludlow Castle, but because we wanted to do this more. So Ludlow has plenty more to entertain us, next time we can get down that way...

We stayed for two nights, before and after our get-together, at the Valley Hotel, Ironbridge: you can walk down from the hotel terrace, through a beautifully maintained public park, and you come to the Severn. That's what we did on our first morning, and then we followed the river towards Ironbridge. It was hot and bright, and I was grateful for the shade of the tree-lined river banks, while it lasted: the Severn Gorge is heavily wooded, with occasional glimses of arches on the far side which we later learned were remnants of the Great Western Railway.

We passed the Antiques Emporium, and were lured into the marvel of Gothic brickwork which is the Ironbridge Gorge Museum. This advertises itself as the point where the Ironbridge Gorge meets the wider world: because it was built (in the reign of William IV) as a jetty to send goods off from the local industries, along the river to the wider world. It has been other things since, including a petrol station, but what it has been, more than anything else, is flooded. By definition, it is right down at the water's edge, where it gets the brunt of any flooding which is happening: which used to be every thirty years or so, then more recently every year, and at present several times a year. It underwent a major renovation, then flooded again, and they renovated again to as flood-proof a standard as they could (all the electrics are high up the walls) and the current exhibition is pretty much a plea for suggestions: how can we best use this irresistible building? That evening I tried to describe this to another member of the party, and was disconcerted that she was grateful for the warning not to bother visiting: we had both liked it very much. A highlight was a display of slides of past floods, including the flooded petrol station, and local coracle-maker Harry Rogers paddling his coracle through the flooded streets. Naturally I went straight to the desk and demanded postcards of this image, and natually they didn't have any (they used to, apparently, but had sold them all and not reprinted). An image search provides plenty of images of members of the Rogers family out and about in coracles (including a link to a page of the Shropshire Star which purports to show the image I was looking for, but founders under the weight of advertising. So it goes...).

Once we had left the museum, the iron bridge came into sight almost immediately. We admired it, and walked a bit closer to admire it some more, and photographed it, and went through the tunnel so that we could photograph it looking the other way. Then we crossed the bridge, and went to the Tollhouse museum (where our fellow visitors were three - I assume - Buddhist monks in saffron robes), and crossed the bridge back again. Have a photo from the middle of the bridge:

There's a pretty square, with a bookshop (of the frustrating kind, which has some lovely books, all of which I already have) and a teddy bear shop (with an impressive window display of Moomins) and a tea shop, outside which we sat under a shady umbrella and ate ploughman's lunches (someone had grated all the cheddar, which was odd but not a deal-breaker). Over lunch we agreed that I would be prepared to walk a little further, if I wasn't required to walk all the wat back. On this basis, we continued to the Bedlam blast furnace: massive heaps of masonry huddled into the hillside, historically important (one of the sites where the iron for the bridge may have been cast), artistically significant (believed to be the subject of this painting), surrounded by railings and parked cars, which was frustrating.

We backtracked to a little park with a bench where I waited in the shade, and read my guidebook about Ironbridge, while

durham_rambler returned to the hotel and collected the car. Back at the hotel, an hour's sleep, a shower and a change of clothes, and I was ready to go and be sociable. Among the many things we talked about, the five couples who made up the party compared notes on how we had all spent the day, and I was relieved to discover that I did not at all regret not having gone to the spectacular Vctorian town. I was entirely satisfied with my fragmentary visits to the Gorge,

This morning, though, we had time to visit one substantial museum before moving on to Ludlow, and we opted for the Jackfield Tile Museum. It deserves a post of its own, with many pictures; it really is bigger on the inside, and by the time our visit had returned us to our starting point, I didn't have the energy to visit either of the craft galleries nearby. We found a pub - actually, one that was mentioned in the museum - and after a relaxing lunch, it was an hour's drive to Ludlow for the next episode of our trip.

durham_rambler's brother maintains a loose contact with the people who were their next-door neighbours when they were all children. Every year or so they pick a destination, and meet there for dinner: sometimes we join them (as we did in 2017 in Derbyshire). This year they have opted for Ironbridge, which works for us mostly as somewhere that allows us to visit other people not too far away, but also as a pleasant place to be...

