Day 14 - In Thomas Telford's Footsteps
Shrewsbury to Wrexham
Just inside our front door at home is a small painting by a local artist called John Coatsworth. It's a view of the Tyne Bridge on a cold, wintery evening with a couple huddling under a wind-blown brolly as they scamper across the bridge. A Newcastle Corporation bus passes by, its cabin lights glowing warmly in the gloom.
It’s not the couple that immediately catches your eye but the bus, partly because it looks so warm and inviting and partly because its painted a bright egg yolk yellow which was the colour of all Newcastle buses until the 1980’s.
 |
| Tyne Bridge by John Coatsworth |
Bus liveries used to be very much about places. At one time, it was possible to recognise instantly exactly where you are in the UK just by checking the colour of the buses on the streets. Orange and green? Ooh, I'm in Glasgow. Dark blue? Welcome to Sunderland. Purple? Hey, I'm in Edinburgh….
And then of course there’s London, where it is decreed by precedent, by rite of heritage, possibly even by act of parliament and certainly on the grounds of taste, that buses cannot be any other colour than red. It's sort of the Eleventh Commandment. Cabs are black, buses are red. Deal with it.
Since the 1980’s, though, and the onward march of the big private operators, most of these local liveries have been replaced by the corporate colour schemes of their owners. It’s virtually impossible now to tell where you are by the colour of the buses. Barnsley? Ballater? Barnstaple? How would you know when the buses are mostly the same colours?
I am reflecting on this as my bus to Oswestry swerves gracefully into Shrewsbury’s neat but carefully-hidden bus station and I saw that is was yet another Arriva bus with its familiar turquiosey livery. If I get a minute, I’ll count up how many of this company’s buses I have travelled on so far... there, it's ten, including all three of yesterday's.
Am I bothered? Well, slightly, yes. Today's High Streets are already bland and uniform enough with the same old shops selling the same old stuff behind the same old identical shop fronts. Now all the buses look the same, too. Individuality doesn't seem to count for much anymore. Am I the only one that reckons that's a shame?
I am taking my leave of Shrewsbury with regret. I'm smitten. I was so taken with its ancient charms that last night I roamed its cobbled streets till late, returning via a lovely old pub called The Three Fishes whose ceilings were so low and its floors so quaintly uneven that you felt mildly adrift after barely half a glass of lemonade.
One of the reasons for all this splendour is that Shrewsbury somehow managed to side-step the industrial revolution. While everywhere else was acquiring dark satanic mills, Shrewsbury stayed in the shadows of its own medieval architecture. Local industrialists concentrated their attentions further down the Severn at Coalbrookdale and Shrewsbury remained what it had always been – a major centre for the woollen trade with a regular market for local wool producers, or sheep as they are sometimes called.
Not that Shrewsbury entirely escaped the march of progress. In fact, it was at Shrewsbury that the revolutionary Ditherington Flax Mill, the world's first iron-framed building no less, was built in 1797, a modest structure which nonetheless is the improbable forebear of the modern skyscraper. The town’s proximity to Coalbrookdale, with all that cheap iron pouring out of Abraham Darby’s Coalbrookdale furnace, was one reason for its novel construction though its designer was equally interested in its fireproof properties which is always an important feature in a building filled with combustible materials.
I didn't get the chance to sample a Shrewsbury biscuit, which takes its name from the town but whose origins are uncertain. Certainly a recipe for 'Shrewsbury cakes' can be found within the pages of “The Compleat Cook”, a cookbook dating from 1658, and it's known to have been eaten in the White House at the table of President John Quincy Adams no less. And it was referenced in 1700 by the playwright William Congreve in his play “The Way of the World”:
"Why, brother Wilfull of Salop, you may be as short as a Shrewsbury cake, if you please. But I tell you 'tis not modish to know relations in town".
Well, quite.
Congreve aside, they've clearly held some fascination for the literati over the years. In 1840, for example, the writer Richard Harris Barham mentioned them in a poem about ‘Bloudie Jacke of Shrewsberrie' which attributed Shrewsbury cakes to a local baker named Pailin .
“Oh, Pailin! Prince of cake-compounders!” exclaims the author, under the name of Thomas Ingoldsby. “The mouth liquefies at thy very name”.
Whether a Mr. Pailin ever existed appears to be a matter of debate, though I did come across a plaque near my guest house stating "This shop occupies the site of a building where Palin first made the unique Shrewsbury cakes to his original recipe in the year 1760”, followed by Ingoldsby's liquifying mouth allusion of 1840. Local manufacture ceased during the Second World War due to the butter shortage and today the crisp and buttery biscuit bearing the town's name is manufactured, as far as I can tell, everywhere but Shrewsbury.
