Train station. Start of tour Church Stretton (walk or short taxi ride to first accommodation); end of tour Shrewsbury or Welshpool (in either case bus – or on Sundays taxi – from Montgomery). Buses and taxis are not included in the tour price.

Airports. The airports with international flights best placed for the Shropshire Hills are Birmingham (BHX), Manchester (MAN), London Heathrow (LHR) and London Gatwick (LGW). For more details of rail links between airports and the starting and end points of the various tours see our ‘Detailed factsheet’.

Tour code S7:
7 nights tour £—. Single room*: £—. STS**: £–.

Single room* = single room price (applicable when 3 or 5 persons book together as well as for solo travellers).

• STS** = solo traveller supplement (applicable when booking is for one person only).
• Supplement for en-suite/private facilities every night. ES/private bathroom cannot be guaranteed on all nights of this tour (although available most nights).
• Extra night at Montgomery £– per person per night (always with ES/private bathroom).
• Extra nights elsewhere on this tour: £– per person per night.

Prices quoted are per person on basis of two people in double or twin-bedded rooms. Included in the price are bed and breakfast each night, with baggage transfers, maps and route directions. ‘ES’ (en suite) facilities means that there is a private bathroom with shower or tub and toilet within the main door of your room. ‘Private facilities’ means that the private bathroom may be outside the main door of your room. When the booking is made for a party of 3 or 5 customers, a single room supplement is payable. When the booking is made for a single traveller, a solo traveller supplement is payable. Normally a maximum of one single room per booking.

A Shropshire Lad

In valleys of springs of rivers,
By Ony and Teme and Clun,
The country for easy livers,
The quietest under the sun…

A.E.Housman

In 1996, 100 years after those lines were published, Housman was finally awarded a place in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey, while the south Shropshire Hills – now officially designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – remain as inspiring now as they were to Housman.

The tour starts with 2 nights in Church Stretton, a favourite centre for walkers and hikers in the heart of the Shropshire Hills. The first full hiking day can be spent climbing to the Romano-British hill fort of Caer Caradoc and exploring the steep-sided valleys cut into the heather moorland of the Long Mynd. You then head westwards over the Long Mynd plateau into the remote headwaters of the East Ony river, and follow the celebrated 18th century ‘beech avenue’ over Linley Hill. The splintered rocky pinnacles of the Stiperstones were the setting for Mary Webb’s novel The Golden Arrow.

After two full days to explore further in and around the Stiperstones range, you continue westwards to spend a night close to the 4000-year-old stone circle of Mitchell’s Fold. You then quit ‘those blue remembered hills’ (A Shropshire Lad, XL) of Shropshire to spend a night just beyond Offa’s Dyke and the Welsh border at the beautiful little mediaeval and Georgian town of Montgomery. Make a point of walking up the footpath to the castle (badly damaged in the civil war, but still an evocative ruin with a panoramic outlook) and, if you like the atmosphere of a real old-fashioned hardware store, don’t miss Bonner’s.

 A.E.Housman’s slim book of poems A Shropshire Lad is both readable and evocative. Mary Webb’s earthy novels provide an authentic picture of the Shropshire Hills, notably The Golden Arrow and Gone to Earth, which are set in the hills between Church Stretton and Montgomery. The Jacobean poet George Herbert was born and brought up in Montgomery.