Shropshire Way
A 182-mile figure-of-eight around Shropshire from Shrewsbury, over the county's hills, edges and meres
Indicative — sampled from open terrain data along the simplified route.
The Shropshire Way is a figure-of-eight of 182 miles, with two loops meeting at Shrewsbury in the middle of the county. The route starts and ends at the Buzzard sculpture in the town, and the black-and-orange buzzard waymark carries the walker round both circuits. Each loop divides into day stages, so it is walked in pieces rather than one push — anything from a fortnight upward for the whole thing.
The two halves are quite different. The southern loop is the hillier and better known, taking in the Stiperstones ridge, the Long Mynd, the limestone escarpment of Wenlock Edge and the isolated cone of The Wrekin, and passing through Clun and Ludlow in the far south and Ironbridge in the gorge where the iron industry began. The northern loop is gentler, running out to the meres and mosses around Ellesmere and up to Whitchurch on the Cheshire border.
Much of the southern circuit lies within the Shropshire Hills National Landscape and involves real climbing; the northern lowlands are easy by comparison. Shrewsbury, at the centre, is the obvious base and has a station on several lines, which also makes the route practical to start from and return to between stages.
The Way has taken various forms since it was first devised in the 1980s, with different loops added and dropped over the years. The present figure-of-eight was set out to give a single continuous circuit of the county from its central town.
