Dr Roger White is coming to speak to us on October 6th on The Romans In Shropshire. He is one of the county’s leading authorities on Wroxeter and the Romans.

Join us on Thursday 6th October at St Georges and Priorslee Parish Centre, St Georges, TF2 9LJ.

All welcome, but please note for Non-Members of the WHG there is a £2.50 charge. However if you become a member then there is no charge, for membership details see the Membership Information page.

We look forward to seeing you Thursday 6th October.

The talk will describe the two great linear earthworks of the Welsh Marches and will also trace the history and development of dyke systems across the country following the Anglo-Saxon migrations into England.

It will explore the concept and character of Offa’s and Wat’s Dykes, their functions, date and Dark Age political context, the Mercian kings responsible and military campaigns of the 8th – 9th centuries AD.

Join us on Thursday 7th April at St Georges and Priorslee Parish Centre, St Georges.

All welcome, but please note for Non-Members of the WHG there is a £2.50 charge. However if you become a member then there is no charge, for membership details see the Membership Information page.

We look forward to seeing you Thursday 7th April.

Dorothy started by telling us about her connection with Attingham, she has been a volunteer there for many years. She said that to talk about Attingham was to talk about the house and the family as well.

Rowland Hill a Draper did well for himself, so much so that he became the first Protestant Mayor of London. He needed a country property to bolster his new found prosperity. He bought Hawkestone Park. After a few generations a Richard Hill obtained the post of Deputy General Paymaster to the Army. He did very well, though his activities came under scrutiny as did the Paymaster himself. The Paymaster was taken to court but was acquitted.

As a result of this increased income and position Richard decided to expand his country property so he bought the Attingham estate. He died without issue and the estate devolved to a nephew Thomas Harwood.

Thomas Harwood changed his name to Hill. When his father died he inherited money so built himself a nice little property on the Attingham estate, Tern Hall. He then let a nearby property to an Iron master to build a forge, seemingly having no idea what sort of impact this would have on his own property. He promptly moved back to London. He married twice when he died Noel the son of his second wife inherited.

Noel went into politics and supported Pitt, as a result of this was raised to the Peerage as Lord Berwick. He took the name of a small hamlet near Attingham for his title. As a result of this advancement he decided he needed a bigger house in keeping with his title. He employed George Stewart to design and build him one at Attingham.

From the Shrewsbury Road the house is very impressive but in fact is all frontage incorporating Tern Hall, even the cladding is thin like tiles. He saved his money for the interior. Dorothy’s pictures showed plaster mouldings in the drawing and dining rooms. These were similar in both rooms but the roundels which were filled with paintings in the dining room were empty in the drawing room. Did guests only see the dining room? The carpet in the dining room is one of the best in the National Trust Collection, this is fading so that the Trust is now forced to keep the shutters closed and as a result display the room as it was meant to be seen. There is a boudoir which also has a fine 18th century wall paintings.

Up to now it seemed that this family had a series of sensible hard working successful people accumulating wealth now Dorothy told us about what must be their black sheep.

Thomas Noel Hill inherited and set out on the Grand Tour.  He avoided France and Bonaparte and headed for Italy where he spent and spent on paintings, sculpture and ceramics. On his return he had so much that he could not house it.  He needed somewhere to display it he asked John Nash to provide him with a gallery. Nash may have been the pre-eminent designer of his time with imaginative designs, but it seems his workmanship was less so. His scheme for a gallery for this house involved knocking through two rooms and the staircase, leaving a gallery in the middle of the building with no windows. To provide light he cut through the earlier roof and installed a skylight. In doing this he cut through the roof beams leaving the roof partially unsupported.  My Uncle had a saying “It can’t fall down there is nothing holding it up” seems to apply here. The skylight was made of the new ’in’ material cast iron but twelve months after it was finished it leaked when it rained. This was 1805 the leaks were not stopped until the1970s when the National Trust set about installing another skylight over the original.

