National Trust takes over the Ironbridge Gorge museums

The National Trust is taking on the running of the 10 museums in the Ironbridge Gorge, with the help of a £9m government grant, reports BBC News.

At present they are run by the Ironbridge Gorge Museums Trust, which was set up in 1967. The National Trust is also assuming responsibility for the upkeep of 35 listed buildings and scheduled monuments, including Blists Hill Victorian Town, the Coalbrookdale Museum of Iron and the Old Furnace.

When I visited Ironbridge back in 2011, I didn't bother with any maps or guide books, I just set out for a stroll along the river. The first attraction I came to was the Jackfield Tile Museum, which I wouldn't have planned to visit, yet it turned out to be fascinating.

I hope the National Trust can keep this unique collection of attractions thriving.

Secret Shropshire: From Wild Edric and the seven whistlers to the RAF Cosford UFO

BBC Radio Shropshire is running a series of short programmes on strange stories from the county under the title Secret Shropshire.

So far there are 17. They range from Bloudie Jack to the ghost barge of Ironbridge; from Wild Edric and the seven whistlers to the RAF Cosford UFO; from Mad Jack Mytton to the Child's Ercall mermaid.

Because he was born in Dawley, there's a good programme on Bill "Fatty" Foulke, who played only 34 games for Chelsea but remains part of the club's folklore to this day.

I've not plucked up the courage to listen to The Phantom Arm of Much Wenlock though.

Microwave starts fire at Blists Hill Victorian Town

The Shropshire Star wins our Headline of the Day Award by a distance.

Chuckles were heard from the judging room, but I feel sure that in the steampunk world there is such a thing as a steam-driven microwave.

The Devil went down to Shropshire

Writing in the new Fortean Times, Francis Young notes that the Devil of English folklore

is a considerably less threatening figure than the Devil of theology and often becomes the dupe of saints in folk-hagiographies. While the Devil of folklore is a foil for saints and serves to explain landscape features and prehistoric monuments.

There aren't many saints in Shropshire these days, but Owd Scratch (as the Devil is known in the county) remained a presence there until recently. 

Amy Boucher has collected some tales of his interventions, including one from her own grandfather, who was convinced he had met him one Sunday in Ironbridge when bunking off church to play cards.

Fear of the Devil is said to have killed a boy as recently as 1915, but the for the most part his interventions seem random and rather trivial for him to spend his time on.

When it comes to explaining Shropshire landscape features, it's the outcrop called the Devil's Chair on the ridge of the Stiperstones that gets most attention. Amy Boucher has discussed these legends too, in a Shropshire Star article that includes a 1958 photograph that captured some members of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine Club.

Talking of the Lone Piners reminds me that in Seven White Gates the Morton twins claimed to have met Owd Scratch in his chair:

"Well - comin' up the mountain, Dickie and me swore a deadly oath that we'd dance in that old Devil's Chair, and we would have done that only his curse must have come upon us..."

"Just as we were scrambling and fighting our way up inch by inch..."

"An' the vultures were screamin' around our heads..."

"An' just as we came to the last and worst bit. then the old Devil said, 'No, you don't, Dickie and Mary..."

"'Just get out o' my throne,' he said."

"And then, before we could do anything else, and I could leap up there and dance like we said we would in our oath, there was an awful crash and blue lightning..."

"Goin' bang, crackle, BANG all around us..."

"Gosh! It was awful, but we were brave, and then the rain came and more lightnings came out of the throne."

It's hard to decide who must have been more frightened: the Devil or the twins.

And if you listen to Amy Boucher's audio drama The Best of Men (part 1 and part 2) you may find that Owd Scratch has not finished with Shropshire yet.

Amy Boucher on The Devil in Shropshire

Folklorist Amy Boucher shares tales of ghosts, witches, mermaids and devils from her home county of Shropshire in The Devil in Shropshire, the latest episode of the Tracing Owls podcast,

Through her blog Nearly Knowledgeable, Amy explores Shropshire folktales that highlight the county's unique cultural and historic identity and also an immense amount of high strangeness. 

Among the many tales discussed are stories of ghost barges carrying victims of the Black plague, encounters with the Devil (known in Shropshie as Owd Scratch) and the life of the last known Shropshire sin eater. Amy ends the episode off with tales of a horse-riding spectral ape man.

What remains of the railway from Ironbridge to Bridgnorth

The other day I blogged about proposals to reopen the railway line between Ironbridge and Bridgnorth.

This video shows you the state of the line today, though it does not mention the new housing that has been built across the route near Bridgnorth golf course. It is this that makes people sceptical about the idea - well, that and the unstable geology around Jackfield.

Still it makes a nice walk - I have done it myself between Ironbridge and Coalport.

And a Shropshire Star article from last year suggests that the route all the way into Bridgnorth could have been preserved if the council had wanted.

