Matthew Green to fight South Shropshire again

At the last election Matthew Green and his team in South Shropshire achieved a remarkable 23 per cent swing from the Conservatives, finishing only 1,624 votes short of victory. Matthew was MP for the old Ludlow constituency, which covered much the same area, between 2001 and 2005.

Today comes news that Matthew has been reselected as the Liberal Democrat candidate for South Shropshire. He writes on his Facebook page:

In South Shropshire with the continued rapid collapse of the Conservative Party, at the moment it appears the next general election will be between the Liberal Democrats and Reform. We need to help stop the UK descending into a very dark place. This is the strongest motivation for me to stand and win in South Shropshire. I want to be able to look my children in the eye and say I didn’t stand back, and I played my part, to the fullest extent I could, in helping resist the rise of xenophobic populist nationalism in our country.

Many have already contacted me with messages of support and offers of help in order to fight off the threat of Reform in South Shropshire, and I believe it’s our patriotic duty to do so. If you want to help, please comment on this post or message me.

You can also follow Matthew Green on Bluesky.

And he concludes:

It’s going to be a busy three years but I’m confident I’ll still find the time for walking South Shropshire’s beautiful hills, visiting castles and abbeys, and if my knees permit, still playing a game or two of cricket for Much Wenlock.

Discovering the Shropshire filming locations of Gone to Earth

British film history meets Shropshire hill porn. What's not to like?

As the blurb from Third Rate Content on YouTube says:

Journey into the heart of Shropshire where the magic of 'Gone to Earth' was captured through film. This video blends history, mystery, folklore, and magic, taking you to the very places where the story unfolded,

Warning: May contain Stiperstones.

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.

South Shropshire Lib Dems and the future of England fast bowling

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The England selectors have included the uncapped Nottinghamshire seamer Dillon Pennington.in their 14-man squad for the first two tests against the West Indies this summer.

Pennington joined Notts at the end of last season, having played for Worcestershire before that. And his profile on Cricinfo reveals that he is originally from Shropshire:

Dillon Pennington possesses the natural strength and height to become an imposing fast bowler of international quality. He was part of Worcestershire's satellite academy in Shropshire - coached by Paul Pridgeon - which has been so prolific in producing young players in recent years.

And Matthew Green, who was Liberal Democrat MP for Ludlow between 2001 and 2005 and is fighting South Shropshire in the current election, recently revealed on Twitter:

Thrilled to see Dillon Pennington @DillonPenningt4 called up to the England Test Squad. I had the pleasure of captaining him for his first games in adult cricket, when he played for Much Wenlock CC in 2012.
Always a delight to see others who are #Shropshire born & bred, excel. https://t.co/p6HkQRW89q

— Matthew Green (@MatthewGreen02) June 30, 2024

Shropshire Lib Dems are on such a roll at the moment they're even finding fast bowlers for England.

Stand by for the Much Wenlock Gold Rush of '24

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I've been prospecting in Shropshire.

Much Wenlock?

Yes, there are always women around the camp.

Exciting news from the Guardian:

A metal detectorist in Shropshire has unearthed England’s largest ever gold nugget worth £30,000 – despite turning up an hour late for the dig with a faulty metal detector.

Richard Brock, 67, travelled three and a half hours from his home in Somerset to join an organised expedition on farmland in the Shropshire Hills last May, and ended up arriving late. He also had problem with his metal detecting kit, and was forced to use an older machine that was not working properly. ...

But just 20 minutes later, Brock unearthed a huge 64.8g golden nugget buried about 13–15cm (5–6in) underground. The metal, which has been named Hiro’s Nugget, is now expected to fetch at least £30,000 at auction and is believed to be the biggest find of its kind on English soil.

My first thought was that this was probably in the Stiperstones, were a little silver was mined alongside the lead ore. 

My second thought was that there would now be a gold rush in those hills.

But the reality is rather different:

The nugget was found on a site near the village of Much Wenlock believed to have been an old track with railway lines running through, containing stone possibly distributed from Wales – an area known to be rich in gold.

It's all a bit vague, but it sounds as though the nugget was first unearthed in Wales rather than Shropshire,

The Lord of Homer and Wigwig was unavailable to comment

Residents of the Shropshire hamlet of Homer are up in arms about the council trimming a hedge there.

