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77-515: Pave Lane is a hamlet in Shropshire , England, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) south of Newport , just outside the small village of Chetwynd Aston. It is an affluent area, with numerous large houses, many of which have been built in a Duke of Sutherland -inspired architectural style. Residents have excellent views of the Shropshire countryside and are in close proximity to Lilleshall Hall . There

154-407: A number of options. Groups of pioneers could have set off from the continent in one-off small-scale invasions. Or people might have arrived after a long-term and eclectic mixture of contacts down the continental coast from Denmark to France. Or gatherer-hunters might have traveled by boat to the continent and brought back the animals and plants as the result of slowly developing exchange contacts. There

231-405: A population of 498,073. Telford (155,570), in the east of the county, and Shrewsbury (76,782), in the centre, are the only large towns. Shropshire is otherwise rural, containing market towns such as Oswestry (15,613), Bridgnorth (12,212) and Newport (11,387). For local government purposes the county comprises two unitary authority areas: Shropshire , and Telford and Wrekin . Shropshire

308-817: A possible inspiration for the Robin Hood legend. Parts of Shropshire are inside the ancient Forest of Arden , which was the part if the English Midlands , that in antiquity and into the Early Modern Period was bounded by the Roman roads including to the North by the Watling Street and to the west by Wales. This forest was the Setting of Shakespeare's As You Like It , and that play

385-597: A relatively short space of time, lasting in total only about 2000 years – in human terms little more than 80–100 generations." Between 10,000 BC to 8,000 BC the Neolithic Revolution in the Near East gradually transformed hunter-gathering societies into settled agricultural societies. Similar developments later occurred independently in Mesoamerica , Southeast Asia , Africa , China and India . It

462-477: A trend that would continue into the following Bronze Age . Those constructions are taken to reflect ideological changes, with new ideas about religion, ritual and social hierarchy. The Neolithic people in Europe were not literate and so they left behind no written record that modern historians can study. All that is known about this time period in Europe comes from archaeological investigations. These were begun by

539-441: Is Psmith , a fictional character in a series of Wodehouse's novels. In Oscar Wilde 's The Importance of Being Earnest , Algernon attempts to trick Jack into revealing the location of his country home by inferring he resides in Shropshire. The 1856 plantation literature novel White Acre vs. Black Acre by William M. Burwell features two Shropshire farms acting as an allegory for American slavery – "White Acre Farm" being

616-587: Is a ceremonial county in the West Midlands of England, on the border with Wales . It is bordered by Cheshire to the north, the Welsh county of Wrexham to the north and northwest, Staffordshire to the east, Worcestershire to the southeast, Herefordshire to the south, and the Welsh county of Powys to the west. The largest settlement is Telford , while Shrewsbury is the county town . The county has an area of 3,487 km (1,346 square miles) and

693-509: Is a Bronze Age stone circle set in dramatic moorland on Stapeley Hill . The area was once part of the lands of the Cornovii , which consisted of the modern day counties of Cheshire, Shropshire, north Staffordshire, north Herefordshire, and eastern parts of Powys. This was a tribal Celtic Iron Age kingdom. Their capital in pre- Roman times was probably a hill fort on the Wrekin . There

770-512: Is a large public house in Pave Lane; 'The Fox'. Because of its location on a toll road between Newport and Wolverhampton , which became the A41, the area became the site of many inns and coach houses. By 1767 it had become the site of a small lime works and brick works owned by local landlord Lord Gower , who made Pave Lane the terminus of Donnington Wood Canal . Limestone and coal was sold at

847-552: Is a legend that one of the caves of Hawkstone Park was the burial ground of King Arthur , and the Arthurian story of the giants Tarquin and Tarquinus is located, or Whittington Castle and linked to the Holy Grail since the 13th century. Old Oswestry has been identified as a possible home of Guinevere. Ludlow Castle site features heavily in the folk-story of Fulk FitzWarin , outlawed Lord of Whittington, Shropshire and

