Shropshire

Wiped out from a very long previous day and almost no sleep, we checked out of the Bestwood Lodge at around 9 in the morning and headed west toward Shropshire, and Shrewsbury, our next bed. Sharon caught a cool picture of a dove in one of the hotel's sculpted facades.

I was groggy and a little cranky, fending off a hint of skepticism that we had planned the middle portion of this trip a bit too ambitiously. There were a handful of moments when I glowered with bitterness about the driving – not so much that I was doing it all, since Sharon had developed a conductor’s mastery of the GPS and without it we’d probably still be there – but just that I was still distrustful of the vehicle and feeling like any day could visit utter catastrophe on us. A moment of forgetting which side of the road to be on, a fleeting lapse checking the oncoming traffic, grossly misinterpreting the meaning of a street sign. Our own “fooking piece 'o shit” moment could be out there, waiting to deliver infamy and misery on us at any time.  

I recalled a post on a travel site that I read months before about an American couple who also planned a driving trip through England, their first time, and abandoned the car after two days, shaken and rattled to the point of utter capitulation. I didn’t consider that an active option for us – we were on a tight budget and converting the whole deal to buses and trains would have screwed both the itinerary and our wallets – but at least I knew how that anonymous couple felt. There’s an unexpected component of re-learning the nuances and cadences of driving, and after almost forty years of driving stateside, that piece came as a surprise to me. The last time I learned how to drive I was 16 and invincible, in a car about three times the size of this twitchy little VW.      

Our planned route took us through Nottingham proper that morning - we got to see the cemetery again, from the car – and a couple of dicey turns and the crush of rush hour traffic had me on edge almost immediately. We finally made it onto the A52, headed toward Derby (for us Yanks, pronounced “Darby”), feeling like I had managed to survive another tangle of fast, busy English county roads. But as soon as I let my guard down, I screwed up in a roundabout, ending up lost and sandwiched between buses and trucks in Derby itself. What we saw of the city reminded us a bit of rust-belt urban America, big and undistinguished warehouses and office buildings, although the city itself dates to Roman times and I’m fairly certain we missed the historic section. Our faithful GPS guided us patiently through a string of death-defying left turns and we were square again in a few minutes, eventually finding our way to the M6 headed south, then the M54 headed west.

We made to Shropshire after a couple of thankfully uneventful hours driving through the riotously green, heavily agricultural Midlands, skirting the madness of Birmingham and its large metro area from the north.

Next stop was Buildwas Abbey, another ruined Cistercian mission, founded in 1135. 

Smaller than the ruins in Yorkshire, Buildwas was an oddly compelling site, due in part to the several still-roofed rooms at one end of the site. Buildwas felt like a place. 

We were nearly the only people there, and we spent several minutes chatting with the English Heritage lady at the gift shop – she was a local and explained that several of the very old houses in the community were built in part with stone pilfered from the Abbey itself, in the years after Henry’s Dissolution.

And fresh from a ghost hunt the night before, I did a few EVP recordings in the quiet places around the abbey ruins, coaxing the spirits of the monks in my unconvincing French.

We also picked up a friend.

Off again, this time to Wenlock Priory, at the outskirts of the Shrewsbury metro area. The priory, part of the Cluniac order, is located on the site of a monastery dating to the seventh century and is thought to be the resting place of St Milburga, a Benedictine abbess who died in the early 8^th century. 

There are handful of privately owned (and more recently constructed) buildings on the site, inaccessible to the public, but the Priory ruins themselves were a treat, laced with an immaculate and slightly creepy topiary garden.

We also visited the local church, Holy Trinity, at the center the tiny village adjoining the priory (Much Wenlock) and shot the cemetery; it was mid afternoon and the local moms were picking up their kids from school. The cemetery had an odd feel to it – unexpectedly heavy around the back side of the church, despite the bright and warm summer afternoon, quite possibly the most perfect weather day we had while in the UK.  

Hobbling into Shrewsbury, an ancient market town a mere nine miles from the Welsh border, we found our hotel without much trouble, the tourist-luringly named Abbot’s Mead, and thankfully found a spot, maybe the last one, in the hotel's tiny car park. Sharon got out of the car to guide me in. I had lost all car-park-incompetence-shame about two hotels ago. 

The gameplan was more or less routine by now – we climbed some steep stairs, entered a nice if unremarkable hotel room looking out over the street, dumped the bags and charged up the devices. We had each shot several dozen pictures since the last battery charge, and while Sharon’s Nikon seemed to possess a freakishly long charge cycle, I typically had to change batteries at least once a day…sometimes twice. By evening, I had at least two batteries to charge up…a few evenings, three. Plus the laptop. Our phones didn't work over there, we rented one from Verizon before we left; just as well, we mugged every plug in every hotel room, every night. At night, we dimmed the country. 

Sharon had mapped out the churches and churchyards ahead of time, at least the ones in the city center, so we figured we’d use the early evening light to shoot them and then find someplace for a bite, opting this time to skip getting a recommendation from the hotel gentleman and just roll the dice.