The story in the Shropshire Star ends:

"We think the hedge is beyond the council's remit. Maps in the Land Registry show that the verge and hedge that has been desecrated belong to the title of the Lord of the Manor of Homer and Wigwig."

She said the current "lord" resided in America after buying the title several years ago and that the verges, copses, hedgerows and alleyways in the area belong to his estate.

The Lord of Homer and Wigwig was unavailable to comment, but a spokesperson for Shropshire Council said on Thursday: “The hedge is on public land and was trimmed by Shropshire Council’s highways team, who will be returning today to tidy it up.”

In fact the Star called it Wiwig, but as my favourite signpost shows, it's Wigwig. Even Homer nods.

The Shropshire Hills shuttle bus service is cut again

I will get back to the Shropshire hills soon - if not this summer, then next. And when I do I shall use my favourite buses - the Shropshire Hills Shuttle.

They used to be called the Secret Hills Shuttle, but I guess the hills are better known these days. If they are not, it's no fault of mine.

I can remember when three different routes were timed to coincide at The Bridges pub at Ratlinghope, giving visitors a wonderful choice of destinations.

In 2012 it was possible to reach Much Wenlock, which has some claim to be the cradle of the modern Olympic movement, and I can recall dropping in on Aardvark Books at Brampton Bryan, which is in Herefordshire.

As in recent years, in 2022 there is only one route. And it has been cut back.

I can see why this has been done. Once the bus left Snailbeach and the remains of its lead mine, the ride back to Church Stretton was scenic but did not pass through anywhere people were likely to want to alight.

Now the bus turns back at the Stiperstones Inn (where I once posted a Britblog Round Up), which means it does not even reach Snailbeach.

I trust I shall still be able to walk there from the Stiperstones Inn (sorry if this is getting technical), but there are many people who cannot.

The decline in this bus service, which allows people access to these lovely hills without a car, is a measure of our decline as a nation since I stated vising the Shropshire hills 36 years ago.

Here endeth the first lesson.

28 February in Liberal England history

So what has this blog been concerned with on what is usually the last day of February?

2021

Rosalind Franklin, the neglected pioneer of our understanding of DNA, turned out to be the great niece of the Liberal Party leader Herbert Samuel. 

2020

This was, I had worked out, the 51st anniversary of my only West End appearance in the Danny La Rue show Queen Passionella and the Sleeping Beauty - I was one of the children asked up on to the stage halfway through::

My strongest memory of the evening, apart from my own performance, is of Danny La Rue coming out in front of the curtain, as himself, and announcing that someone had died and singing his own signature tune "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep" as a tribute to him. 

I have tried to make sense of this memory in recent years, assuming that the person who had died was the writer of the song. But on investigation he turned out to be George Stevens, and he died in 1954. 

Then a few days ago I heard Barry Humphries on Desert Island Discs. One of the records he chose was "On Mother Kelly's Doorstep, as sung by Randolph Sutton. 

Sure enough, Wikipedia tells us that Sutton made a famous recording of the song and died on 28 February 1969. Which dates my first and last West End performance to within a day or two.

In fact, as I say at the end of this post, it dates it exactly to 28 February 1969, when I would have been eight years old.

2019

Francis Young wrote a guest post on the undiscovered treasure trove that is the work of forgotten Victorian folklore collectors:

The digitisation of local newspapers and Victorian pamphlets, making them searchable, is bringing much lost folklore recording to light, and we are currently living through a golden age of folklore research – not because there is still traditional folklore to be collected (in most cases there is not), but because folklore collected over a hundred years ago is finally emerging from the shadows.

2018

I did not post on 28 February, but the day before I had posted a picture of the wonderful Musical Ruth in sharing the news that there would be no Arts Fresco street theatre festival in Market Harborough in the summer.

2017

Good news! I had found another video about the disused railway from Oswestry to Welshpool.

2016

I compared The Boy in Striped Pyjamas with I Am David - a book that I read as a child in the 1960s:

The Boy in Striped Pyjamas reflects the modern belief that moral education involves the young being taught about the Holocaust and being able to recite the correct lessons from it. It also reflects the high status we give to victimhood. ...

I am David was written in a different era. It is not about death, but about escape, moral growth and the finding of happiness.

