Some very wintery views here on the wooded flanks of Windmill Hill. Where the trees stop, the land drops off into the massive, now abandoned Shadwell Quarry. Once freight trains from South Wales came chugging into the vicinity to take on cargoes of Wenlock limestone. It was a highly valued resource – mostly used as a flux in iron smelting, but also burned to make fertilizer or ground to produce lime mortar for building; or simply to build with. It’s hard to imagine this place as a hive of heavy industry, but it was – a stinking, dust-palled quarter too. Now the old railway line that runs below the wood is a peaceful footpath, over-arched with ivy-clung ash, hazel and crab apple trees. It’s a good place for pondering on how things are always changing and that it is only our wilful, wishful, often narrow perception that makes us believe that there ever were times when everything was static and predictable.
Shadwell Quarry and an impressive slice of the Silurian sea bed, some 400 million years old, and once located somewhere off East Africa.
Tish Farrell 
I wish we were located somewhere off east Africa now, I am so over this chilly, rainy, windy weather!
And the weeds that it’s making!
if only my courgettes, cucumbers and beans were doing as well as the weeds!
Yes, indeed. The weeds are definitely winning. And the slugs.
ah we are still okay on slugs, think the hedgehog must be eating them all.
Ooh a hedgehog. I’d give anything for a few at the allotment.
I’ll have a word with our pair!
I’m suddenly having a hedgehog version vision of the sunset howling in 101 Dalmations. The call going out from hedgehog to hedgehog, from Winchester to Shropshire – summoning the spiny ones to deal with the mollusc invasion…
🦔🦔🦔🦔🦔🦔
Years ago when we lived in Holmes Co. there was a gravel quarry not far from us. I’ve always thought of them a dangerous place .
They certainly can be. That water in my Shadwell Quarry pic is at least 70 feet deep, and kids think it’s a great place to go jumping off the cliff face after they’ve had a bit to drink. No amount of fencing and security seems to stop them from going there.
ah yes we are easily forget that industry was once everywhere – rather like your Quarry, Ironbridge may be beautiful now but when the bridge was built it must have been terrible!
by the way your square root had me with my head on the side!!!
Yes it was rather lop-sided. Effect of taking it while sliding down the hill maybe.
yikes!! I presumed you had been getting all arty and doing strange photographer stretches. Hope you and the camera were okay
Ah. Kind thoughts, Becky. I wasn’t falling, but was anchoring myself to the fence on a bit of a drop in the ‘path’, hence strange angle.
what we do in the name of photography!!
It would have been awful. The noise from the steam hammers in the riverside works beyond the Severn Warehouse for one. Then all the fumes in a narrow valley.
and to think tourists came to see it all!!
They seemed to enjoy the frisson glimpses of Hades
bonkers!!
Love your title, Tish, and this: “… it is only our wilful, wishful, often narrow perception that makes us believe that there ever were times when everything was static and predictable.” Or that they were the “good old days.”
Yes, some perfect time, that never was, except perhaps in some fleeting sense that stuck in the mind.
I like this, and it looks calm, quite unlike the place it would have been all those years ago…
The way things change, Sue. People in Wenlock still remember what it was like to live under a pall of quarry dust – two quarries at our end of the town and several mega-ones along Wenlock Edge. And the place used to shudder with the regular blasting. Now I just complain about speeding aggregates and container trucks going past the house.
Goodness, presumably old people with the memories
Back in the 80s’ they were still blasting in the some of the quarries. As a child in the 60s I remember Wenlock being a rather lugubrious place.
Oh, I never realised that….did you know of a place called Snail Beach? I believe there were miners cottages there….I once tried to find it – that would have been in the late 80s
I’ve not been there for ages. That part of the Stiperstones-ish area can be a bit grim too.
OK.
Not surprised you didn’t find it. It’s a tiny scattered settlement. And yes some miners’ cottages. The mine is a museum now.
Ah, OK…what town is it closest to?
Shrewsbury. It’s about 11 miles. Minsterly is the nearest big village.
D’you know, after all these years, Minsterley rings a vague bell…..
It’s amazing was surfaces from the mental archive.
😊
And I could imagine Wenlock being a melancholy place
The High Street has been much ‘gentrified’ in the last 20 years or so. But melancholy wintery days still stick in my memory, before the cottages were ‘done up’ and the limestone seemed to absorb all the rain.
Beautiful and fascinating.
Thank you, Manja.