Shropshire

Reasons To Be Cheerful: Six On Saturday

January came with heavy snow and gale force gusts that brought down snow-laden trees. Then there were days of frost and biting winds, then heavy rains that flooded fields and roads. There were also many low cloud days, the hills around the Castle shrouded in murk the colour of mud; not much sight of the sun. But through it all the snowdrops have been emerging in ever bigger clumps. They are everywhere around the town, in pots and borders, on patches of abandoned garden, under walls and hedges. And they’re still going strong.

Our own snowdrops are too newly planted to make a clump or a photo worth taking, though we’re still pleased to see them. So these are the neighbours’ snowdrops.

The garden has been looking pretty dreary, but there are signs of spring – when I put on my specs and do some low-level peering. The Tete a Tete daffodils for one are looking promising:

We’re also approaching the main season for hellebores. The December flowering Christmas Carols have kept going through snow and frost, but the rain has muddied and bruised their faces.

This purplish-pink one, just opening outside the kitchen window, is faring better:

And still in purplish mode the Ajuga reptans looks to have put on a growth spurt along the back garden path. I think it may be Atropurpurea. It’s certainly looking very purple here in the afternoon light:

And since we’re in the back garden, it’s worth looking in on the winter greens. At one stage they were buried in six inches of snow, but now I see the Swiss Chard and perennial beet have begun to regrow, and the purple sprouting and cauliflowers planted out in the cleared runner bean bed in September are bulking up. The land cress, meanwhile, has been sprouting edible, peppery salad stems all winter.

And finally there are the slivers of tiny mauve crocuses that have popped up all over the front garden. On dull days they are almost invisible, their petals in tightly wrapped small spikes that remind me more of fungi than flowers.

But earlier this week we actually had a blue-sky-full-on-sun day, and the tiny souls opened wide, though barely an inch across at full petal: their own small force of nature.

Six on Saturday Our host Jim, as ever, has plenty to show us in his garden; always something new to see or learn about there.

In The Beginning There Was A Castle…

Some three years ago we began our shift from one ancient Shropshire town and into another: out of Much Wenlock and into Bishop’s Castle. The first was a settlement that grew up outside the walls of Wenlock Priory, its inhabitants subject to rule by Prior until the Dissolution in 1542. The second evolved, or rather descended from a hillside motte and bailey castle, built around the 1080s by the Bishops of Hereford, owners of the surrounding manor lands of Lydbury North.

Notional reconstruction of the earth and timber motte and bailey of 1080s CE

The castle was deemed essential for the defence of the manor, given its location close to the Welsh border and potential raiding parties. It also served as an administrative centre for running the estate, gathering taxes and holding courts to maintain law and order. The Bishops had pastoral duties too, but for the ordinary souls who lived and worked on their lands, their worldly purpose was to produce good crops and profits for their landlords, who in turn had their own obligations to the Crown. It was big business then; a feudal corporation.

It is not clear how the bishops of a town nearly 40 miles away came to own Lydbury North, a highly profitable farming domain. But, as often happened in medieval times, there was a handy legend to lend authority to claims of possession. (In Much Wenlock it was the apparent 11th century discovery of St. Milburga’s shining seventh century bones that helped turn the town into a busy pilgrim centre).

In similar vein, the Bishop’s Castle legend has it that around the 790s CE, the original Lydbury North owner, Saxon lord, Egwin Shakehead, was so grateful to have his tremors cured at St. Ethelbert’s tomb in Hereford Cathedral, he gave the 18,000 acre estate to the bishops in perpetuity. It is a compelling blend of antique ‘authority’ and saintly miracle, probably politically expedient in the immediate post-Conquest era of the Norman regime change.

The Bishops’ motte and bailey was thus built in line with the prevailing Norman subjugation plan to establish fortifications across England and Wales. The earth and timber mottes were fairly quick to construct. Later they would be rebuilt in stone, depending on strategic need. But in any event, they were highly visible structures to remind the Saxons and Celtic Welsh of who was in charge.

It was also Norman policy to develop civilian settlements next to their castles, this to secure the site and to ensure neighbouring land was cultivated. And so began the ‘planted’ town of Bishop’s Castle with the provision of dwellings for rent. These were established either side the castle’s main access road, running down from the outer bailey walls and towards the church.

