Pair of beavers released on the River Clun in Shropshire

BBC News reports:

Beavers have returned to a Shropshire river for the first time in 400 years.

The Severn Rivers Trust introduced a pair to the River Clun in the south of the county on Monday afternoon.

It hopes the pair will have offspring and can help transform the natural environment through their dam building.

The beavers have been released into an enclosure, but the story quotes Joe Pimblett, the chief executive of the Severn Rivers Trust

"If you're a nature lover and you've got an interest in the rural environment this is huge, this could be the precursor to beavers living here naturally in Shropshire."

The Clun rises near the hamlet of Anchor, close to the border with Wales. It flows east through the little town of Clun, before turnings south and joining the Teme just over the Herefordshire border in Leintwardine.

My photo shows the medieval bridge over the River Clun in the town on Clun.

Telegraph names each county's best pub, but two aren't even in the right county

Time Out reports that the Telegraph has named what it believes to be the best pub in every English county, based on reports from its readers. 

So naturally I turn first to the winner for Leicestershire and for Shropshire.

They are:

• Best pub in Leicestershire - The Swan at Braybrooke
• Best pub in Shropshire - The Sun Inn, Leintwardine

The only problem is that Braybrooke is in Northamptonshire and Leintwardine is in Herefordshire.

I don't expect the urban sophisticates of Time Out to know better, but shouldn't the Telegraph? Someone there has been misled by postcodes, as Braybrooke has a Market Harborough postcode and Leintwardine a Craven Arms one.

Anyway, this is a good time to point you to my post on Malcolm Saville and the Pubs of Leintwardine.

In which I am quoted in the Shropshire Star

For the first time, as far as I recall, I have been quoted in my favourite newspaper.

An article in the Shropshire Star (or at least on its website) looks at the drying up of the River Teme above Leintwardine, which has obliged the Environment Agency to rescue more than 700 trout and salmon.

It ends by quoting the tweet of mine you can see above.

Now read about Malcolm Saville and the pubs of Leintwardine.

Advent Calendar 15: Kindness to swallows at Leintwardine church

Well done, St Mary Magdalene.

The Springs of Rivers project on the Teme

At this point on its journey to the sea, the Teme changed its character and appearance. The Lone Piners had many times seen it splashing over the weir at Ludlow and sparkling in the sunshine as it ran under the battlements of that ancient town. Nearer to its source, and before it reached the gorge, it meandered through pleasant water meadows, and even when there was very little water in its shallow bed it ran fast. 

But here it changed. Now it was sullen and deep in the limestone gorge where it had been cutting through the soft rock for hundreds of years, and the Lone Piners, standing on the bank, wondered what it would look like when the rain on the Welsh border brought the storm waters rushing downstream, tearing at the banks and roaring into the gorge. 

Malcolm Saville The Secret of the Gorge (1958)

Good news from Shropshire courtesy of the Heritage Lottery Fund:

The beauty of the River Teme was immortalised in A.E. Housman’s collection of poems A Shropshire Lad, but in the 118 years since it was published the river has suffered a drastic change. 

Despite its high conservation status, species such as salmon and eel are in serious decline, and wildflower meadows and woodlands that once characterised the river valley are being lost. 

The Springs of Rivers project, which will be managed by SRT, aims to reconnect and improve more than 200km of river through a number of linked initiatives. These will include practical conservation; a range of community events; improving access to the river; and creating volunteering opportunities and apprenticeships. 

A new visitor centre will form a hub for the community across the river. An educational programme is also planned that will aim to work with schools and their local rivers and streams across the region.

The name of the project comes from this Housman verse:

In valleys of springs of rivers,
By Ony and Teme and Clun,
The country for easy livers,
The quietest under the sun,

My photo shows the Teme just over the Herefordshire border in Leintwardine. The Downton Gorge, which inspired Malcolm Saville, lies between there and Ludlow.

The Teme, despite what the great man wrote, does not reach the sea. It flows into the Severn south of Worcester.

Thanks to the excellent @andybodders on Twitter for the lead.

Malcolm Saville and the pubs of Leintwardine

The Secret of the Gorge, published in 1958, is the 11th of Malcolm Saville's Lone Pine series.

It is a topical book, in that it involves the demolition of a large country house (enormous numbers of them were lost during the 1950s), though the plot has been largely borrowed from The Nine Tailors by Saville's friend Dorothy L. Sayers.