Today has been all about the rush to get away from home (not as early as I'd have liked, not as late as I feared), and the long drive to get here. After all the cold weather, today was warm and drowsy - or was that just me? I slept much of the way, waking just in time to enjoy the stretch of the M62 across the high Pennines. About an hour from our detination, the satnav decided she was bored with motorways, and brought us cross country - yes, I know, we should know better than to indulge her, but this was not such wild terrain (though we did pass one road sign reading UNSUITABLE FOR HGVs - SAT-NAV ERROR). The route brought us through Eccleshall, which is twinned with Sancerre: it's a while since I've been to Sancerre, but I couldn't see any resemblance (there is a vineyard in Eccleshall, though.

And the last mile or so brought us through Coalbrookdale, which was delightful. We have tomorrow to do a little exploring, and I'm looking forward to it.

This post would have contained more detail, but

desperance distracted me by using the expression "[she] is particularly a fiend if she gets her gander up" which I had never met before: dander, yes, gander, no. So I have been down all sorts of rabbit holes, of which this is by far the most entertaining.

I knew nothing about Wroxeter Roman City until we happened to find ourselves there, with just time for a quick visit. Once, English Heritage tell us, it was the fourth largest city in Roman Britain (I couldn't find an authoritative list, but at least oe version puts it after London, Cirencester and St Albans - and before York). I didn't know Housman's Uricon either, aand am grateful to

cmcmck for the introduction.

All that survives - no, all that survives above ground, because the city extends well beyond what is now excavated, and beneath that presumably there are traces of the fort which preceded it - is the baths complex, including the magnificent stretch of wall known as the Old Work, of which the picture above is a detail.

( More pictures under the cut: )

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/770656.html

Today's crisis happened before breakfast:

durham_rambler checked his e-mail and found a message that a client's site was unavailable, with a notice saying that it had run out of bandwidth. We knew exactly why it had been busy lately, but hadn't had the warnings that it was at 80% and 90% of its allowance, and had come away from home without any device with the necessary passwords to increase the allocation. On the off-chance,

durham_rambler asked our hosting service if they could help - which is absolutely not their job - and they did. Thank you, Astutium, for service above and beyond.

Even after this complication, we had time in hand before we needed to be at Shrewsbury crematorium, and we spent it at Wroxeter Roman city. We didn't have time to visit the reconstruction of a Roman town house, or whatever remains of the Forum can be seen on that side of the road, but we wandered around the baths and basilica, which seems to be all that is currently excavated of the city, and admired the massive Old Work (a huge slab of the wall of the basilica) as the light changed, and the sun shone and the clouds grew darker. I took photographs, but they'll have to wait until we get home, because I don't think the hotel wifi can cope. Just before we headed into the museum (and exit through gift shop) there was a very fine view along the length of the basilica to the Wrekin in the distance, and I thought of

cmcmck ...

The funeral was - well, it was a funeral, which isn't good, but as funerals go it was fine. Not a big crowd, but the upside of this is that we were quite well spaced in the crematorium, and when the celebrant invited us to join in singing The Lord of the Dance (alongside the Carthy / Swarbrick recording) it felt possible to do so; not entirely necessary, but possible. I've been to funerals that conveyed more of a sense of the person who'd died - it helps a lot if the celebrant knew them personally - but it did feel as if we were talking about the same person, which is the main thing.

Lunch afterwards was at the Mytton and Mermaid, beside the Severn and most of the way back to Wroxeter. (At one point it belonged to Clough Williams Ellis, who gave it its name). We found ourselves sharing a table with two women who had been B.'s carers during his illness, one of whom was a keen metal detectorist, had enjoyed talking about local history with B., and ended up showing us pictures of her finds, including a Celtic gold stater. Meanwhile, at another table, the Milton Keynes amateur dramatcic society were looking forward to their forthcoming production of Treasure Island.