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924-540: Is a much more labour-intensive way of life than that of hunter-gatherers. It would have involved deforesting an area, digging and tilling the soil, storing seeds, and then guarding the growing crops from other animal species before eventually harvesting them. In the cases of grains, the crop produced then has to be processed to make it edible, including grinding, milling and cooking. All of that involves far more preparation and work than either hunting or gathering. The Neolithic agriculturalists deforested areas of woodland in

1001-717: Is acknowledged to potentially be a cultural monument to Sir Rowland Hill , a prominent Tudor statesman and publisher of the Geneva Bible from the county. Shropshire was the original seat of prominence of the Cotton family who held the Cotton Library before it was taken to found the British Library. Shrewsbury Abbey features in The Cadfael Chronicles ; Brother Cadfael is a member of

1078-546: Is also referred to in the same play (Act II, scene ii). There is a tradition that the Stanley monuments in St Bartholomew's Church, Tong are the work of Shakespeare. William Wycherley was born at Clive near Shrewsbury, although his birthplace has been said to be Trench Farm to the north near Wem later the birthplace of another writer, John Ireland , who was said to have been adopted by Wycherley's widow following

1155-606: Is an important Iron Age Hill fort at Old Oswestry earthworks, this has been linked to where King Arthur’s Guinevere was born and called "the Stonehenge of the Iron Age." According to tradition, Caracticus made his last stand against the Romans in Shropshire. Ptolemy 's 2nd century Geography names one of their towns as being Viroconium Cornoviorum ( Wroxeter ), which became their capital under Roman rule and one of

1232-474: Is believed the area of Shrewsbury was settled in the 5th century by refugees from the nearby Roman City of Viroconium Cornoviorum , most physical evidence dates from the 7th century. Oswestry saw conflict in the early mediaeval period and is reputed to be the place of death of Oswald of Northumbria in 641 or 642 CE. Oswald was later regarded as a saint, with Bede saying that the spot where he died came to be associated with miracles , and people took dirt from

1309-585: Is generally flat in the north and hilly in the south. The Shropshire Hills AONB covers about a quarter of the county, including the Wrekin , Clee Hills , Stiperstones , the Long Mynd , and Wenlock Edge . Part of the Fenn's, Whixall and Bettisfield Mosses National Nature Reserve , which extends into Wales, occupies the low-lying north west of the county. The county's major river is the Severn , which enters from

1386-555: Is no answer to this puzzle, which is all the more intriguing since the earliest evidence for farming in the British Isles comes from Ireland and probably the Isle of Man, and not from southern Britain. The reason for switching from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle has been widely debated by archaeologists and anthropologists. Ethnographic studies of farming societies who use basic stone tools and crops have shown that it

1463-541: Is one of remarkable changes in landscapes, societies and technologies, which changed a wild, forested world, to one of orderly agricultural production and settled communities on the brink of socially complex 'civilization'. It was a period that saw the arrival of new ideas and domesticated plants and animals, perhaps new communities, and the transformation of the native peoples of Britain. The Neolithic opened an entirely new episode in human history. It took place in Britain over

1540-577: Is still debated, with some evidence placing the development of agriculture as early as 12,500 BC. The idea of agriculture subsequently spread from the Levant into Europe and was adopted by hunter-gathering societies in what is now Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and across the Mediterranean and eventually reached north-western Europe and the British Isles. Until recently, archaeologists debated whether

1617-629: The English Civil War Shropshire was Royalist , and Charles II fled through the county—famously hiding in an oak tree —after his final defeat at the Battle of Worcester . The area around Coalbrookdale is regarded as one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site . Evidence of Neolithic occupation of a religious form dating back before 2,000 BC,

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1694-596: The Indo-European family, it is not known what language the early farming people spoke. The Neolithic also saw the construction of a wide variety of monuments in the landscape, many of which were megalithic in nature. The earliest of them are the chambered tombs of the Early Neolithic, but in the Late Neolithic, this form of monumentalization was replaced by the construction of stone circles ,

1771-666: The Mesolithic . During the early part of that period, Britain was still attached by the landmass of Doggerland to the rest of Continental Europe. The archaeologist and prehistorian Caroline Malone noted that during the Late Mesolithic, the British Isles were something of a "technological backwater" in European terms and were still living as a hunter-gatherer society though most of Southern Europe had already taken up agriculture and sedentary living. "The Neolithic period

