Shropshire Routes to Roots

Joe Hughes works on the Maesbury Road Industrial Estate and is trying to find out what changes to the landscape have taken place over the years and what was there before the industrial estates were built. This interest was sparked by a letter in the local paper. The writer said that as a girl she worked on a farm, on land that was now underneath the factory where Joe worked.

By following some of Joe's investigations you may be able to do something similar where you live. It does not matter if you live in a town or the countryside, or in the suburbs of a city, all landscape has a history and it has seen changes over time.

Joe starts by going for a walk around the area using the roads and footpaths. He follows his route on the local 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey map and gets to know what is where and how it all fits together. He is surprised to find many things he had never seen before even though he had worked on the estate for seven years.

Joe had seen old buildings near the estate many times but never thought much about them. The building illustrated here stands near the junction of Maesbury Road with the A438 Oswestry by-pass. According to the 1839 field name plan the land on which the building stands was called Toll Bar Gardens. Joe wants to find out if this building, or an earlier one, was a toll house.

He then gets the local 1:25,000 OS map that shows much more detail: features such as field boundaries and small watercourses are marked, as are individual buildings. This helps him identify the some of the still existing field patterns and the overall shape of the land before the industrial estates were built.

Field boundaries change style and shape over time and the layed hedge has seen a return to the countryside in recent years. Hedgelaying, or pleaching, involves the partial cutting through of hedgerow stems, bending the bough down and weaving it among the upright stakes. It makes a hedge that will remain stockproof for many years. You may see old layed hedges that have been abandoned, they have thick horizontal stems and thinner very tall upright branches and are often seen in upland areas.

National Hedgelaying Society (Opens in a new window)