Thomas Noel had run himself into debt which he was only able to clear by selling the contents of the house.  The sale took 16 days but at the end he was solvent. Just to add to his problems he had taken a wife Sophie De Bouchet. In his forties he had fallen head over heels for this pretty 16 year old courtesan who was already being kept by another. He proposed but she was not keen, but to marry a title and a comfortable income was a better bet than her current situation so she accepted. She was, incidentally, the sister of the notorious Harriot Wilson who tried to blackmail Wellington, among others, when she threatened to publish details of their affair only to receive the reply “Publish and be damned.” They moved to Italy and when he died she was supported with a pension from his younger brother William, the heir.   He went into politics he spent a fortune in election costs, £6000 in pubs alone. He appears to have made a name for himself and was made ambassador to Sardinia. He then went to Naples. This was 1815 and Napoleon’s general Murat and his wife Caroline had just left. He shipped all their furniture back to Attingham. He also used some of his ambassadorial funds to buy himself a very expensive silver dinner service. When his term of office ended he returned to England bringing his silver service with him. He was allowed to keep it, it is rumoured, because Palmerston wanted the place for a nephew. It is now on display in Attingham. William died at 42 with no legitimate heirs so his brother, Richard who had gone into the Church inherited. He was a notorious drinker. He chose to live in Cronkhill, a John Nash house on the estate, Attingham stood empty. The next three Lord’s Berwick chose also to live there as a result it remained a Regency House unchanged by successive wives or wrecked by children.

Thomas 8th Lord Berwick moved in after World War 1 but did not have a lot of cash.  His wife was painted by Sir Gerald Kelly and later in a more modern style by Walter Sikert. This latter was not well received and was rumoured to have ended up in the boiler room, but it seems this is not true.

The house was passed to the National trust in 1947 on the death of the 8th Lord but as the building was being used as an Adult Education College the Trust could do nothing other than maintaining it till 1970, but now it has a new dry skylight.

Dorothy now showed pictures of the work on the roof and skylight and the complex scaffold needed to support the cast iron skylight whilst the new one was fitted, as well as the viewing platform to enable the public to see where their money was being spent.

Brian Savage 

Nigel started his talk by saying that he started kayaking on the Severn for fun but soon his archaeological background took over.  Living at Cross Houses he noticed the island at Cronkhill.  He knew that this was man made as are other islands in the Severn.  They were started when fish traps were built to allow the passage of river traffic. The next noticeable feature to an archaeologist was the bank where the river turned and wore away the side into a cliff, or so it appeared from his seat at almost water level, exposing layers of soil like the section of a dig.  He noticed 2 metres or so of silt laid down by flooding, beneath which was a grey/black organic looking layer which he recognised as the original natural level laid down before the river had cut back to this point. In this exposed material was a piece of an oak tree which on investigation, by a group of what he described as boffins who were looking for projects for students, proved to be Mid Bronze Age, this 3000 year old wood having been preserved by moisture in the soil until being exposed by the river. Further work showed that its felling was part of Bronze Age land clearance.
 
His paddling took him on to the Attingham Estate where the National Trust invited him to check on the remnants of the medieval bridge which had stood over the Tern. In doing this he found the abutment and pillar base and that the former had been repaired with carved stone. This is believed to be from Haughmond Abbey and was done by Sir Rowland Hill.  He cleared a route through the side nettles and this may become a further attraction for walkers to the park.
 
Further up river he found the remains of a fish weir by the dam made by Repton who introduced this to hold back the water to make more picturesque the view towards the house.  He was able to gain experience of this at a later date when the area was flooded and he was able to match Repton’s drawing with a photo through the 1782 bridge.
 
On the subject of fish weirs he says the best preserved are at Preston Boats just behind the Shire Hall where there was a trap or three operating well into 20th century.
 
He was asked to investigate Wroxeter Island but was not able to improve on the current knowledge however he found a row of pieces of Roman pot in the river at low water which Nigel thinks were wasters from a nearby pottery. There is a layer of fine clean clay on top of the Ice Age deposit which he thinks may have been the clay supply for this pottery. He wants to get a local potter to fire some to see if it will match his finds.
 