One town where you will find the Shrewsbury biscuit in full production is the Indian city of Pune, whose love affair with this quintessentially English biscuit began in the days of the Raj when the British instructed the local populace in English home baking to ensure that their ladies always had something light and trifling to offer their guests at tea. The locals quickly developed a taste for them and today people apparently visit Pune from far and wide to buy Shrewsbury biscuits, giving them as 'presents from Pune' in the same way that we give sticks of Blackpool rock.
 |
| Another morning, another bus queue... |
I board my turquoise and cream Arriva bus for Oswestry and discover that it has no fewer than 6 CCTV cameras dotted around the inside but, tellingly, no escape hatch in the roof. So in the event that I’m attacked by some biscuit-crazed passenger and unable to make my hurried escape through the roof, at least it will all be captured on video for posterity, with someone no doubt back at the depot who will helpfully upload the whole thing to YouTube. Lol.
Out of Shrewsbury and we are onto the A5 again before diving back into the surrounding countryside. It's beautiful around here, soft and green, yet despite it’s obvious English-ness it also feels oddly remote in the same way that Cornwall felt remote. It's peculiar but actually I rather like it.
The horizon ahead is lined with bumps and mountains which I assume in my usual ill-informed and faintly romantic way to be the Welsh Border, though there’s no reason why they couldn’t be in England (they were). As we approach Oswestry, the hills become clearer and appear to stand squarely across our path. It really feels like we're entering a border town, which of course we are. There’s an ancient hill fort clearly visible from the road which reinforces the impression of this being a land of bloody skirmishes and lawlessness.
It's a curious name – Oswestry - and a tricky one to say. It is derived, I'm told, from the name given to a tree which had once contained the dismembered limb of a dead Anglo Saxon king. Well, I suppose you have to name a town after something.
The story goes that King Penda of Mercia and King Oswald of Northumbria met in battle here in 642 BC, with the victory eventually going to Penda's forces. However, Penda was not entirely satisfied with simply winning and decided to celebrate his victory by chopping off some of Oswald’s vital bits as he lay bleeding on the ground. Eventually, having thoroughly dismembered poor Oswald, he lost interest and wandered off leaving a eagle which was perched in a nearby tree to nonchalantly fly down and grab one of Oswald’s decapitated arms which it then carried back to its tree.
In time, miracles began to be associated with that tree and rather conveniently this seems to have coincided with a local desire to declare poor Oswald a martyr and a saint. So the area began to be known as ‘St Oswald’s Tree’, and it is from this that the slightly mangled name of Oswestry was derived. Actually, I heard people on the bus call this place ‘Oztree’ so it looks like the name might still be evolving.
 |
| The market, Oswestry |
Oswestry’s proximity to the Welsh border has meant that the town has changed hands fairly regularly over the years, something reflected in the noticeable mix of English and Welsh street names around the town. At one time, Oswestry was also known as Pentrepoeth or 'hot town', not because of its climate or the attractiveness of its local women but because of the Welsh habit of burning the place to the ground.
From Oswestry the road – or, more accurately, the bus - leads me over the border into Wales to Crick, a village which exudes a glorious aroma thanks to its nearby chocolate factory. It's real glory lies just behind the village, however.
Ever since leaving Watford I’ve been aware that I've been making my way up a well-trodden path. The main roads and motorways, the West Coast mainline, even the canals all seem to have been pointing in the same direction - the West Midlands, economic powerhouse of 19th century Britain. Yet the road doesn't end there. I joined it yesterday on the way from Telford to Shrewsbury, and this morning it took me to Oswestry, and then to Chirk. It keeps cropping up. Where on earth is it going?
In fact, much of the route of today's A5 would probably have been familiar to the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth the First because this road had a serious government function. It provided a vital connection between the Royal Court and England's colony in Ireland where, for the sake of government, there needed to be regular contact. There were laws to be communicated, soldiers to be despatched, sometimes hurriedly, and obviously taxes to be collected.
Yet as I described earlier, even up to the middle of the 18th century travel in Britain over any distance was not for the faint-hearted. Roads were often informal affairs prone to disappearing into sucking quagmires for eight or nine months of the year. Anyone contemplating a long journey could generally count on being in transit, and in some discomfort, for a good many days. At three days in length, the journey from Dublin to London via Holyhead was a case in point. This presented the Crown with a serious problem.
Any government official unlucky enough to be summoned from Dublin to London faced a real endurance test. The Irish Sea, for example, is not generally renowned for its placidness, but assuming he survived the crossing he would then be forced to land at Holyhead not at a pier but onto sea-washed rocks. He then faced a journey of 24 miles across Anglesey where there were no roads, to arrive bruised and bad-tempered at the Menai Straits. Here he would transfer to an open boat which, if the weather was bad, could be swept for miles up or down this fast-moving and dangerous channel. Then came the roads of North Wales which were rough, steep, narrow and perilous. In winter they were almost impassable. Forget stage coaches – at the beginning of the 19th century, the only regular traffic between Shrewsbury and Bangor was a small cart which travelled between the two once a week.