1848-717: The Middle East . Until then, during the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, the island's inhabitants had been hunter-gatherers , and the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one did not occur all at once. There is also some evidence of different agricultural and hunter-gatherer groups within the British Isles meeting and trading with one another in the early part of the Neolithic, with some hunter-gatherer sites showing evidence of more complex, Neolithic technologies. Archaeologists disagree about whether

1925-593: The Norman conquest in 1066, major estates in Shropshire were granted to Normans, including Roger de Montgomerie and later his son Robert de Bellême , who ordered significant constructions, particularly in Shrewsbury, the town of which he was Earl . Many defensive castles were built at this time across the county to defend against the Welsh and enable effective control of the region, including Ludlow Castle and Shrewsbury Castle . The western frontier with Wales

2002-587: The Polden Hills with Westhay Mears, a length which ran for over a kilometre. Being agriculturalists, the Neolithic peoples of the British Isles grew cereal grains such as wheat and barley , which therefore played a part in their diet. Nonetheless, they were supplemented at times with wild undomesticated plant foods such as hazelnuts . There is also evidence that grapes had been consumed in Neolithic Wessex, based upon charred pips found at

2079-531: The abolitionist Northern United States, and "Black Acre Farm" being the slaveholding Southern United States. The angel Aziraphale , a principal character in Good Omens , was credited with designing Shropshire by Terry Pratchett . In the novel Howards End , Mr. Wilcox's daughter gets married in Shropshire. Part of the novel is set near Clun . Shropshire was the native county and rural seat of power of Sir Rowland Hill , who coordinated and published

2156-407: The antiquarians of the 18th century and intensified in the 19th century during which John Lubbock coined the term "Neolithic". In the 20th and the 21st centuries, further excavation and synthesis went ahead, dominated by figures like V. Gordon Childe , Stuart Piggott , Julian Thomas and Richard Bradley . The period that preceded the Neolithic in the British Isles is known by archaeologists as

2233-661: The 1560 Geneva Bible . This important Bible was the senior Bible of English Protestantism for the early decades of the Elizabethan Religious Settlement . Prior to the Reformation , there are accounts of major festivals in the county. The "first flowerings of English drama" in the Tudor period are considered to be in the town, according to the 18th century Poet laureate and scholar Thomas Warton . Whitsuntide and mystery plays were performed in

2310-495: The Balkans along the Mediterranean coast. The arrival of farming populations led to the almost-complete replacement of the native Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the British Isles, who did not experience a genetic resurgence in the succeeding centuries. The 2003 discovery of the Ness of Brodgar site has presented an example of a highly-sophisticated and possibly-religious complex in the British Isles dating from around 3500 BC, before

2387-536: The British Isles along with or roughly concurrent to the introduction of farming. A widely-held theory amongst archaeologists is that those megalithic tombs were intentionally made to resemble the long timber houses, which had been constructed by Neolithic farming peoples in the Danube basin from circa 4800 BC. As the historian Ronald Hutton related, "There is no doubt that these great tombs, far more impressive than would be required of mere repositories for bones, were

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2464-520: The British Isles appear to have been built between 4000 and 3200 BC, a time period that the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson notes means that tomb building was "a relatively short-lived fashion in archaeological terms". Amongst the most notable of these chambered tombs are those clustered around the Brú na Bóinne complex in County Meath , eastern Ireland: they include Newgrange , Knowth and Dowth ,

2541-591: The British Isles to use the cleared land for farming. Notable examples of forest clearance occurred around 5000 BCE in Broome Heath in East Anglia , on the North Yorkshire Moors and also on Dartmoor . Such clearances were performed not only with the use of stone axes but also through ring barking and burning, with the last two likely having been more effective. Nonetheless, in many areas,

