The candidate who won the highest percentage vote in any contest last Thursday was the Liberal Democrat Heather Kidd in Shropshire Council's Chirbury & Worthen ward. She received 71.1 per cent of the votes cast, despite having Conservative, Labour, Green and Reform opponents.
Chirbury & Worthen is a large rural ward which takes in the western flank of - you know what's coming - the Stiperstones, including the former lead-mining village of Snailbeach.
But stay with me. This post isn't just an excuse for quoting some descriptive writing about Shropshire, because the second passage includes a bit of history that may be one reason that Liberals do so well in this corner of the county.
Nearer the Welsh border Chirbury & Worthen is lush and pastoral, but that's not so true of the area close to the Stiperstones.
Even today, Snailbeach has something of the feel of the Wild West - a shanty town thrown up to accommodate a mining boom. When I first knew it in the 1980s, before its startling white slagheaps had been landscaped, that feeling was much stronger.
Anyway, here is Malcolm Saville writing in the Lone Pine story Not Scarlet But Gold in 1962:
Between the lower, western slopes of the Stiperstones and two mountains called Condon and Stapley is a stretch of desolate country called by some "The Land of Dereliction".
It is well named, for from the heather of this lonely moorland, treacherous with bogs, the gaunt arms of ruined mine shafts rise through the mist above slag heaps and pools of stagnant water.
The Romans mined all this land for lead long, long before man came back in the last century, to this haunted corner of Shropshire. These miners tore up the earth, built engine houses, sank shafts and buried the golden gorse under piles of rubbish which may still be seen today.
And in 1944, in his Quietest Under the Sun, John Wood wrote of "a tract scarred with the waste of disused lead and barytes mines". He added:
Sad to say, this became in the between-wars period one of the most utterly derelict areas in Britain proportionate to its size.
That I can believe. The district seems to have been too remote to interest even the scrap merchants, and once the lead mines closed it must have been hugely overpopulated. There wasn't much work, and it's not good farming country.
And here is the part that may help explain last Thursday's result:
It is a point of interest that when these now abandoned enterprises were developed the labour power was brought from the tin mines of Cornwall, and even today the descendants of those Cornishmen make the valley a strong Nonconformist and radical enclave in an Anglican and conservative countryside.
First rule of Liberalism - don't mess with angry Methodists
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