Town Walk

Stage 1

Start at Barclays Bank (marked * on the map) under the Railway Bridge. This was the original Market Place.

Stage 2

Walk South. The Odfellows (formerly the Star Hotel) was an important coaching inn at the beginning of the 19th century. It had a balcony on the roof from which a lookout was kept for coaches.

A plaque on the building indicates that it was the site of the 18th century home of Humphrey Pitt of Priorslee Hall and was the birthplace in 1760 of the prominent physician Thomas Beddoes who became professor of chemistry at Oxford University.

Stage 3

The road becomes Park Street, named after the mediaeval deer park to the south of Shifnal. This area was formerly The Horse Fair. On the left is a fine range of early 17th century buildings (now Naughty Nell’s).

Naughty Nell's is the nearest building

Stage 4

The Jerningham Arms, on the opposite side of the road, dated 1705, was the chief Shifnal staging post in the 18th and 19th centuries catering for up to eighteen coaches per day.

Stage 5

Idsall House, now part of the Park House Hotel, is a fine William and Mary style building of 1699. For many years it was the home of Shifnal's doctors. A plaque can be seen mounted on its gate.

The Park House Hotel was built around 1830 by Richard Mountford, a local industrialist. He came from Old Swinford near Stourbridge in 1798 to manage and later become one of the owners of Wrockwardine Wood Glassworks. In 1818 Mountford and partners re-opened the Ketley Ironworks which had closed in the depression of 1816. In 1830, Mountford and his partners set up banking in Shifnal in premises at 4 Market Place.

Idsall House

Stage 6

Park Court, now private flats, was originally built in 1817 as Shifnal Workhouse. In 1836 it became the Union Workhouse for Shifnal and fourteen surrounding parishes. It later became part of the Cottage Hospital. The building is on the next corner on the West side of Park Street.

Park Court was once the town's workhouse

Stage 7

Returning on the other side of the road, turn down the footpath at the southern side of Dyas Mews which leads to the Church. (Dyas Mews is set off behind Park Street and is approached from a road opposite Idsall House.)

The footpath crosses Wesley Brook

Stage 8

St Andrew's Church, 12th century and later, built in local red sandstone, is exceptionally large for its present parish. It has a beautiful 14 century east window. The fine hammerbeam roof was built in the 1590s.

Among the interesting features of the church are a memorial to Mary Yates who lived to be 127, marrying her third husband at the age of 92. There is also a memorial to John Moultrie who retired to Aston Hall (just outside Shifnal to the west) after an exciting life developing the New World. He was the first governor of Florida.

Stage 9

Opposite the Church is the Old Vicarage, a fine Georgian house. In the large churchyard is the Sensory Garden, made to commemorate the Millennium.

The Old Vicarage

Stage 10

Returning to the Town via Church Street pass Old Idsall House, which survived the fire of 1591 and from about 1760 was Shifnal's first Post Office. Continuing up Church Street and crossing the Wesley Brook, which runs through the town, there are a number of attractive half-timbered houses, now mostly used as shops.

Old Idsall House next to St Andrew's Church

Stage 11

Go north, under the railway bridge. In front of you is the Millennium Clock and the wide market street of Cheapside and Bradford Street which before 1960 had buildings down the centre. Victoria Road to the left was a new road, cut by Thomas Telford as part of the London-Holyhead coach road.

Stage 12

Walking along Cheapside/Bradford Street, the shops on the left are undistinguished 1960s buildings, but those on the right are more interesting. Wyke Place is 16th century. The long garden plots of these buildings can be seen from the car park at the rear and are the remains of the "burgage" plots dating back to mediaeval times.

Stage 13

Further on, Shrewsbury Road leads off to the left, while the aptly named Broadway carries on towards Newport.

Stage 14

Shrewsbury Road contains buildings mainly of the mid-1800s. The Old Magistrate's Court was formerly an early Baptist Chapel of 1844.

Stage 15

Beyond the 5-ways island at the end of Shrewsbury Road, is the Priorslee Road with Shifnal's Cricket Club grounds on the left. Across the fields on the right is Haughton Hall (now a Hotel) home for generations of the Morton and Brigges families whose monuments can be seen in the Church.

Stage 16

Return via Victoria Road (known as New Road when it was built in about 1820) passing St Mary's Roman Catholic Church built 1860 and Trinity Methodist Church of 1880.

The massive railway viaduct built in 1848 is on the right.

Stage 17

The High Orchard Community Garden is in the North of the town at the end of the “High Street cul-de-sac”.

Thanks are owed to Mr John Brown of the Shifnal Society for presenting this walk

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