2618-517: The British Neolithic, the term "Neolithic" had been broadened to "include sedentary village life, cereal agriculture, stock rearing, and ceramics, all assumed characteristic of immigrant agriculturalists". In the 1960s, a number of British and American archaeologists began taking a new approach to their discipline by emphasising their belief that through the rigorous use of the scientific method , they could obtain objective knowledge about

2695-473: The English fantasy writer. In Susanna Clarke 's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), Jonathan Strange is from the county, and some parts of the book are set there. Another fictional character from Shropshire is Mr Grindley, from Charles Dickens ' Bleak House . P. G. Wodehouse 's fictional Blandings Castle , the ancestral home of Lord Emsworth , is located in Shropshire. Also from Shropshire

2772-603: The High Medieval period the Shropshire area influenced important poetry: the poet William Langland , writer of Piers Plowman , was born in Cleobury Mortimer , and the 14th-century alliterative poem St Erkenwald is written in a local dialect. The only copy of the ancient poem 'Life and Death' was also found in Shropshire. In this period the county was also associated in divers places and ways with Arthurian legends, for instance at Hawkstone, where there

2849-702: The Lichfield diocese. The county was a central part of the Welsh Marches during the medieval period and was often embroiled in the power struggles between powerful Marcher Lords , the Earls of March and successive monarchs. From 1457, King Henry VI created for his son, Prince Edward , a Council to rule Wales and the Marches, Cheshire , and Cornwall , which became the Council of the Marches. Shropshire

2926-612: The Lower Rhine area. Beakers arrived in Britain around 2500 BC, with migrations of Yamnaya -related people, resulting in a nearly-total turnover of the British population. The study argues that more than 90% of Britain's Neolithic gene pool was replaced with the coming of the Beaker people. The Neolithic is largely categorised by the introduction of farming to Britain from Continental Europe from where it had originally come from

3003-534: The Mesolithic Natufian culture of the Levant, which showed signs that would later lead to the actual domestication and farming of crops. Archaeologists believe that the Levantine peoples subsequently developed agriculture in response to a rise in their population levels that could not be fed by the finite food resources that hunting and gathering could provide. The time period in which this happened

3080-557: The Mesolithic period, the inhabitants of the British Isles had been hunter-gatherers. Around 4000 BC, migrants began arriving from Central Europe . These migrants brought new ideas, leading to a radical transformation of society and landscape that has been called the Neolithic Revolution . The Neolithic period in the British Isles was characterised by the adoption of agriculture and sedentary living . To make room for

3157-488: The Neolithic Revolution was brought to the British Isles through adoption by natives or by migrating groups of Continental Europeans who settled there. A 2019 study found that the Neolithic farmers of the British Isles had entered the region through a mass migration c. 4100 BC. They were closely related to Neolithic peoples of Iberia, which implies that they were descended from agriculturalists who had moved westwards from

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3234-680: The archaeological record although they are rare and have usually been uncovered only when they were in the vicinity of the more substantial Neolithic stone monuments. The Early and the Middle Neolithic also saw the construction of large megalithic tombs across the British Isles. Because they housed the bodies of the dead, those tombs have typically been considered by archaeologists to be a possible indication of ancestor veneration by those who constructed them. Such Neolithic tombs are common across much of Western Europe , from Iberia to Scandinavia , and they were therefore likely brought to

3311-474: The centres of ritual activity in the early Neolithic: they were shrines as well as mausoleums. For some reason, the success of farming and the veneration of ancestral and more recent bones had become bound up together in the minds of the people". Although there are disputed radiocarbon dates indicating that the chambered tomb at Carrowmore in Ireland dates to circa 5000 BCE, the majority of such monuments in

3388-515: The community at the Abbey. The poet A. E. Housman used Shropshire as the setting for many of the poems in his first book, A Shropshire Lad . Moreover, many of Malcolm Saville 's children's books are set in Shropshire. Additionally, D. H. Lawrence 's novella, St. Mawr , is partially set in the Stiperstones area of South Shropshire . The early 20th century novelist and poet Mary Webb

