Day 32: Soulton Hall

Distance: 18.0 miles
Metar: EGBB 291020Z 33007KT CAVOK 15/06 Q1029
Posting this a day late, on our day off. We had a nice late relaxing big dinner yesterday, and since Dawn doesn't drink wine, I had to drink nearly the entire bottle, and then a coffee with whiskey in it along with dessert, and it was getting late, and, well, anyway, I procrastinated on the blog till today. I was expecting a torrent of angry comments on the delay, and also supporting comments from people who had read yesterday's blog with tears in their eyes. Where are you all?
Yesterday we said goodbye to our friend the Severn River. From Shrewsbury, it turns southwest to its headwaters in the mountains of Wales, and we need to go the other way. From here, our route swings northeast around Manchester and to the south end of the Pennines. From there we head north to Haworth, in West Yorkshire, where we'll have our next rest day - a three day break for Easter.
Other than a few miles at each end, we spent the day on the Shropshire Way. On the map, the Shropshire Way is a dashed green line with green diamonds - very easy to follow. And as the day started out, it was easy to follow on the ground as well, a wide, well travelled path, with signs at every fork. In cool, sunny, morning air, we wound our way though pleasant woods, saying "Morning" to people walking their dogs; it was nice.
We saw on the map that our path took us by the ruins of Haughmond Abbey. We hadn't done any homework, didn't really know what to expect, but there was one of those English Heritage castle icons which often means "impressive". And it was.




English Heritage has built a little gift shop, and put up some sign boards, and installed some benches in the ruin, which is cool. They charge a few pounds to get in, which is also cool. And they surrounded the whole site with barbed wire, and specified that it's only open some hours - not cool. Oh well, it was still really something to walk around and see from outside the fence.




You get a clear birds eye view of the layout, since most of the buildings are just foundations now. One high archway is still intact, and a couple of the buildings. I found out later that the Abbey started around 1100, was given the official abbey stamp of approval in 1155, was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539, and was burned and mostly abandoned a hundred years later during the civil war. Over five hundred years of history in that one sentence!




After the abbey, the Shropshire Way started to get a bit sketchier. I've learned to classify footpaths into three levels. At the top are paths like the Cotswold Way, where the path is easy to see on the ground, it matches up with what's on the map, and there are waymarks on the ground to keep you honest. That's what the Shropshire Way had delivered so far. But now the Way dropped to the middle level. Here, you lose some, often most, waymarks on the ground, and sometimes the path fades a little, but with a bit of map and compass work you can still figure out where the right of way goes, and there you'll find the necessary stiles and bridges so you can make your way. Walking paths at this middle level is slower, since you're stopping all the time to read the map, and since the path is sometimes more of a hackathon through a field than a real path - but this level is gratifying because of how Dawn's map reading skills are rewarded over and over. We made slow but steady progress.




As we so often do, we stopped in a church yard to sit on a bench, put on our bear arms (it was warming up), and have a snack. This is not just a recycled picture of a church from day one, it's the church in the beautiful village of Astley. Every church has something special. This one had freaky stone heads carved into the stone of the tower. Maybe all the churches have them, but for some reason I really noticed them here.




Here's a close up.




We made it to the village of Hadnall just after noon in need of lunch, but the pub was closed. We asked a lady tending her garden if there was anything else, and she pointed us to a restaurant just down the road. It was a little high end for us, with our packs, our boots, and my nylon shorts, but they were quite welcoming and told us they don't stand on ceremony. We sat in the corner of the bar, ordered diet coke (Dawn) and tea (me), and put in food orders for a bagel with mushrooms and tarragon cream, which looked like this




And a quite posh cheese and pickle sandwich




Our waiter came by and started taking my tea. "I'm not done!" I protested. He was very nice, and didn't make fun of me, even though I'm sure I came across as the dumbest git to fall from the turnip truck in the past few months. He was just collecting our drinks to lead us from the bar table to our dining table. The dining room was elegant; we were dressed like bums. To cap it off, my t-shirt was on inside out. The food was really tasty, and fortunately the dining room was empty except for us. To their credit, the folks at the restaurant treated us as if we were dressed to the nines.




After Hadnall, we climbed a couple of hundred feet through the Corbett wood (likely named after Reg) up to the town of Grinshill. Here I am taking a breather on the way up; the bench is chiseled out of the rock along with the date: 1880.




After this, the Shropshire Way went from the middle of my three level footpath scale down to the lowest level. At the lowest level, the waymarks, when they exist at all, go from disks with path names and arrows to things like this.




The terrain and the map begin to diverge. Finally, at the lowest point, following the lovely green line on the map leads you into the middle of a field with no clear exit, like this.




What you do now is look around for some escape to a lane, or someone's yard, or something. We found it at the edge of the field, where we hopped a fence into a school yard. Some kid pointed at us and said "hey, who's that?". We bolted.
After another class three foot path, we finally made it to Soulton Hall. Since we first saw the website, our dream was to stand on the roof of this building and taunt passersby.




But we're happy enough just to stay here. There's been a manor house here since the thirteenth century, or maybe earlier, but the current house wasn't built until the 1550s, when Sir Rowland Hill, who had been Lord Mayor of London, bought the place and remodeled it into an Elizabethan Borg cube.




It's been owned by the same family ever since. Can you see the family resemblance across 460 years to Tim? (who could not find a diplomatic way out of posing for this photo) Tim is Oxford educated, spent a year in Los Angeles considering a law degree, and after all that decided to come home to Soulton Hall to help with the family house and farm. Sir Rowland would be proud!




Our room is in the old part of the house, and the construction is really something. The big (roughly eight by eight) beams are fit together with tongue and groove and dowels. I guess you couldn't just stop by Home Hardware for a bag of nails back then. After centuries of settling, the floors and walls all come together at crazy slanted angles. Some walls are finished with 500 year old plaster parging. I Iike it.
It would be great just to stay here, but we've got to move on. Tomorrow is a short day to Whitchurch. Our plan is to sleep in a little, maybe till 7, then have a late breakfast and be on our way.

Location:Wem,United Kingdom