Now you need to look at the High Street with fresh eyes: strip away all those slate roofs and hugger-mugger back-lot buildings. See, not the tall eighteenth and nineteenth century facades, but low, timber-framed, thatched dwellings fronting the road. Behind each cottage would be a long narrow garden or burgage plot for the tenant’s use. At the foot of these, on both sides and running parallel to the main street, were ‘back lanes’. And beyond the lanes, to the east and west, were the town fields.

You can get the gist from this rather blurry photo from one of the town’s information boards.

By 1167 there were 47 burgages, and the town was on the up. At that time, too, the castle was rebuilt in stone, and grand enough to host both bishops’ and royal visitations.

This following reconstruction is again notional, but it suggests there was both an outer bailey with service buildings such as stables, stores, brewery and bakehouse, and a defended inner bailey surrounding the main castle keep.

Over the following centuries the ‘new town’ prospered. Weekly markets and annual fairs were well supported, and local trades, servicing both castle and general populace, likewise flourished. The bishops continued to reap the benefit of course, and it wasn’t until 1559 that they lost control. Queen Elizabeth 1 forced the then Bishop Scory to surrender his four richest manors to the Crown in return for less wealthy ones. (The Bishop had been implicated in a domestic financial scandal). The exchange included Bishop’s Castle.

At this time, too, there was a Crown survey of the castle. It recorded the presence of thirteen habitable rooms, the roofs leaded. There was a tower containing stables on the east wall, a prison tower, dovecote and other buildings. The castle had its own garden, forest and park.*

There are few signs of the castle today, apart from the Castle Green (cared for by Old Castle Land Trust), a small grassy segment of the original bailey.

The castle played no role in the Civil War of the mid 1600s. In fact by then it was reported derelict, with its roofs stripped of lead, and its stone and timbers used in developing the town’s housing. The recycling of materials probably became a matter of course. One beneficiary was The Castle Hotel, built in 1719 within the outer bailey.

Around this time, too, the site of the castle keep, which was further up the steep hill behind the hotel, was levelled to make a fine octagonal bowling green. Both the green and the restored octagonal pavilion are still in use today.

The Bowling Green Pavilion

So here we are at the bowling green at the top of the town. But for the best view we need to drop down a level to the garden above The Castle Hotel (its rooftops in the foreground).

I’m guessing I was standing near or within the site of the inner bailey when I took this photo. And am I sorry there’s no castle rampart left to clamber up and take more dramatic photos? No, not really. Castles can be exciting structures, but I’m thinking our response to them often has more to do with romance than reality.

I’ve anyway learned that the born-and-bred locals call their castle-less town ‘the Castle’, its utterance conveying a strong sense of community and long rootedness, yet with fellow-feeling enough to absorb generations of blow-ins; people like us. And so it seems that although the castle fabric may be long gone, what remains feels a better kind of stronghold.

Sources:

*The Story of Bishop’s Castle 2018 eds David Preshous, George Baugh, John Leonard, Gavin Watson, Andrew Wigley; Logaston Press

Bishop’s Castle: A Timeline of Governance Bishop’s Castle Heritage Resource Centre

Year’s End At The Castle: The Changing Seasons

Here’s how our world looked on Christmas morning we drove from our side of the Long Mynd to a family gathering on the other side. Above, the westerly face, a sinuous small portion. Then below, some easterly features. It’s a very long hill.

My sister’s home is perched on its foothills near Church Stretton. She looks out on Ragleth Hill: the backdrop to the day’s festivities, the deepening glow in ice-cold air while, indoors, lunch simmered and roasted and the wood stove crackled. Much laughter and chatter; the chink of wine glasses; rustle of wrapping paper. It was the finest Christmas Day, the sun alone a gift after the weather people’s threat of snow and earlier weeks of heavy rain.

Backtracking to mid-December and in the midst of gloomy wetness, we took ourselves off to next door Clun. Well water-proofed and wandering the lanes, we ended up at the Postcard Cafe beside the old Clun bridge. It seemed a good spot to lift the spirits:

Years ago it was a quirky little tea-room that also had trays of old postcards for sale. Now it’s bright and cosy resort, playing cool jazz and serving Brazilian coffee along with slices of the cook’s signature cardamom and ginger cake, and much else besides.