3465-489: The death of Ireland's parents. The playwright George Farquhar 's 1706 play The Recruiting Officer is set in Shrewsbury. The "father of English ballet", as well as the originator of pantomime, John Weaver , developed his art in Shrewsbury. A second generation dancing master in the town, he founded English ballet, founded pantomime, and wrote on the philosophy, theology, statecraft and biology embedded in his era's understating of dance. Later in life he came to publish on

3542-454: The early tenth century, the relics of St Alkmund were translated to Whitchurch, this was also probably the work of Æthelflæd. There is evidence to show that by the beginning of the 900s, Shrewsbury was home to a mint . Archaeological excavations at the site of Shrewsbury castle in 2019 have indicated that the castle itself may have been a fortified site in the time of the Saxons. After

3619-459: The elm leaves to use as animal fodder during the winter and that the trees died after being debarked by domesticated cattle . Nonetheless, as Pearson highlighted, the decline in elm might be due to the elm bark beetle , a parasitic insect that carries with it Dutch elm disease , and evidence for which has been found at West Heath Spa in Hampshire . It is possible that the spread of those beetles

3696-459: The expression of a single, underlying cultural idea". It was in the 17th century AD that scholarly investigation into the surviving Neolithic monuments first began in the British Isles, but at the time, these antiquarian scholars had relatively little understanding of prehistory and were Biblical literalists , who believed that the Earth itself was only around 5000 years old. The first to do so

3773-485: The final stage of the Stone Age and defined this period purely on the technology of the time, when humans had begun using polished stone tools but not yet started making metal tools. Lubbock's terminology was adopted by other archaeologists, but as they gained a greater understanding of later prehistory, it came to cover a wider set of characteristics. By the 20th century, when figures like V. Gordon Childe were working on

3850-607: The first pyramids and contemporary with the city of Uruk . The site is still in early stages of excavation but is expected to yield major contributions to knowledge of the period. "After over a thousand years of early farming, a way of life based on ancestral tombs, forest clearance and settlement expansion came to an end. This was a time of important social changes." From the Beaker culture period onwards, all British individuals had high proportions of Steppe ancestry and were genetically more similar to Beaker-associated people from

3927-628: The first of which was built between 3100 and 2900 BCE. The Late Neolithic also saw the construction of megalithic stone circles. The stone or "lithic" technology of the British Neolithic differed from that of Mesolithic and Palaeolithic Britain. Whereas Mesolithic hunter-gatherer tools were microliths (small, sharp shards of flint), Neolithic agriculturalists used larger lithic tools. Typically, they included axes , made out of either flint or hard igneous rock hafted on to wooden handles. While some of them were evidently used for chopping wood and other practical purposes, there are some axe heads from

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4004-518: The forests had regrown within a few centuries, including at Ballysculion, Ballynagilly, Beaghmore and the Somerset Levels . Between 4300 and 3250 BCE, there was a widespread decline in the number of elm trees across Britain, with millions of them disappearing from the archaeological record, and archaeologists have in some cases attributed that to the arrival of Neolithic farmers. For instance, it has been suggested that farmers collected all

4081-658: The founding years of Shrewsbury School under Thomas Ashton ; they attracted the attention of Queen Elizabeth I . Later this was expressed in the many arbours built in Shrewsbury for that town's particular tradition of pageantry and performance. Shakespeare memorialised the Battle of Shrewsbury in Henry IV, Part 1 , in Acts IV (Scenes and 3) and V (Scenes 1-5). The arrest of Buckingham referred to in Richard III ( Act IV, scene iv) happened near Wem. Ludlow castle

4158-441: The human past. In doing so, they forged the theoretical school of processual archaeology . The processual archaeologists took a particular interest in the ecological impact on human society, and in doing so, the definition of "Neolithic" was "narrowed again to refer just to the agricultural mode of subsistence". In the late 1980s, processualism began to come under increasing criticism by a new wave of archaeologists, who believed in

4235-683: The largest settlements in Britain. After the Roman occupation of Britain ended in the 5th century, the Shropshire area was in the eastern part of the Welsh Kingdom of Powys ; known in Welsh poetry as the Paradise of Powys . As 'Caer Guricon' it is a possible Shrewsbury was the site of the seat of the Kingdom of Powys in the Early Middle Ages. This would date establishment of the town to the 500s CE under Brochwel Ysgithrog . It