Improvements were desperately needed, so in a bid to shorten the 41-hour journey the government recruited Thomas Telford to carry out improvements. Telford had a formidable reputation as an engineer and a master builder of bridges and canals and he would have been familiar with parts of this route from his spell as surveyor for the County of Shropshire. Telford was tasked with improving the whole London-Holyhead road, though most of his work would centre on the difficult section between Shrewsbury and Holyhead which he shortened and built as far as possible on the level.
 |
| Chirk's canal tunnel, with aqueduct beyond |
It's no surprise that he chose to take his new road through Chirk as he knew this place well from a previous project, the construction of the Ellesmere Canal linking the ironworks and collieries of Wrexham with the Mersey. His major challenge here was to carry his canal across some of the deepest valleys in the Welsh borders, a task which at Chirk saw him create an impressive 10 span aqueduct which lifts the canal across the 700 foot-wide valley of the River Ceriog. It's a stirring piece of architecture which today offers bargees and walkers one of the finest views in the borders.
No less stunning is Telford's 420m long canal tunnel at the northern end of the aqueduct. This was the first tunnel in Britain to have its own towpath and, as I'm here, I rashly decide to walk through it. It's a decision I might not have taken if I'd realised that the tunnel is completely unlit. Not one for the faint-hearted.
From Chirk I take the Bryn Melyn minibus to Llangollen. I've said goodbye to the mighty Arriva for now and I'm travelling on a service operated by a small, local firm who runs a handful of public bus services, some school services and a small fleet of coaches.
 |
| The bus to Llangollen |
Rural bus services such as this have been taking people into their nearby towns on market day, to the cinema, to doctor's appointments or to school or college, for almost a century. Few are serious money-makers which is why most of the big boys in the bus industry have stayed away, but they have always played a crucial role of the social structure of the countryside.
Services like these have been in decline since the 1950's though, partly due to increasing car ownership and partly to the mechanisation of post-war agriculture which has required far fewer people to work the land. This has lead to a sharp drop in the rural working population who were generally a rural bus service's primary source of income.
The need for a local bus remains, however, so services like this one take advantage of subsidies offered by local councils committed to maintaining a vital and irreplaceable life line.
We plunge ever more deeply into the hills along the A5 and the hand of Thomas Telford is obvious in the way the road appears to be carefully carved along the hillside to form a level ribbon of tarmac. There are tier upon tier of trees above and a deep valley floor below and the views across the valley are breathtaking. This is big, muscular countryside with a ruggedness you'd expect of a wild mountainous place yet with gentle, sloping meadows and flower-strewn hedgerows. The green of the valley floor and the purple of the heather above makes for a beguiling mix, tough yet pretty, like a prop forward in a Laura Ashley frock, though perhaps a little easier on the eye.
 |
| Llangollen |
Look a little beyond the shop fronts and you will find a perfect little Welsh town with churches and chapels and steep, blue slate roofs. With the valley sides offering a luscious green backdrop, Llangollen really is a very pretty place. Busy, though.
The short ride on the Bryn Melyn bus into Wrexham takes us under a sheer wall of cliffs along the opposite side of the valley. There are glimpses of the road we travelled along earlier – it looks like it's been nailed onto the hillside.
The road levels out, the landscape broadens and I begin struggling with place names. These are helpfully printed in two languages, but I'm finding them difficult enough in just one. For example, there's something about the name Pentre Bycon that makes me think I should be saying it with a French accent, but I'm sure that's not right. And I wouldn't even attempt to ask the driver to drop me off at either Rhosllanerchrugog or Froncysyllte. Still, at least the scenery looks familiar. We are now in the former Wrexham coalfield and with its slag heaps and wedge-shaped colliery winding gear poking up over the rooftops I'm finding it all reminiscent of my own home in South East Northumberland.
We bounce into Wrexham. Llangollen was busy, but Wrexham seems noisier, more aggressive. Or is it just that I've lost the knack of large towns? A quick look around the town centre reveals a place that might have endured hard times before the 2008 recession and has faltered since. Its main shopping street is awash with 'To Let' signs and listless teenagers, there are nightclubs a-plenty, hot food take-away's and taxi offices all hinting at a boisterous but joyless night life. It has the feel of a tough frontier town.
I hurry out of the town centre and find my guest house in a street of once grand Victorian villas. This clearly is where the money used to be - today I'm detecting something of a siege mentality. After a shower, my hosts point me in the direction of a nearby pub which they say serves reasonable food, but their advice seems cautious and unconvincing. I fail to find the pub and have to settle instead for a portion of fish and chips in a chippie which keeps a few Formica-topped tables for the few lonely people like me who need to get in off the street.
NEXT: Wrexham to Liverpool - in which I finally enter 'The North', arrive at a brilliant little transport museum in a beautifully restored tram, and complete my Mersey mission by arriving in Liverpool by river.
Map courtesy of those awfully nice people at Google
Comments
Post a Comment