{"id":30,"date":"2008-11-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=30"},"modified":"2011-01-20T09:55:09","modified_gmt":"2011-01-20T09:55:09","slug":"import30","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/?p=30","title":{"rendered":"Shropshire’s Stiperstones Ridge"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

If you're looking for a bland, impersonal, run-of-the-mill place to base yourself for a walk around the Stiperstones, avoid the Bog Centre like the plague.\"\"<\/p>\n

Its dark stone building – once a back-country schoolroom for the children of Victorian lead miners, now a visitor centre run by mustard-keen local volunteers – can look bleakly forbidding, especially on a murky afternoon of drifting hill mist and low cloud the colour of bruises. But stepping inside, out of the chill and damp, I found a hive of gossip and kitchen clatter, positively buzzing with warmth and character. Not only that, but some of Shropshire's finest home-baked cakes, quite irresistible to the hungry walker, and the greedy one too. I devoured one of each, and I hadn't even set out yet. They were just as good as those I'd tasted on my last visit – maybe even better. Devil's Chocolate, Wild Edric's Tart, Bog Cake: off-kilter names, with a whiff of puckish humour very typical of this out-of-the-way area where demons are said to dance on the hilltops and warlocks to walk abroad when the mist is down on the stones.<\/p>\n

It was a hard job to separate myself from the cake stall and the giant teapot, but I shook the last crumbs of Bog Cake manfully from my beard and got myself out into the open air. The sun looked weakly through the fog, a pale presence more hinted at than seen. A pearly coat of mist lay on the heather of the Stiperstones ridge, where gorse sprigs glistened with trembling spider webs. Walking up the stony path, I stared ahead and upwards for the first glimpse of the Stiperstones themselves, and tried to remember what I knew of these fantastically shaped tors of quartzite – Cranberry Rock, Manstone Rock, the Devil's Chair, Scattered Rock, Shepherd's Rock – that rise from the apex of their ridge like a line of cartoon monster heads.<\/p>\n

Giant pressures brought about by volcanic upheavals some 500 million years ago formed the shining white quartzite of the Stiperstones, long weathered to a cloudy, lichen-blotched grey. The frosts of aeons shattered and sculpted them into pinnacles, towers and canted blocks. The metallic content of the rocks attracts lightning strikes; the elevation of the ridge lures clouds and wild weather. Small wonder that superstitious locals, their skyline view dominated by the storm-bound stones, invested them with demonic force.<\/p>\n

The toothed silhouette of Cranberry Rock loomed out of the mist, and I stopped in its shelter to wipe water droplets off my spectacles. Near here, Slashrags the tailor once outwitted the Devil, "a big Boogebo with a strong sulphurious smell", by bringing Mr Brewster the parson to their midnight rendezvous. Just along the ridge, I came to Manstone Rock, rising from the dark peat to a funnel-shaped top – a chimney down to hell. Here, each winter solstice night, the demon rout of Wild Edric the Saxon commences its mad procession among the Stiperstones; and from this spot at midnight one can see the corpse of Lady Godiva riding her spirit horse – eternal punishment for choosing to go hunting when she should have been at church. Wild stories all; but the wildest are reserved for the Devil's Chair, the largest and weirdest of the stones, with its "window" through which only the bravest will creep and its seat in which only the reckless will dare to sit.<\/p>\n

"For miles around it was feared," wrote Shropshire novelist Mary Webb in The Golden Arrow. "It drew the thunder, people said. Storms broke round it suddenly out of a clear sky. No one cared to cross the range near it after dark… Whenever rain or driving sleet made a grey shechinah [resting place] there, people said, 'There's harm brewing. He's in his chair'. They simply felt it, as sheep feel the coming of snow."<\/p>\n

It was the devil who made the chair, the stories say, by letting slip an apronful of stones as he flew overhead. He might have tidied them up, at least: it's a slippy, rubbly ankle-breaker of a path that runs on along the ridge. As I passed Scattered Rock, the hill wind began to shred the mist; and by the time I had reached the cairn near Shepherd's Rock and started down into the valley, the Stiperstones were standing outlined against a cold afternoon sky of the palest blue.<\/p>\n

Squeezed into extravagant snake bends between the bulging flanks of Perkins Beach and Green Hill, the old miners' path fell away 600ft to reach Stiperstones village far below. Through the steamy windows of the pub I glimpsed other walkers yarning over their pies and pints. But that surfeit of Bog Cake still needed some working off. I turned my back on temptation and stepped out for the Bog Centre along a high stony laneway below the ridge, where the craggy heads of the Stiperstones stood magnificently against the rain-washed sky.<\/p>\n

Christopher Somerville is the author of "Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places: 500 Ways to Discover the Wild" (Allen Lane)<\/p>\n

Walk FILE<\/p>\n

Maps: OS 1:25,000 Explorer 216; 1:50,000 Landranger 137, 126<\/p>\n

Length: 5 miles<\/p>\n

Start and finish: The Bog Centre, Stiperstones (www.bogcentre.co.uk)<\/p>\n

In brief: Shropshire Way from road (OS ref 362976) past Cranberry Rock (365981), Manstone Rock (367986), Devil's Chair (368991). From cairn just before Shepherd's Rock (374000), steep descent to Stiperstones village (363004) and Stiperstones Inn. Return to Bog Centre via 361002, 359999, 361996 and lane parallel to the Stiperstones.<\/p>\n

Eat\/drink: The Bog Centre or Stiperstones Inn (www.stiperstonesinn.co.uk)<\/p>\n

Travel: Train to Church Stretton (www.thetrainline.com).<\/p>\n

Car: A488 north from Bishop's Castle or south from Shrewsbury; signs to Shelve, then Bog Centre.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Giant pressures brought about by volcanic upheavals some 500 million years ago formed the shining white quartzite of the Stiperstones, long weathered to a cloudy, lichen-blotched grey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.christophersomerville.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}