4312-495: The most productive areas, where the soils were more fertile, namely around the Boyne , Orkney , eastern Scotland, Anglesey , the upper Thames , Wessex , Essex , Yorkshire and the river valleys of The Wash . Those areas saw an intensification of agricultural production and larger settlements. The Neolithic houses of the British Isles were typically rectangular and made out of wood and so none had survived to this day. Nonetheless, foundations of such buildings have been found in

4389-411: The new farmland, the early agricultural communities undertook mass deforestation across the islands, which dramatically and permanently transformed the landscape. At the same time, new types of stone tools requiring more skill began to be produced, and new technologies included polishing. Although the earliest indisputably-acknowledged languages spoken in the British Isles belonged to the Celtic branch of

4466-410: The period that appear never to have been used, some being too fragile to have been used in any case. The latter axes most likely had a decorative or ceremonial function. Neolithic Britons were capable of building a variety of different wooden constructions. For instance, in the marshland of the Somerset Levels in south-western Britain, a wooden trackway was built in the winter of 3807 BC and connected

4543-456: The remains of the city of Viroconium Cornoviorum date from the Roman period. During the Anglo-Saxon era the area was part of Mercia . During the High Middle Ages the county was part of the Welsh Marches , the border region between Wales and England; from 1472 to 1689 Ludlow was the seat of the Council of Wales and the Marches , which administered justice in Wales and Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. During

4620-418: The site of Hambledon Hill. They may have been imported from Continental Europe , or they might have been grown on British soil, as the climate was warmer than that of the early 21st century. As the archaeologist John C. Barrett noted, "There never was a single body of beliefs which characterise 'neolithic religion'... The variety of practices attested by [the various Neolithic] monuments cannot be explained as

4697-421: The site, which led to a hole being dug as deep as a man's height. King Offa of Mercia annexed the entirety of Shropshire over the course of the 8th century from Powys, with Shrewsbury captured in 778, with two dykes built to defend, or at least demarcate it from the Welsh. King Offa converted the palace of the rulers of Powys into his first church, dedicated to St Chad (a foundation that still survives in

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4774-408: The subject of dance, which he located in a wider understanding of his culture as representing a component of Ptolemaic harmony and an earnest part of the statecraft of his time. The first known architectural project of Inigo Jones is the Cotton monument in the Church of St Chad, Norton-in-Hales . There are a number of important buildings in the county. The world's first iron-framed building

4851-467: The town and operated on that initial site for over 1000 years, moving in 1792). In later centuries, Vikings repeatedly invaded and fortresses were built at Bridgnorth (912) and Chirbury (913). In 914, Æthelflæd , Lady of the Mercians, fortified Shrewsbury, along with two other fortresses, at Scergeat (a currently unknown location) and Weardbyrig , Viking rides from the north traveling south were reaching Bridgnorth at this time (910CE). In

4928-425: The transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural society was gradual, over a period of centuries, or rapid, accomplished within a century or two. The process of the introduction of agriculture is still not fully understood, and as the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson noted: There is no doubt that domesticated animals and plants had to be carried by boat from the continent of Europe to the British Isles. There are

5005-402: The weather forecaster, lived from childhood at Pave Lane until after leaving school, in Yew Tree Manor a 17th-century brick house used as an inn until their parents bought and renovated it for use as the family home. It appears on Ordnance Survey maps as Yew Tree Manor. Shropshire Shropshire ( / ˈ ʃ r ɒ p ʃ ər , - ʃ ɪər / ; historically Salop and abbreviated Shrops )

5082-400: The west and forms a wide, flat valley before exiting into Worcestershire south of Bridgnorth. The village of Edgmond , near Newport , is the location of the lowest recorded temperature in England and Wales. There is evidence of Neolithic and Bronze Age human occupation in Shropshire, including the Shropshire bulla pendant. The hillfort at Old Oswestry dates from the Iron Age , and