The Secret of the Gorge begins with a stranger getting off the bus in the village of Bringewood Chase. This is a fictionalised version of Leintwardine, which is just over the Herefordshire border from Saville's favourite Shropshire.

First, the stranger looks at the menu pinned up outside the white-walled inn called The Evening Star:

Apparently he didn't like what was offered, or perhaps it was the price of the meal which sent him shambling off again until he reached a turning on the right which led him into a narrow street. The houses here were little more than cottages and most of them were shabby. The only shop was a greengrocer's, but at the far end on the left the man in the brown suit saw the sign of another inn. When he was close enough he realized that the sign had not been cleaned for years. At first he thought the artist had painted two dirty yellow pears or oddly shaped oranges on the sign, but after more study he realized that he place was called Two Bells.

I got off the bus at Leintwardine myself last summer. The Evening Star, the white-walled inn by the bridge, is clearly The Lion.

Find a sidestreet off to the right that once had shops - goodness knows how much a cottage costs in Leintwardine these days - and you will come to the Sun Inn.

This was famous as one of the last of the parlour pubs - I blogged about it back in 2010. The new owners have a built an extension at the back where most of the drinking now takes place, which has allowed them to keep the interior of the main pub as it was when they took it over from Flossie Lane.

As I drank there last summer England were building towards another victory over Australia - how long ago that now seems.

Anyway, you can see the The Lion/The Evening Star above and The Sun Inn/Two Bells below.

Now read more about Malcolm Saville and the countryside around Leintwardine.

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.

Eating squirrel in Leintwardine

I am not a great admirer of the Hugh Dennis and Oz Clarke programme, but a story about them in the Ludlow & Tenbury Wells Advertiser touches upon two subjects that have interested this blog in the past.

They are the Sun Inn, Leintwardine, and the eating of squirrels.

The Sun Inn, Leintwardine

The website for Hobsons, the brewers from Cleobury Mortimer, has an article on the Sun Inn in Leintwardine.

This historic "parlour pub" was kept by the country's longest-serving landlady, Flossie Lane, until she died last June at the age of 94. It now has new owners who are committed to running it as "a kind of living museum where good beers can be enjoyed in a historic environment."

The Hobsons page has a BBC video about the Sun Inn which starts playing as soon as you land there. You can find it if you scroll down to the bottom.

Leintwardine? Malcolm Saville writes in his foreword to The Secret of the Gorge:

On the borders of the counties of Shropshire and Hereford, where the river Teme is joined by its tributary the Clun, you may find the village of Leintwardine. It is not very easy to discover although it lies on a road along which the Roman legions once marched, but it is worth it when you get there.

A few miles from the village the lovely river runs unexpectedly into a limestone gorge overshadowed by trees and strong-smelling elders, thick with creamy blossom in the summer, and heavy with purple fruit a few months later.

Through this gorge the river runs smooth, fast and deep for half a mile until it swirls under an old bow bridge. If you can find the gorge, be careful how you cross this bridge, for it was in very bad condition when I was last there and saw the sparklilng water through holes in the rotting timber.

I have been to Leintwardine, though not the gorge. Reading that, and reading about the Sun Inn, I want to go back there.

The picture above comes from the new website of the Sun Inn.

A E Housman and the Squeezy Lemon

The South Shropshire Journal has the story of the day:

Villagers were due to meet last night in a bid to halt a gay pop festival taking place in their parish.

Residents in Clungunford, Leintwardine and surrounding villages were expected to meet last night, Thursday, to discuss a licensing application submitted for the Squeezy Lemon Festival, which organisers want to hold on fields at Marlow Farm, outside Clungunford.

The vice-chairman of Clungunford Parish Council, Jonathan Roberts, says:

“Author A E Housman said Clungunford was ‘the quietest place under the sun,’ but if this is allowed to go ahead then it won’t be."

Agree with him or not, how can you fail to like a councillor who quotes Housman?

The verse Roberts has in mind is the 50th poem in A Shropshire Lad, which begins:

Clunton and Clunbury,
Clungunford and Clun,
Are the quietest places
Under the sun.

So Clungunford has to share the honour.

Incidentally, it is hard to resist the thought that Housman would rather have enjoyed the Squeezy Lemon Festival.