2015

Dangerous Minds had posted a new documentary on Nick Drake and his music. In posting it on here I quoted them:

Other than a few childhood home movies, no film footage of Nick Drake exists. So director Berkven had to create a sense of Drake through other means. That he succeeds is quite remarkable. 

He is enormously helped by Nick’s mother Molly. Her own music uncannily evokes her son’s and creates a deeply emotional dimension to A Skin Too Few.

2014

Cat of the Day came from here in Little Bowden.

2013

Richard Ingrams believed Ian Hislop  had been editing Private Eye for too long and I agreed with him:

Perhaps part of the Eye's appeal is precisely that it is the same every time. But while I still value its reporting and gossip, its humour pages do seem stale. Perhaps it needs some new contributors, if not a new editor?

But he ignored both of us.

2012

I remembered a ghost story from Much Wenlock in Shropshire:

This photograph shows Raynalds Mansion in Much Wenlock, where I went several times in the 1990s for the Festival at the Edge. The half-timbered front dates from the 17th century, but the building behind it is much older.

One year I joined a guided walk around the town. Outside Raynalds Mansion we were told the story of some children who were evacuated to the town and housed here during World War II.

On the first morning they came downstairs and demanded to know who the children in funny clothes they had been playing with were.

2011

These were the days when blogging still seemed important and Liberal Democrat Voice ran interviews with party bloggers. Today was my turn:

I realised that I was not a Socialist ... when Boxmoor County Primary School demanded a letter from your parents before you were allowed not to have custard with your pudding.

2010

28 February fell on a Sunday this year, so I posted a music video. And a rather good one too.

2009

This was the era of blog carnivals, including the Carnival of Modern Liberty, which I once hosted here.

This time it was the turn of Liberal Conspiracy and James Graham.

2008

And this was the era when the Liberal Democrats had their only weekly newspaper and I wrote a column for it.

This week it was about Michael Martin, the Commons speaker who was undone by the scandal over MPs' expenses:

Labour backbenchers broke the modern convention that the position should alternate between the Labour and Conservative parties to install him. In 2000 there was a strong feeling amongst them that a house with a large Labour majority should have a Labour Speaker. Such a partisan launch to his career was never going to make things easy for him when the time came to rule on contentious questions.:

2007

I had gone all intellectual, contributing the entry on Karl Popper to the newly published Dictionary of Liberal Thought.

2006

It was time for an anecdote about Sir Alan Ayckbourn, who is famous for living in Scarborough and opening all his plays there:

Ayckbourn was walking along the front there one day, when he was accosted by a stranger.

Mr Ayckbourn, isn't it?

It is.

I was looking at the paper the other day and I noticed that you have two plays running in the West End.

Yes, that's right.

I hope you don't mind me saying so, but you must be doing quite well out of that.

Yes, I suppose I am.

Mr Ayckbourn, there's one thing that's always puzzled me. If you got all this money, why don't you live in Bridlington?

2005

I had been to the Commons press gallery:

On the way I passed the Fathers 4 Justice demonstrators (Batman, Robin and Captain America) who had found a perch on the Foreign Office building in Whitehall.

My taxi driver said he supported their cause but not their tactics. He said that if everyone just ignored them they would have to stop this sort of stunt.

He also pointed out that Robin was wearing a coat over his costume, so he was not as heroic as all that.

Children and Shropshire ghosts

This is Raynards Mansion in Much Wenlock, where evacuee children are supposed to have come down for breakfast on their first morning and asked who the children in funny clothes they'd been playing with were.

I heard another ghost story from Shropshire. There is a bed-and-breakfast there I have stayed at many times. It is an old property and its core is medieval.

The owner told me that one morning she found her little boy playing on the landing rather than in his bedroom.

When asked why, he replied quite unperturbed: "The people are being a bit of a nuisance."

Homer and Wigwig feature in Road Sign of the Day

Found in a wallet of prints from the 1990s.

As you can see if you look closely, this sign is to be found just outside Much Wenlock.

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 pleasures of Wenlock Priory

Wenlock Priory, says Wikipedia, is a ruined 12th century monastery, located in Much Wenlock, Shropshire.

Following the dissolution in 1540, several buildings, including the late 15th-century Prior's House, were converted into a private residence later known as Wenlock Abbey.

