Things to do in Shropshire

Blists Hill Victorian Town is the flagship site of Ironbridge Gorge Museums in Shropshire, an open-air living history museum recreating the sights, sounds and social texture of a working Victorian industrial town in the late nineteenth century. Set within the landscape of the Ironbridge Gorge, the first World Heritage Site in Britain, the museum occupies a site where the remains of the original Victorian industrial infrastructure including the Hay Inclined Plane, the blast furnaces and the canal arm provide authentic archaeological context for the recreation of the Victorian townscape built around them. The Victorian town has been assembled over several decades by relocating historic buildings from across the Telford area and furnishing them with period-appropriate contents and working demonstrations. The high street of the town includes a working bank where visitors can exchange modern currency for replica Victorian coinage to spend at the shops, an ironmonger's, a chemist, a photographer's studio, a baker, a sweet shop and a pub serving Victorian-style ale. The costumed staff play their roles with detailed historical knowledge and genuine interactivity that makes the experience educational as well as entertaining. The industrial heritage of the site provides a dimension that distinguishes Blists Hill from purely domestic Victorian recreations. The Hay Inclined Plane, a remarkable piece of industrial engineering designed to transfer canal boats between two levels of the Shropshire Canal using a counterbalanced system of rails, survives as a scheduled monument within the museum site and the interpretation of this and the other industrial remains connects the town recreation to the genuine history of the gorge's industrial period. The wider Ironbridge Gorge museums complex encompasses ten museums including Ironbridge itself, the Coalport China Museum and Broseley Pipeworks, all within a few kilometres of Blists Hill and all dealing with different aspects of the industrial revolution that was largely initiated in this gorge.

Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and one of the most important industrial heritage sites in the world, a UNESCO World Heritage Site where the convergence of coal, iron ore, water power and entrepreneurial genius in the narrow gorge of the River Severn in the mid-eighteenth century produced the technological and commercial breakthroughs that transformed the world. The Iron Bridge itself, built between 1777 and 1779 as the world's first large-scale cast-iron bridge structure, stands across the gorge as the defining symbol of this transformation and remains in daily use as a pedestrian crossing. The coalmaster Abraham Darby first smelted iron using coke rather than charcoal at Coalbrookdale in 1709, a technical breakthrough that freed iron production from its dependence on timber and enabled the dramatic expansion of output that fuelled the Industrial Revolution. Within three generations the Darby family had developed their process to the point where they could cast the 378 tonnes of iron required to build the Iron Bridge, a structure that demonstrated the structural possibilities of cast iron to the world and opened the way for the bridges, railways, factories and industrial buildings of the following century. The ten museums of the Ironbridge Gorge Museums Trust collectively tell the story of this transformation from multiple perspectives. The Museum of Iron at Coalbrookdale, Blists Hill Victorian Town, the Coalport China Museum, the Jackfield Tile Museum and the others together provide one of the most comprehensive industrial heritage experiences in the world, each museum occupying a site where the history it describes actually took place. The gorge itself, cut through the Shropshire hills by the Severn in the last Ice Age, provides a dramatic and beautiful setting for this industrial history, the wooded hillsides and the river framing the historic infrastructure of the first industrial landscape.

Much Wenlock in Shropshire is one of the most historically interesting and most architecturally complete small towns in the Welsh Marches, a settlement of considerable medieval character whose combination of the ruined Wenlock Priory, the remarkable Guildhall building overhanging the market place on timber pillars and the variety of medieval and Tudor domestic buildings creates one of the finest small heritage townscapes available in the English Midlands. The town also has an extraordinary connection to the modern Olympic Games. Wenlock Priory, founded in the seventh century, refounded by Lady Godiva in the eleventh and rebuilt by the Cluniac monks in the twelfth century, is one of the finest and most complete monastic ruins in Shropshire, its combination of the Norman chapter house with its remarkably preserved interlaced blind arcading and the later Gothic nave ruins creating a site of considerable architectural quality. The priory ruins are managed by English Heritage. The connection to the Olympics derives from the Wenlock Olympian Games established in 1850 by the local physician William Penny Brookes, whose competitive sports meetings at Much Wenlock directly inspired the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, who visited the games in 1890. The Wenlock Olympians mascot of the 2012 London Olympics took his name from the town, giving Much Wenlock a global visibility entirely disproportionate to its modest size.

Wenlock Edge is a limestone escarpment extending approximately fifteen miles through the south Shropshire countryside from Much Wenlock to Craven Arms, a wooded ridge of Silurian limestone whose combination of the ancient woodland, the far-reaching views westward toward the Welsh hills and the exceptional geological and ecological interest of the limestone habitats makes it one of the most distinctive and most rewarding walking landscapes in the English Midlands. The National Trust manages large sections of the Edge and the Wenlock Edge Walk provides the framework for exploring its full length. The woodland of Wenlock Edge, predominantly ash with field maple, wych elm and other characteristic limestone woodland species, is one of the finest examples of ancient limestone woodland in the Midlands, its flora reflecting centuries of traditional coppice management. The characteristic limestone woodland ground flora of dog's mercury, sanicle, wood anemone and the rare limestone polypody fern creates a botanical interest of considerable quality, and the spring display of bluebells and wood anemones is among the finest in Shropshire. A E Housman used Wenlock Edge as one of the principal landscapes of A Shropshire Lad, the 1896 collection of poems that established the melancholy pastoral character of Shropshire in the literary imagination. The Edge appears in several poems as a place from which the wider country can be seen and the transience of human life contemplated, giving this particular landscape a literary resonance that adds to its considerable natural quality.