Shrewsbury

I have many reasons for visiting Shrewsbury, but they’re not wildly sensible? I’ve read & re-read a bunch of novels set in & around the town, and there’s a NZ biscuit named after it.

If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you should know better than to think I’m going to have a sensible reason for doing most of the things that I do.

I took the train from Glasgow to Shrewsbury, which involved a change at Manchester Piccadilly, so I took the opportunity to at least leave the station, since I had some time.

The train to Shrewsbury was delayed, which I think is the first significantly delayed train of this trip. They made an announcement at around 15 minutes after departure time, letting us all know that the train was delayed, but my impression is that we all knew that already because we understand how time works. It eventually turned up, but wasn’t as relaxing a trip for me as I was hoping due to some confusing directions about carriages; I think the goal was to say that people should be in certain carriages for certain destinations because of short platforms, but it sounded like the train would split at some point, and I couldn’t figure out which bit I needed to be in. The mixed Welsh/English displays also meant that it took a really long time to get to the information I needed as they flipped through screens.

Later experience has shown that Transport for Wales may just be shit-useless at communicating train splits, because the same situation happened leaving Shrewsbury, and it took the conductor spotting my destination to tell me I was in the wrong carriage, despite all the signage and announcements.

This hotel is a classic British small one, I think; Rooms off a central staircase, bathrooms retrofitted at some point, and from the outside you could mistake it for a terraced house because the reception is in the bar next door. It’s nice enough, if a bit small, and I suspect the drains may have some issues because the bathroom has a hint of the same smell as the nearby river.

By the way, is the thing with the little galleries of pictures working OK for you all?

I started my full day in Shrewsbury by heading in the general direction of the English Bridge & the Abbey (technically I started it with breakfast at the pub next door because it’s included in the room price. this also involved trying to give a summary of the web serial novel Dungeon Life to the lady working there when she asked what I was reading ), and after a while I found the way. Didn’t get lost, so much as I didn’t care much about a direct route, so there was an amount of “must be roughly this way” and “I wonder where this path goes” going on.

Having found the abbey, I did notice the bits which indicated that stuff had been removed, but didn’t know why; It looks like it used to be longer & wider, and given the position of roads either side I was really hoping that it wasn’t cut down to make room. The tour/guide later in the day explained it as the result of the abbey being carved up/sold off by Henry VIII – What’s left is the bit they got to keep.

The next bit was wandering around the loop in the river to the Welsh Bridge (there’s a path/esplanade, and also a coffee shop in a park at one point, which I think is where the tree of life mural was). Right beside the bridge was the dock for a river tour, leaving every hour, so I did that. Wasn’t the youngest person on the boat, but close to it?

It’s an interesting way to see a place, and there was commentary on the way back (it went to the English Bridge and back); Commentary content was interesting, if a bit scattershot because it was based on what you could see, so there was a lot of jumping between centuries. The delivery was odd; Almost every ‘paragraph’ (for want of a better word to describe the sections of information) had the last few words slowed down & emphasised, like he thought he was delivering a punchline.

and of course the comments about government funding, costs to attend the various schools, and about how a person ended their days in an asylum because of their wife+children

Wandered back through the town (found a market hall by accident) to get to the abbey. There’s no tour, as such, but they do have some volunteers who give you a basic introduction & a self-guided tour map of the things you’ll see.

Shrewsbury gets flooding pretty regularly, from what they said on the boat tour, and you can see those flood level indicators around by the river showing how high the bigger ones were. Having seen that, the photo of people boating in the church was still a surprise, but it is very flat around there.

Another slightly odd thing was discovering that something from the Cadfael novels that I’d assumed was fictional is in fact a real thing; The little Welsh Saint.

That’s about it for the noteworthy bits of my trip to Shrewsbury. I did visit the outside of the castle, but it was late enough in the day that it was closed; I’m kind of castled out at this point, so I don’t really mind?

I did see someone driving in, and having to get presumably their passenger to open & close the bloody great wooden gates for them, which looks just like dealing with a farm gate, only heavier.