Today Wenlock Abbey is owned by Gabriella Drake, star of Crossroads and sister of Nick Drake.

As at Fountains Abbey, the medieval ruins have been turned into a folly in the park of the great house. I also like the rather poorly focused topiary.

Dr William Penny Brookes celebrated in Much Wenlock

I wrote many columns for the New Statesman website, but got only one piece into the printed magazine.

That was about Much Wenlock's Olympian Games and their founder Dr William Penny Brookes.

Visit Much Wenlock today and you will find him celebrated. The waymarked Olympian trail through the town takes in both the house where he was born, lived and died and his resting place across the road in the churchyard.

The ghosts of Raynalds Mansion, Much Wenlock

I have told this story before, but not with this photograph:

One year I joined a guided walk around the town. Outside Raynalds Mansion we were told the story of some children who were evacuated to the town and housed here during World War II. 

On the first morning they came downstairs and demanded to know who the children in funny clothes they had been playing with were.

The old railway station at Much Wenlock

Opened in 1862, Much Wenlock station stood on the line between Wellington and Craven Arms.

The line to Craven Arms closed in 1951, but trains continued to run between Much Wenlock and Wellington until 1962.

Today the old station building is a private house.

I have previously posted four videos by Holden Webster that follow the line from Wellington to Craven Arms today:

• Wellington to Craven Arms disused railway 1
• Wellington to Craven Arms disused railway 2
• Wellington to Craven Arms disused railway 3
• Wellington to Craven Arms revisited

Shropshire Hills bus service started today

I may struggle to get there this summer, but the Shropshire Hill shuttle buses started running today.

You can find full details and the timetable on the Shropshire Hill AONB site.

Once again, spending cuts mean that only the service being provided is the core one from Church Stretton over the Long Mynd to Pontesbury, Minsterley and the Stiperstones is running.

It's not so long since you could reach Much Wenlock, Bishop's Castle and Knighton on these buses.

Wellington to Craven Arms disused railway 3

The third and final part of this walk takes us from Much Wenlock to Craven Arms and is by far the most scenic.

I once did much of this walk myself, coming down from the Edge short of Craven Arms and reaching the Traveller's Rest at Upper Affcott via the lanes.

"I either have to spend the night here or go on to Craven Arms," I told the landlord.

"Are you trying to make us feel guilty?" he replied.

But he did have a room for the night, so I stayed there.

I heard that the Traveller's Rest had closed, but today it seems to be open under a new name: Affcott Lodge.

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.

Shropshire Hills Shuttles 2013

The timetables for this summer's shuttle bus services in the Shropshire hills have been published. These services will run on Saturdays, Sundays and Bank Holiday Mondays from 4 May to 29 September. You can find maps and timetables on the Shropshire Hills AONB website.

The Long Mynd and Stiperstones service will run this summer, as will the one (new last year) from Church Stretton to Much Wenlock.

The really good news is that a new service will run from Ludlow via Bromfield, Leintwardine, Brampton Bryan, Bucknell, Knighton and Clun to Bishop’s Castle. I am particularly pleased to see these buses reaching Clun again.

Many of these towns will be familiar to people who grew up reading the children's books of Malcolm Saville. Leintwardine appears in The Secret of the Gorge (1958) as Bringewood Chase.

Saville describes it as follows:

The village of Bringewood Chase, on the borders of Hereford and Shropshire, had been there a long time. The straight road running due north after crossing the river was built above the foundations of one made by the Romas of the use of their legions. The church  a white-walled inn, a tiny post office and a few shops all faced the village street.

I don't suppose there are so many facilities there today, but I hope to visit Leintwardine this summer.

The White Horse Inn, Pulverbatch

The Shropshire Hills Shuttle buses were diminished last summer. There was a new service, for Olympic year, from Church Stretton via Acton Scott to Much Wenlock, but the buses no longer served Clun, Craven Arms or Bishop's Castle.

Still, we are promised a service to Ludlow next summer.

I did, of course, make use of the buses while I was in Shropshire. On one Sunday I was able to go into the mines at Snailbeach, have tea at The Bog and still find time for a pint at the White Horse Inn, Pulverbatch.

There were a lot of pub closures in this part of Shropshire a few years ago, but this is one of several to have bucked the national trend and reopened recently. And I can certainly recommend it.