大象传媒

Richard Uridge visits Wenlock Edge, a long, wooded escarpment that runs from the Wrekin down to Craven Arms in Shropshire. It is a limestone rock formation that dates back to the Silurian period over 430 million years ago and sits next to the birthplace of the industrial revolution in the nearby town of Ironbridge. The Edge is a popular destination for walkers and geologists.

Wenlock Edge also has a literary landscape, immortalised in the writing of A E Housman in his epic poem A Shropshire Lad, in which he refers to the "blue remembered hills" he could see from his home in Bromsgrove in Worcestershire. The poem is a bittersweet reflection on the transient nature of life with references to many places in Shropshire. On Wenlock Edge evokes the ancient nature of the woods along the ridge, as he thinks of the Romans who walked there before him.

Richard Uridge meets people who have different interests and perspectives on Wenlock Edge. Gordon Dickins is a librarian and author of a book on literary Shropshire. He shows Richard some of the views and landmarks that crop up in the works of Housman and Shropshire's other famous writer, Mary Webb. The timelessness of the landscape is something that inspired them, he says, and continues to inspire those who visit the county today. Gordon continues to be moved by the beauty of the views from the Edge and the fact that he can stand in the same spot as Mary Webb would have stood looking at the countryside, knowing that the land remains relatively unchanged.


Housman's awareness of those who went before him was, no doubt, influenced by the fact that Wenlock Edge is the best-known Silurian site in the world, containing fossilised coral from the time it was under a warm Caribbean sea. Liz Etheridge, of Shropshire Wildlife Trust, is an enthusiastic geologist who believes the subject needs to be de-mystified and made accessible to everyone. She takes Richard on a walk to study the landscape from a distance and close up. They look for trilobites and fossilised sea creatures that are preserved in the stone along the path, easily spottable for amateur fossil hunters.


At the northern-most point of Wenlock Edge, overlooking the Ironbridge Gorge power station, Richard meets Keith Pybus, a keen walker who writes about Shropshire's industrial past in his book Ten Walks That Changed the World. Keith tells Richard how the limestone of Wenlock Edge was a key factor in the Industrial Revolution because it was used to extract iron from the ironstone. The raw limestone was processed in a kiln near the quarries and transported first by horse and later by rail to Ironbridge. Although the limestone on the Edge is still quarried today, it doesn't detract from people's enjoyment of its timeless, natural beauty. Myths and stories of people who have lived and walked along the Edge abound, not only those created by Shropshire writers, but also by the modern-day storytellers who congregate each year on Wenlock Edge for the storytelling festival in summer. Mike Rust, who organises the festival, takes Richard to Ippikin's Rock and tells him why the Edge has given rise to so many tales, and why it remains the perfect place for hearing stories from all over the world on a midsummer's evening, gazing out into the Shropshire sunset.



Email Open Country: open.country@bbc.co.uk

The 大象传媒 is not responsible for external web sites