5159-459: The wharf at Pave Street and supplied the growing town of Newport with coal. The rise of railways and carriages meant the canal went into decline and the Pave Lane stretch of the canal closed in 1882; the canal has since been filled in. The A41 road no longer runs through Pave Lane, instead it now passes on a new alignment just to the east of Pave Lane and Chetwynd Aston. Leader of the Labour Party , Jeremy Corbyn , and his brother Piers Corbyn ,

5236-423: Was a Royalist stronghold, under the command of Sir Francis Ottley . In the autumn of 1642, Charles I had a temporary capital at Shrewsbury, though he immediately moved to Oxford after the events of the Battle of Wem . Prince Rupert established his headquarters in the town on 18 February 1644, being welcomed by Shrewsbury's aldermen. Much Wenlock was the birthplace of the modern Olympic movement. In

5313-467: Was born in Shropshire and lived most of her life there, and all her novels are set there, most notably Precious Bane , with its powerful evocation of the Shropshire countryside. A school in Pontesbury bears her name. Shropshire is widely believed to have been an influence for J. R. R. Tolkien 's landscape of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings . Specifically, the Wrekin (as The Lonely Mountain) and Ellesmere (as Laketown) are said to have inspired

5390-461: Was built in Shrewsbury at the Flaxmill Maltings : the techniques pioneered in that building were necessary preconditions for skyscrapers . Nash and Repton were active at Attingham Park . A rare Anglo-Saxon hall, which was a high status building from the Anglo Saxon period, and possibly a feasting hall or palace, was excavated at nearby Attingham in 2018; the dating window is between 400 AD and 1066. Neolithic British Isles During

5467-490: Was coincidental although the hypothesis has also been suggested that farmers intentionally spread the beetles so that they destroyed the elm forests to provide more deforested land for farming. Meanwhile, from around 3500 to 3300 BCE, many of those deforested areas began to see reforestation and mass tree regrowth, indicating that human activity had retreated from those areas. Around the period between 3500 and 3300 BC, agricultural communities had begun centring themselves upon

5544-553: Was discovered in 2017 in the grounds of a church, the medieval Church of the Holy Fathers in Sutton , Shrewsbury, making it Britain's oldest place of worship. The Shropshire bulla ("bulla" is Medieval Latin for "a round seal", Classical Latin for "bubble, blob", plural bullae), also known as the Shropshire sun pendant, is a Late Bronze Age gold pendant found by a metal detectorist in 2018 in Shropshire. At Mitchel's Fold there

5621-549: Was governed via this council for several centuries. According to historian John Davies , at its peak under Sir Henry Sidney and for a period thereafter the Council: represented a remarkable experiment in regional government. It administered the law cheaply and rapidly; it dealt with up to twenty cases a day and George Owen stated that the 'oppressed poor' flocked to it. During the English Civil War , Shropshire

5698-766: Was in the Near East that the "most important developments in early farming" occurred in the Levant and the Fertile Crescent , which stretched through what are now parts of Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Jordan , Turkey , Iran and Iraq , areas that already had rich ecological variation, which was being exploited by hunter-gatherers in the Late Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic periods. Early signs of these hunter-gatherers beginning to harvest, manipulate and grow various food plants have been identified in

5775-572: Was not finally determined until the 14th century. Also in this period, a number of religious foundations were formed, the county largely falling at this time under the Diocese of Hereford and that of Coventry and Lichfield . Some parishes in the north-west of the county in later times fell under the Diocese of St. Asaph until the disestablishment of the Church in Wales in 1920, when they were ceded to

5852-429: Was picked up by another antiquarian in the following century, William Stukeley (1687–1765), who had studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge before he became a professional doctor. The term "Neolithic" was first coined by the archaeologist John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury , in his 1865 book Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages . He used it to refer to

5929-503: Was the antiquary and writer John Aubrey (1626–1697), who had been born into a wealthy gentry family before he went on to study at Trinity College, Oxford , until his education was disrupted by the outbreak of the English Civil War between Royalist and Parliamentarian forces. He recorded his accounts of the megalithic monuments in a book, the Monumenta Britannica , but it remained unpublished. Nonetheless, Aubrey's work

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