Meanwhile outside, the Clun River was threatening to leave its bed. It’s often guilty of serious flooding along the valley. Not so back in the summer, when the cafe’s clientele would spread themselves out at tables and chairs set out along the river bank, while the cafe’s staff would trot across the road with trays of cake and coffee, dodging the odd passing car. It was a pleasing reminder of warmer, drier days with no rain at all. (Though I do remember complaining about that!)

But enough of rain. Back to Bishop’s Castle, and another cold and sunny day on the High Street. Please note: this street will feature later, though not quite so emptily.

And so to Boxing Day and a lively gathering at the town’s ancient pub and brewery, The Three Tuns. It was a freezing cold morning so a big round of applause for Martha Rhoden’s Tuppenny Dish dancers and the Shropshire Bedlams morris men…

Later there was a performance of Castle Carols, by folks of Bishop’s Castle and the Clun Valley singing their hearts out. Choirmaster, local accordion-squeeze box magician, John Kirkpatrick, had schooled them well in ancient and traditional versions of English carols. He’s also the power behind the traditional dance teams.

This well reveals the Bishop’s Castle conundrum. The town so often wears a dreamy, not-much-happening face, but looks can deceive. I was thus sorry I’d missed a sighting of the local rugby club’s now annual charity fundraiser – the Boxing Day Boxer Run – wherein the brave run a circuit of the town, starting at the King’s Head pub, and wearing only their underpants. A chum told us he’d spotted twenty one of them charging up the very steep High Street. They raised over £500 this year. I’ll leave you with that image, then, as I wish all who come here a very

Happy New Year

and some cheery singing from Castle Carols:

The Changing Seasons: December 2025 Ju-Lyn at Touring My Backyard and Brian at Bushboys World are our very good hosts for posts of the month just gone. Many thanks, both.

Six On Saturday: In The December Garden

Now as the year ends, the garden is wet, wet, wet. Wet as in waterlogged, sodden, soggy and all round slithery. But yesterday we had sun. It seemed like a heavenly blessing after days of gloom and serial downpours. And suddenly, instead of finding the garden depressing, I started to notice the plants that were not only doing their best, but in their own way, putting on a show.

1) Top of the list is Nandina domestica, otherwise known as Heavenly Bamboo. It’s not a bamboo and so does not have bamboo’s bad infesting habit. The variety here is Fire Power. It’s compact, dome-like in habit, evergreen, and will grow around 18 inches tall with a two feet spread. It likes full sun, but otherwise is undemanding. It also seems unfazed by hard frost (we had several weeks of freezing weather last year). But what colours! It turns more red with the cold weather.

Number 2) is a plant that has made a good recovery after a very unpromising start. It’s a Japanese Shield Fern I bought on-line back in the spring. After ten days being lost and tossed about by the delivery company, it arrived in very sorry state, much mangled and desiccated. Now it seems very happy in its pot, making new fronds even..

3) The prize for steadfast out-of-season flowering goes to the Phlox paniculata Adessa in the front garden. This is a young plant, bought in the summer. I was not expecting it to flower until next year, but come November, spires of small white flowers appeared, and they’re still going, subtly scented too.

4) Also in the front garden is a tiny self-grown viola. It’s seeded from the pot of violas my sister gave me over a year ago. Such stalwart, exquisite little plants.

5) Another surprise is the number of foxglove plants in the garden, all self-sown. They have been growing huge during the recent wet and mostly mild weather, having recovered from a spell of heavy frosting in November. Happy thoughts of summer then.

6) Finally, and spot on for a December debut is hellebore Christmas Carol. It was a gift last year, since divided and planted out both in a pot and in the new back steps bed. It’s been so cheering on dull days, though, annoyingly, some beastie is biting holes in its petals. Last year it flowered from months and months.

Happy gardening everyone –

whether planning or planting, depending on your hemisphere

Six on Saturday And thanks and Happy Christmas to host Jim. He has shown us so many fascinating plants, to say nothing of guiding us around his stunning planting schemes.

Shadows of Summer Past at Wildegoose Nursery

Wildegoose Nursery in the Corve Valley has been hosting a special winter opening this week (Thursday – Sunday) – giving us a chance to see the walled garden in its late season colours. Not the brightest of days yesterday, and with rain on the air.

Here’s a reminder of how it looked when we visited in September, this after weeks without rain:

Then and now…

From the tea room window

November Shadows #29

Snow!

We woke to snow this morning. Not too much and already melting at 8 a.m. but, even so, far too early an occurrence for the time of year.