So it goes.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/769404.html

Saturday's lunch party didn't break up until late in the afternoon, by which time

durham_rambler and I were ready for some quiet time with the newspaper and the internet. But by late evening, we revived enough to feel that a breath of air, a little walk, some light refreshment would round the day off nicely. Saturday night on the main drag is pretty lively, and we walked straight past the tapas restaurant which had been our first option: there's nothing wrong with live flamenco music - indeed, there's much right with it, if that's what you're looking for, but on this occasion it wasn't. We didn't have to go far, though, to find ourselves in a much quieter street, and the Golden Cross looked very inviting:

( Did it live up to its promise? )

On Sunday morning we headed off to Wem, to continue the party at the home of our hostess. By this time most of the stragglers had departed, and the only other house guest, apart from ourselves, was a schoolfriend who had, in the intervening years, returned to her native Newfoundland, and who was staying on to join the unbirthday girl and another schoolfriend for a short break in Trier (this is apparently our fault - I hope they are enjoying it!). I can't call Sunday a quiet day, because we talked non-stop - but the pleasures were those of conversation, and we tore through the crossword at record speed.

We set off for home on Monday morning. The plan was for a minimum of delay and diversion, as we had to be in Durham for a meeting in the early evening, but we needed to fit in a lunch stop and a little essential shopping, and initially we thought we might take the M6 all the way, and break somewhere pleasant, Kirkby Stephen, perhaps? But it was not to be. Signs on the motorway warned of long delays ahead, so we turned onto the M62, and stopped at 'the Boroughbridge services' (otherwise known as Morrisons supermarket). Oh, well...

So the fun part of the weekend was shorter in practice than it had been in anticipation, but no less sweet.

Crossposts: http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/591440.html

We had a splendid and exhausting day yesterday about Wightwick Manor, about which I will probably have more to say when I have sorted out my thoughts (and my photos). Now we are in Shrewsbury: we arrived yesterday evening at the Lion, where we are staying, and mentioned as we checked in that we are here for a party to be held in this hotel: "Oh, you're here for S.'s party! Isn't she lovely? Have you known her long?"

We don't have time for more than the briefest look at the town. Last night we walked up the hill to the Square, and dined at 'Côte - a pseudo-French bistro, one of a chain but nicely done, if loud. This morning, between the showers, we took a brief walk along the town walls, and visited the Cathedral (it's a Catholic cathedral, and by Pugin, but although the commission originally went to AWN Pugin, he died before he could carry it out, and the design is in fact by his son Edward, aged 18). I'd have thought it a worthwhile visit anyway, but I was completely bowled over by the work of a woman artist completely unknown to me:

The Cathedral has several windows by Margaret Rope, and they are wonderful.

Time to return to the hotel, put on our party finery, and party. Inevitably, we had less time to talk to the unbirthday girl than we would have liked, but she was very good at introducing us to people, and making sure we had someone to talk to. We thought we were doing pretty well telling people that

durham_rambler had been at University with S. in the late '60s, but we were seated at lunch with even longer-time friends, including a schoolfriend and the French penfriend of her teenage years (and her equally French husband). There was a quiz, memorable mostly (to me, at any rate) for the cultural dexterity with which our Frenchman identified a picture as the star from the movie about Welsh miners playing in a band, which I was able to name as Brassed Off (despite it not, in fact, being set in Wales...), which enabled another member of team to name Pete Postlethwaite. Leaving me to explain the title Brassed Off to the French couple who knew it as Les Virtuoses.

There was music, provided by someone's expertise with Spotify, which was interesting: I've been thinking I ought to try it out, but, um, this tiny sample was resistible. Eventually we gave up on it, and just continued chatting, untilwe all collapsed. And tomorrow we will go and visit S. at home, which I hope will be our real chance to catch up with her. But now, maybe a breath of air...