Shrewsbury: Monks For Sale, Green Day and The Dingle

We headed out up the impossibly narrow St Julian’s Friars  

and headed left up Beeches Lane.

The lane turns into the Town Walls St, which traces the medieval defensive wall around the city center built by Henry II in 1216, little of which remains with the exception of this small guard tower dating from the fourteenth century, listing notably inward. (Unless the adjoining houses were listing notably outward - by this time, either seemed possible to me...)

The tower is open a few times a year and is in the care of the National Trust.

Along the way, we came upon Shrewsbury Cathedral, one of the town’s landmarks (although, hardly ancient, as it was consecrated in 1856.), quiet and still in the harsh light of late afternoon, at the outskirts of the town center on the curiously deserted street. 

The gate was locked, so we couldn’t go inside. By the photos we have seen, the place is quite grand on the inside, but from the sidewalk, it left little impression on us.

Old St Chad’s Church was next, a block or two away. 

The church, built on the site of an eight century monastic building, dates to the late 12^th century, although much of it collapsed (“spectacularly”, as the interpretative plaque tells us) in 1788, with only the original Lady Chapel remaining of the original structure. It is thought this was one of the very earliest occupied post-Roman sites in Shrewsbury. Unsurprisingly, we shot the churchyard around it, and also unsurprisingly, the church was locked.

Apparently some nasty things happened in Shrewsbury in the Middle Ages, too. 

We found our way next to St Alkmond’s, St Mary the Virgin and eventually (the new) St Chad’s Church, which the Victorian-era (and much larger) successor to the Old St Chad’s. It sits right across the street from The Quarry, Shrewsbury’s large municipal park which slopes down the River Severn and which encompasses a gardened area known as The Dingle…a name we had a little cheap, foreigner fun with. The Quarry also features an immense statue of Michael the Archangel, a WWI Memorial erected in the 1920’s.

The park was a green and pleasant expanse; lots of folks out strolling, laying in the grass reading, walking their dogs etc. The church is immense and imposing, but also locked, as were the gates around the gardened grounds and the small, neatly arranged churchyard. We were starting to get the picture; churches in the cities tend to be locked during off-hours, churches in the villages tend to be left open for the public. Not a hard and fast rule, but generally speaking. 

The town itself was picturesque, lots of Tudor buildings and winding, narrow streets, brightened by loads of flowers enjoying the sunny, warm days of early September. 

This is the mansion (on the left) built for wealthy wool trader John Ireland, in 1596.

Shrewsbury is also the birthplace of one of England’s Favorite Sons, Charles Darwin (whose tomb we saw a few days later, at Westminster Abbey), which we were reminded of at sometimes unexpected intervals, 

but that wasn’t the real reason we were there. Actually, the only real reason we came to Shrewsbury was because it seemed a logical waypoint for our next leg southeast to the Cotswolds, and its relatively close proximity to Wigmore Castle, one of the first ruined castle sites we identified when scoping out the trip months earlier. 

Shrewsbury exhibits a kind of subdued pride that we found uncommon elsewhere (York is much different, more obviously a museum and college town), but for some reason – really quite inexplicable to me – it was the first time walking along an English street where I felt conspicuously foreign. Not unwelcome, but just a tourist strolling about somewhat pointlessly in a working English city. Maybe it was Mary’s remark a few days earlier (“Why would you want to go there?”)  It was an odd sensation and a little unsettling for me, at least for a little while.

We decided not to be too picky about dinner – by this time we had already scratched our Yank-tourist-in-Britain itch for “real” English pubs – so we just popped in a place called The Hole In The Wall (Sharon tells me it’s a chain). It was Friday night and the place was busy and boisterous. We found a small table across from the bar – a clatch of locals, including a conspicuously bar-flyish and cackle-prone middle aged lady with blond hair, ill-advised shorts and a probably flammable blood-alcohol quotient, were swilling enthusiastically nearby.

Our table was stationed just beside a post supporting a jukebox. A band was just starting up in the downstairs area not far away, but the jukebox next to us was being manned by a guy in his early twenties punching up Green Day songs and standing there, facing the machine, nodding approvingly to the music. He wandered off a time or two, but kept coming back, feeding his habit with those odd English coins I still haven’t deciphered. Didn’t seem intoxicated; just a dateless young man, burning a Friday night mainlining Billy Jo down at the pub. A perfectly respectable cover band was cranking away nearby, but he was oblivious. It conjured in my mind a line or two from the Kinks' “Rock and Roll Fantasy.” We found it funny and not at all annoying (Sharon likes Green Day), and somehow a little reassuring to me that England was still growing a rock ‘n roll fan or two.

The barkeep brought our food out (bangers and mash for me, fish and chips for Sharon), and when we asked him, offhandedly, if he knew where Darwin’s birthplace was, he went back to find his manager and returned with a tourist map, giving us directions with circles and arrows. It was no small gesture –I’ve worked behind bars on Friday nights, and the guy went out of his way to give us some tourist directions at possibly the busiest hour of the entire working week. I felt a little bad about it, since we hadn’t budgeted any time to see Darwin’s birthplace anyway and it wasn’t likely that we’d be able to the next morning. He gave us a customer satisfaction card, which we dutifully filled out, giving them high marks all around. We still have the map. 

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped off at another pub, ordered up a couple of ciders and sipped them in the cooling night air at an outdoor table. 

Shrewsbury. I was starting to like the place.

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.