The first photo shows the kitchen rooflight.

I think it’s likely to be an indoors day.

November Shadows #19

Becky shows us some very fabulous Norwegian shadows today.

Sun And Shadow At The Top Of The Town

Yesterday we had sun. We did! And a fine afternoon it was for a short tramp up and round the town.

As you can see, Bishop’s Castle is on a steep hill. The header view shows the High Street below the Town Hall. We’re around half way up the hill.

Now I’m walking you backwards, past the Town Hall, past Bamber’s elephant mural into the Market Square, and crossing Salop Street.

And now I’m turning you right around to look up Bull Street:

And we’re still not at the top.

Bull Street leads to Bull Lane. If we look right and downhill, there’s a fine view of farm fields, doubtless winter wheat and oil seed rape.

But we’re not going down, but left and up to the crossroads where Bull Lane meets Castle Street, Wintles Lane and Montgomery Road.

Now we’re at the top of the town, by the blue house that is growing a fine shadow tree:

And in the shade, on the house wall opposite, a tribute to our two local Morris dance teams, the Shropshire Bedlams and Martha Rhoden’s Tuppenny Dish

At the crossroads it’s decision time – to go left and back into town via Castle Street (where there is no castle, only some ground it once sat on and some more good views):

Or cross the road into Wintles Lane:

If you want to see the elephant sculpture, then you need to take the Wintles Lane option and follow the footpaths on the right. And climb another hill:

It’s also worth clambering up here for the view of the Long Mynd.

And from here, too, you can turn about and look down on the town. A fine spot on Planet Earth:

November Shadows #18

Six On Saturday: Showing Their Colours

Back at the end of October the garden was alive with drifts of cosmos, Michaelmas daisies and rudbeckia. And then the downpours began, plus some big winds. The cosmos is still hanging on, but the Michaelmas daisies are no more and rudbeckia down to the final few stems.

1) The rose trio, though, is hanging on, still doing their bit. Cornelia by the greenhouse is looking a little rain battered, but still very pretty. St. Cecilia on the terrace wall has been flowering sporadically for some weeks. But her neighbour, Penelope, has only started flowering this week, beautiful, but unexpected…

2) There have been other surprise openings this week, including the newly planted young Hesperanthus Wilfred H. Bryant…

Other curious (unseasonal?) discoveries this week include buds and flowers on two Vanilla Ice sunflower plants which I grew from seed in the spring. They’re multi-headed plants with medium, in sunflower terms, sized flowers. Heaven knows why they’ve waited till November.

3) In the still going strong since the summer category, Salvia Amistad wins first prize. Actually, this is the best its looked since it was planted in the spring…

4) And in the front garden, a new favourite Crocosmia Harlequin, as seen this morning. Isn’t this a lovely plant…

5) In between torrential rain and misty drizzle, garden tidying, and the usual plant shifting has begun. Our builder and son also came and removed an annoying (literally) stumbling block outside the back door. Last year we had the garden steps reconfigured, but the job wasn’t quite finished and the old bottom steps survived the exercise, were a real eye-sore and general all-round nuisance. But now transformation. They have been demolished and a brand new, semi-shade bed created. I’ve planted it up with assorted hellebores, (Christmas Carol in the right hand corner just in bud), dwarf daffodils, snowdrops under the hedge, pulmonaria Blue Ensign and Diana Clare (silvery leaves), and in the far left, a neat fern, Polystichum setiferum congestum. As the leaves go from the hedge end behind the house, it will get more light. A spring garden then.

6) Last but not least, when it comes to providing long-lasting colour and cheerfulness, to say nothing of eventually feeding the birds, it has to be the crab apple trees: a miniature Evereste in the front garden (header photo) which we can see from the sitting room, and Jelly King at the bottom of the garden, but visible from the kitchen. Even on the gloomiest days, they do their best to glow. Today, though, we have wall to wall sunshine and Wedgewood Blue sky, so here they are looking their brightest…

Six on Saturday Please call in on our host, Jim. He still has some fabulous plants still flowering in his garden

Hopton Castle, Shropshire

I’m quoting some text from an earlier post:

“Here we have the remains of Hopton Castle, an enigmatic ruin in the Shropshire borderland, eleven miles northwest of of Ludlow. It is called a castle, but it might be better described as an upscale medieval tower-house. That it survives at all, in this accessible state, is down to the creative efforts of the Hopton Castle Preservation Trust whose members toiled for 11 years to raise funds to consolidate the main structure, and then spent a further five years overseeing the work.