Plan to reopen railway from Ironbridge to Bridgnorth

The enthusiasm for reopening long-closed railways has reached Shropshire. A plan has been published to reopen the line up the Severn Valley from Bridgnorth to a station serving new housing on the site of Ironbridge power station.

According to the Shropshire Star:

The plan would create a 10-mile route, with six new stations, and ambitions to link with the Severn Valley Railway in Bridgnorth.

It could also connect to Telford, if plans from Telford Steam Railway to extend its line are developed.

You can find the full plan on the Ironbridge Railway Trust website.

From the outside, reopening the line from Bridgnorth to the industrial museums of the Ironbridge Gorge has long looked like a natural ambition for the Severn Valley Railway. But its Wikipedia entry suggests the idea was long ago written off by them as impractical,

And a link to the Birmingham to Shrewsbury line at Telford is surely vital if this scheme is to go ahead. This line existed unril recently and was used to bring coal to Ironbridge power station.

Six of the Best 923

"Liberal England died a century ago and we still haven’t learned anything," says Stephen Howse. The title made me choke, but it's a good post and the comments are worth reading too.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU commissioner for competition, is interviewed about Covid-19 and the role of the big tech companies she distrusts.

"Economists now study Ramsey pricing; mathematicians ponder Ramsey numbers. Philosophers talk about Ramsey sentences, Ramseyfication, and the Ramsey test. Not a few scholars believe that there are Ramseyan seams still to mine." Anthony Gottlieb on Frank Ramsey, who died at the age of 26.

Rob Young looks back to feature films of the 1960s and 70s, and to documentaries across the decades, and finds that traces of the 'old, weird Britain' can still be unearthed: "To advertise their rural network of acorn-shaped waymarks, the Countryside Commission made a short film depicting the kind of rugged back- packers they hoped to encourage to ramble along Britain’s rural lanes and bridleways. But then the ghosts of a milkmaid and a cloaked minstrel materialise and vanish again on the same footpaths."

Otto Saumarez Smith mourns the loss of Ironbridge's cooling towers.

"Christie’s great talent for fictional murder is to do with her understanding of, and complete belief in, human malignity. She knew that people could hate each other, and act on their hate." John Lanchester accounts for the immortality of Agatha Christie's whodunnits.

So farewell then Ironbridge power station cooling towers

Travelling to Shropshire by road, if you leave the M54 at one junction you join a road that dips sharply so that the hills rise above you.

Just as you are trying to remember some quotations from Housman, you round a bend and see the cooling towers of Ironbridge power station.

Not any more you don't: they were demolished today.

As a 20th-century boy, I still have a regard for industry on the heroic scale. I also admire the way red pigment was added to the concrete so the towers matched the local soil

John Kirkpatrick: A Shropshire Lad

Coming back through Oakengates yesterday I was naturally reminded of John Betjeman's poem A Shropshire Lad. In it, the ghost of Captain Mathew Webb, the first man to swim the English Channel, returns to his old haunts:

There wasn’t a man in Oakengates
That hadn’t got hold of the tale,
And over the valley in Ironbridge,
And round by Coalbrookdale,
How Captain Webb the Dawley man,
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Rose rigid and dead from the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley,
Rigid and dead, rigid and dead,
To the Saturday congregation,
And paying a call at Dawley Bank
On his way to his destination.

Musically, the poem is best known from the setting by Jim Parket. It is great, but Sir John's reading of his own poem does suggest the Dawley and Ironbridge are somewhere in the north of England rather than Shropshire.

John Kirkpatrick, whom I saw playing with the Band of Hope in Leicester many years ago, lives in Shropshire and uses the right accent for the district now occupied by the new town of Telford.

These days you can hear A Shropshire Lad sung in folk clubs.

Should South Shropshire be a national park?

The idea that South Shropshire should be a national park seems to be gaining momentum.

The Shropshire Star reports that the man tasked by Michael Gove with look at whether any new parks should be created, thinks so.

Julian Glover, a former speechwriter for David Cameron and the first person to commission me to write for the Guardian, says:

"I know Shropshire very well. 

"I partly grew up in the Shropshire Hills, and they are as beautiful as anywhere in a national park."

Indeed they are. Someone once described them to me as being like the Lake District without all the visitors.

Andy Boddington, the Lib Dem councillor from Ludlow, also supports the idea.

He writes on his blog:

We live in one of the most beautiful areas of the country. We have so much beauty surrounding us that we often forget its there. It is ordinary to us but astonishing to people who come here. 

My view is that national park will be beneficial for South Shropshire. It will promote the economy. But there could be downsides like too many visitors or rising house price. There could be upsides like more affordable housing. More businesses within and around the national park.

And he concludes:

My view is that we should at that point submit a bid for national park status. 

A national park that stretches from Ironbridge to the Mortimer Forest. Embracing the Titterstone Clee, the Long Mynd, the Stiperstones, Bishop’s Castle and Clun.

He urges people in the county to attend a debate organised by the Shropshire Council's Ludlow and Clee local joint committee on 29 November.