Nigel talked at some length about how the whole picture changes when the floods occur, the river going back to areas it had previously occupied. He showed a picture of the Abbey with a branch of the Severn now running in front. The Wildlife Trust building is the old Water gate, another picture showed a flooded Kings Head Passage passing over the old town ditch. 
 
The next area he explored were some urban waterways. Shrewsbury revealed the unused Smithfield Quay built for the Meat and Cattle Traders just in time for the railways to handle the trade instead. In Norwich he spotted on the bottom of the Bishop’s Medieval Bridge decorative carved faces seen only from small shallow draft craft.  Bristol, straddling the Avon, proved to be a fine source of culverted waterways. The Avon itself the Frome and the remains of the castle moat, he explored these with another kayak expert and the city’s archaeologist who was very impressed to see the underside of the medieval bridges which were sealed by the Victorian culverting.
 
In the 1930s there had been a crew whose job it was to clear obstructions in these tunnels they were known as the Dead Dog Boat. He told us the famous Rodgers curricle making family were often employed in the recovery of bodies and indeed he too had found the body of an elderly lady reported missing. These rather macabre facts had led him to ponder one of the mysteries of archaeology, what did the Iron Age do with its dead? He thinks like the deposits of knives, swords and other similar items offered to the water gods, they may have put their dead in the river which would account for the lack of human remains from this period. The name Sabrina for the river is apparently pre Roman and appears in several places in N.W.Europe, perhaps the Goddess as well as the river.

Neil started his talk by saying that Shropshire was the second last county to become connected to the National rail network.  Although it was a very advanced county industrially this very advance was the cause of the delay.  The clay industry in Shropshire had been using a wooden rail system since the early 17th century this had developed to an iron L shaped rail with iron wheels. There was as much as 20 miles of this between Coalbrookdale, Horsehay and Ketley area. These were in use up to 1870.
 
The road system was also well developed. Holyhead Road was completed in 1837 and local toll roads connected the area to the railhead in Birmingham.
 
Water was already being well used, the Severn acting like a modern day motorway and canals with tub boats and inclined planes provided easy cheap movement of bulk loads.  These narrow canals were in turn linked to the national waterways via the Birmingham/Newport canal.
 
It was the canal company that financed the introduction of the first railway. In 1846 the Shrewsbury to Birmingham line was floated. This reached Wolverhampton where it connected to the rail system via the Stour Valley route. They started from both ends but it ran into trouble with a tunnel through Oakengates. This took 5 months to complete to connect through to Wellington. This also produced some local oddities. Wellington Station was built with a cross on each gable as its construction was supposed to have disturbed the church. At Wolverhampton the line connected to the GWR line to Birkenhead so passengers arrived at Paddington not Euston.
 
Once the connection was made local lines developed apace, to Madeley, Wellington, Ketley, Lawley and Lightmoor.  LNWR developed the Oakengates, Dawley, Coalport link and GWR the Wellington to Market Drayton line and on to Crewe.
 
These developments had a disastrous effect on the Tolls and Toll Roads, “traffic ceased as if by magic”   
(William Smith) but developed the small towns.  Wellington became the Clapham Junction of East Shropshire, expanding its markets, cattle yards, timber yards and brewing, with lines to Shrewsbury, Market Drayton, Stafford, Wolverhampton and Bishops Castle.
 
This prosperity lasted till the 1950s. The mineral lines to Lilleshall and Granville Colliery were kept open, the latter lasted till 1979.  The Ironbridge Power Station is still supplied but it is doubtful if it will go on past this year. The passenger traffic reduced so much that lines were closing before the Beeching axe fell. The Coalport line was the first to go in 1952, Wenlock in 1962, Severn Valley 1963 and Beeching closed the line to Stafford in 1964.
 
Then came privatisation, we had 2 trains per day one in morning and one evening. We now have two trains to London daily. The only proposed expansion is that of the Telford Steam Co who wish to extend their line to Buildwas.
 
Neil finished by telling us that Cornwall joined the National System after us.