The ruin is full of puzzles. The preservation work revealed hints of 11th, 12th, 13th, and 14th century construction, but with no clear evidence for the date of the main surviving structure. It’s been suggested that the Hopton family, who owned it between the 11th and 15th centuries, at some stage deliberately set out to create a faux antique country residence much as the Victorians did with their mock Tudor ‘cottages’. In other words, the Hoptons went in for some creative intervention of their own.

One theory is that it was a hunting lodge. The interior work of all three floors appears to have been very grand, and definitely of ‘lordly’ quality.

Restored entrance

Also, the tower was clearly not intended as a defensive structure. As you can see from the first photo, any besieger could simply walk up to the front door. Yet the building it replaced, the first ‘castle’ on the mound was indeed a functioning fortification – a motte and bailey castle typical of the Normans’ early conquest of Britain after 1066. Made of timber, they could be constructed swiftly, and as the need arose, later re-built and expanded into domineering stone fortresses.

But this did not happen at Hopton. The stone walls that replaced the 11th century motte and bailey appear to have been built of poor quality stone, unsuited to withstanding a siege. Meanwhile, the interior fittings and design suggest considerable expense.

So it’s a pretend castle then?”

You can read more about this (pictorial reconstruction included) at my earlier post: Creative Intervention Rescues A Ruin

This week at Leanne Cole’s Monochrome Madness the guest host is Sarah from Travel With Me. Sarah’s theme is RUINS.

A Bronze Age Circle And Some Mystic Brume

It’s a year or so since we last visited Mitchell’s Fold stone circle. I’m not sure why it’s taken so long to go back there. It’s only six miles from home and such a fine spot, sitting high on Stapeley Hill, with the Stiperstones to the east, Corndon Hill to the south and Wales rolling out in the west. Somehow we had let the summer go by when a sundowner visit would have been perfect for capturing light, communing with ancestors and gazing out on those wide Welsh vistas.

As it was, we waited until late September. And so last Friday, and well before coffee time, in hopes of some good light, we set off. The sky was clear, the sun brilliant and the air autumnally crisp. As we drove out of Bishop’s Castle, I conjured the landscape photos I would take up on the hill; those views into Wales…

Except when we set off on foot up the Stapeley Hill track I soon saw I wouldn’t. Westerly vistas were off.

The uplands might be bathed in sunshine, but the low lying reaches had been invaded by rivers of mist, also known in literary circles as brume. We watched as this mysterious atmospheric phenomenon flowed by, whiffling up hillside clefts and gullies, some of its manifestations distinctly pink. At closer quarters you could see through it as if looking through gauze.

Seen in monochrome setting, there’s almost the sense of spray, as in breakers crashing against a rocky cliff-face…

Of course this all added a frisson to the mystery of ancient stones.

I’ve written about them several times, including in a much older post Witch-catching in the Shropshire Wilds which mentions the myth associated with the place. But very little is known of them other than there were once 30 or so standing (now only 15 and some of them are recumbent.) And that they were sourced locally and hauled in place over 3,000 years ago. We can guess, too, that this was a place of great significance to local people (temple or gathering place?) for we know, too, that nearby hills (Corndon, the Stiperstones) have on their flanks many remains of Bronze Age burial cairns. There is also a lone standing stone and a supposed robbed burial cairn not far from the circle.

A landscape, then, of many meanings; the kind of meanings where sacred and profane coalesce, the subtleties of whose interconnectedness we offspring of industrial culture often fail to grasp, confusing the sacred with dogma.

Around the stones, there are traces of more recent human doings. You can see them in the photos: the remnant ridges and furrows of a mediaeval field system. And also running through the middle of the circle, the ruts made by carts and, in particular, the stage coaches that are said to have run this way between our county town of Shrewsbury and Aberystwyth in mid-Wales. Can you imagine?

In a way, I find this last historical glimpse more exciting than the stones. Just think how it would be, racketing around in a draughty coach, being hauled over this bleak hill on a grey winter’s day, some real fog closing in and looking out on these standing stones…it could be a scene from Jane Eyre.

For now I’ll leave you with some more non-wintery views:

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge