A Day Packed with History in Shrewsbury

A couple of years ago, when I went up to my step-dad's funeral, it occurred to me that it would be quite easy to have a day out along that railway line up the Welsh border.
Today, I finally managed to get to Shrewsbury.
It was a bit dearer than the trip to Cardiff - £21.70 for the day return from Hereford - but the first bus from Hay got me to the station in nice time to catch the 08.27am train to Holyhead.
My intention was to finally get to see Brother Cadfael's Herb Garden - I'd looked it up online. My mother-in-law was a great Cadfael fan, and we'd always intended to take her, but never got round to it.
First, though, I needed coffee and a snack, which I found at Philpott's, where they do coffee and a Cumberland sausage bap for £2.50. It was such a nice morning, I sat outside.

There are lots of signs throughout the town centre pointing to places of interest, so it was easy to find my way down the hill to the Abbey. After looking round, and visiting St Winifred's shrine (or what remains of it), I asked about the herb garden. "Oh, that's not there any more," the volunteer at the abbey shop said, but helpfully pointed me across the road to the headquarters of the Shropshire Wildlife Trust, and gave me a good map of the town centre.
Over at the Wildlife trust, you can see where the herb garden once was - now the plants have been chosen to demonstrate how to attract beneficial insects to your garden, and so on - but the Abbey buildings are now used as offices and a conference room - and the most impressive doorway to a gift shop in all England! It's a very fine Norman archway. They said they'd been there about fourteen years, so the website is seriously out of date!
They also pointed me in the direction of the museum, if I wanted something Cadfael-related, so back up the hill I went. It's £4.00 to get into the museum, but well worth it. The Roman Gallery has a lot of impressive finds from Wroxeter - and they have a marvellous silver mirror, which must be about a foot across, and beautifully decorated on the back with flowers. It was probably held by a slave girl, being very heavy. It was also interesting to hear the theories about the layout of a prehistoric round house - I forget the name of the Professor of Archaeology, but he thinks that different activities took place in different parts of the hut to mimic a daily cycle (going round from sunrise through the door, cooking and crafts, to the bed platform) and possibly also a birth to death cycle.
Upstairs is the Medieval gallery, in the medieval hall of Vaughan's Mansion, and there is a very impressive four poster bed in the Tudor area. It's also fully accessible - they have a lift to the upper floors. There's also some costume, and Natural History, and a Bronze Age canoe. The cafe has an outdoor courtyard, one wall of which is the Mansion, with lots of interesting blocked up windows and other details.
There was an open air market in the square next to the old Market Hall, where I found the Witch Photographer, who takes photos of local sites of interest, and plays with them. I bought a picture which has a red dragon and a white dragon meeting in the middle over a view of the last winter camp of Hastain the Viking (896AD) at Bridgnorth. He's included an impressive amount of information with the picture, about the Vikings, their battles with the Saxons under Ethelflaeda, Lady of the Mercians, and the founding of Bridgnorth. He had a stall on the Brecon Road, on the way to Hay Festival, a couple of years ago - I remembered being impressed by some of his pictures of castles and dragons then.
It isn't a proper day out unless I sample some local beer, and I found the King's Head near the Welsh Bridge. Not only were they serving Moorhouse's Pride of Pendle (which is not local to Shrewsbury, but I'm not going to pass up the opportunity to have a Lancashire beer when I can), but they are the proud possessors of a 13thC wall painting, which was uncovered when they did renovation work in 1987. Apparently, the original King's Head was further up the hill, and in the 13thC the present site was a chapel. The picture of the Last Supper as a medieval feast is quite clear, and there's a top bit that might be St Mark with his lion, and a bottom bit that might be the Annunciation (there's a very clear dove, anyway). All this in a lovely black and white timber framed building.
Later on, I had a half of Three Tuns stout from Bishop's Castle (I have been to the brewery/pub there, years ago), at the Three Fishes pub, which had lots of CAMRA stickers in the window. Beer in Shrewsbury is noticeably cheaper than it is in Hay....
The Three Fishes is opposite St Alkmund's church, which isn't very interesting internally now, but was founded by Ethelflaeda in around 910AD. There were people picnicking in the churchyard, it was such a lovely sunny day.
Nearby is all that remains of St Chad's after the tower fell down catastrophically - only the Lady Chapel survived - and that hilltop may have been the site of the court of the Princes of Powys, Pengwern, before the Saxons took over the town. There is a newer St Chad's which I didn't get to see (on another visit, perhaps) - that one is a circular Georgian church which is used for a lot of concerts as it's one of the largest halls in Shrewsbury. If I'd known in time, I could have gone to a free lunchtime concert there today.
Then it was a gentle amble back to the railway station.
I could have stayed longer - I had plenty of time in Hereford to do a bit of shopping while I waited for the 4pm bus - and all the transport links worked perfectly.