Little Wenlock

While you wouldn’t necessarily know it today, the bucolic village of Little Wenlock was once the centre of a thriving district where heavy industry loomed large in the lives of local inhabitants. Many of those hard edges have long since been softened by the green veil of natural reclamation but for more recent evidence of that process in action take a walk to the eastern edge of the village and traverse the Tom Pickering Benchwalks. Besides some of the best views of the Shropshire Hills to be found anywhere in the county, this former surface coal mine also sports tussocky wet grassland, pools, reed-beds and thick hedgerows where a plethora of farmland and water birds can be viewed year round.