I welcome the idea, but I can think at once of a couple of problems that need to be tackled if it is to be a success.

The first is affordable housing. When I discovered the county more than 30 years ago I used to wonder at how cheap houses were. Then the weekending classes discovered the restaurants of Ludlow and everything changed.

Two years ago it was announced that Hope primary school near the Stiperstones was to close. Heather Kidd, the Lib Dem councillor for the ward, saw no alternative because young families cannot could to move to the area - see her comment on that post too.

The second issue is bus services, which being cut in Shropshire just as they are everywhere else.

The Secret Hills shuttle bus that runs at weekends is a shadow of what it was a few years ago, when you could use it to reach Bishop's Castle, Clun and Much Wenlock.

And the bus from Shrewsbury to Bishop's Castle is under threat of withdrawal.

I support the idea of giving my favourite landscape national park status, but unless something is done about these and other issues in the area, I am not sure how much it will really achieve.

The culling of cash machines in rural areas

A woman on her mobile partly obscures what used to be the only cashpoint in the Shropshire hills

When I started walking in the Shropshire hills there was only one cashpoint in the area.

It was at one of the banks in Church Stretton, so a short holiday had to be planned so it took in a visit to the town.

Yes, some pubs in more remote areas would cash cheques, but you could not rely on it.

The Shropshire Star has a story about plans to reduce the number of cashpoints across the country:

The closing of cashpoints could potentially hit the smaller and more rural areas of Shropshire, with a number of towns already left without banks and only one cash machine available for miles. 

Megan Prince, who owns Ironbridge Bookshop, said: "It is a bit of a shame, as I know cash is a bit of a thing of the past now, but it is important to have cash available in small tourist towns as there are a lot of small independent businesses and not all of them take card payments or only take them over a certain amount.

You can do more without cash than you could 30 years ago, but it sounds as though things are coming full circle.

Wellington to Craven Arms revisited

Last year I posted three videos (part 1, part 2 and part 3) following the old railway line from Wellington to Craven Arms in Shropshire.

Holden Webster, who made those videos, has now gone back to the line to record the good news that the Telford Steam Railway (which he visited in part 1) has recently been extended.

With the closure of Ironbridge power station, there is a chance that it will be extended again.

Six of the Best 610

Stephen Tall cannot but take Brexit personally: "When he’s older I’ll have to explain to my son why we voted to leave the EU ... For a lot of ... people — I don’t know how many, none of us does — it was simply that they didn’t want more immigrants, people like his mother, in this country."

The Liberal Democrats have their highest membership for a decade. Left Foot Forward talks to some new recruits.

"David Cameron’s decision to promise a referendum on British membership of the EU will be remembered as the greatest blunder ever made by a British prime minister." Michael Portillo shows no mercy.

Layo argues that "The self-righteousness of the metropolitan left combined with the cultism of the far-left has created a toxic cocktail of absolutism and puritanism within the Labour Party."

Londonist visits the Jackfield Tile Museum in the Ironbridge Gorge, Shropshire, as you should too.

Learn the history of the Terry's Chocolate Orange on Culture 24.

Jackfield is in a stable condition

From the Shropshire Star:

Riverbank piling works as part of the Jackfield Stabilisation Project have now been completed. That work involved 2,000 steel piles being driven into the banks of the River Severn to stabilise the land and halt the land slip – and was the bulk of the work designed to prevent landslides and try to reduce erosion and the movement of land in the Ironbridge Gorge.

I have blogged about subsidence at Jackfield before. Do follow that link and view the newsreel footage of the area from the 1950s.

The photo above shows Jackfield's remarkable Victorian church, St Mary the Virgin.

Disused railway stations in Shropshire

We had to reach Shropshire eventually.

Along the way we have visited Devon, Bedfordshire, North Lincolnshire, East Sussex, Leicestershire, Herefordshire, Hampshire, Cumbria, Cambridgeshire, Kent, Lincolnshire, Cornwall, Rutland and Northumberland.

Coalport to Wellington disused railway part 1

Part 2 will be along soon.

Wellington to Craven Arms disused railway 2

Part 1 took us from Wellington to Buildwas. This second part takes the journey on to Much Wenlock.

Which recalls the old joke:

"My wife comes from Shopshire." 

"Much Wenlock?" 

"I get my share."

I once wrote about the Wenlock Olympian Games in the New Statesman.

Wellington to Craven Arms disused railway 1

Part 1 takes us from Wellington to Buildwas. As you will see, part of this stretch is still in use.

The disused Severn Valley Railway: Shrewsbury to Bridgnorth 2

If the problem in part 1 was the amount of redevelopment that has taken place at the Shrewsbury end of the line, the problem here in part 2 is geology.

While a preserved steam railway would complement the industrial museums of the Ironbridge Gorge nicely, there are serious problems there with landslips. I suspect they mean a northern extension of the Severn Valley Railway will remain a dream.

Look out for the Jackfield Tile Museum, which I visited a few summers ago.