A walk through Benthall Woods

The weather was far too nice Saturday to do anything other than a lovely long walk.  We took ourselves off to the Ironbridge Gorge, near Telford.  We are particularly fond of this section of the River Severn, as it makes its way from Shropshire into North Worcestershire.  On Saturday we decided to create a walk up-river and out of the Gorge.  We parked the car in the cheap car park on the far side of the famous bridge, walked a short distance along the old railway track, then started the climb up the hill-side on the 'Shropshire Way'...

 

 

When we got to the top the views over the Shropshire countryside were worth all the effort.  This is the view back toward Much Wenlock and the beginning of Wenlock Edge...

 

It was lovely to walk on dry paths for a change.....

 

Before long we arrived at Benthall Hall (a National Trust property).  It's a 16th Century House and I'm sure it's very interesting - but National Trust entry prices are a bit steep if you're not members so we 'gave it a miss'...

 

I was more interested in this fascinating little church in the grounds..

It has loads of really quirky features and I was desperate to get a view of the inside....

 

Sadly it was locked (Grrr!).... so we plodded on across the common towards Broseley.

 

Eventually we picked up some sandwiches from a supermarket in Broseley and sat outside the Victorian parish church.  There's a bench in a sheltered corner by the porch and it was a lovely tranquil place to eat some lunch... 

 

After lunch we retraced our steps for a while, until we got back to the woods.  We then decided to follow an alternative path through the old limestone quarries.  There are lots of remains of the old access roads and tramways - which makes navigation through this section a little tricky.  The OS Map seems to bear little relationship to the tracks we found on the ground!

 

Eventually we reached the view point above our starting point in Ironbridge.  From here there were hundreds of steps down to the river bank.  I was glad to be going down this way, rather than up, but the steps were big enough to be something of a killer for our knees!

 

 

Thanks to Jo for my recent award nomination.

 

As you can see from one of the photos - Mark is back safely!

The return journey was a major saga, which culminated in arriving at Birmingham International station just as thousands of teenage girls were leaving the area after the Justin Bieber concert ("Horrific" was the work he used!)

 

I hope that you are all having a good week.

Jx