Shrewsbury
The town is also famous for hosting one of the oldest and largest horticultural events in the country, the Shrewsbury Flower Show." (from Wikipedia) Shrewsbury OS Explorer Map (1:25 000) Shrewsbury and Oswestry OS Landranger Map (1:50 000)
Shropshire
The county is centred around six main towns starting with the county town of Shrewsbury, which is culturally and historically important, although Telford, which was constructed around a number of older towns, most notably Wellington, Dawley and Madeley, is today the most populous. The other main towns are Oswestry in the north-west, Newport to the east, Bridgnorth in the south-east, and Ludlow to the south. Whitchurch and Market Drayton in the north of the county are also of notable size. The Ironbridge Gorge area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, covering Ironbridge, Coalbrookdale and a part of Madeley. The Shropshire Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty covers about a quarter of the county, mainly in the south. The Wrekin is one of the most famous natural landmarks ('all friends round the Wrekin') in the county, though the highest hills are the Clee Hills, Stiperstones and the Long Mynd. Wenlock Edge is another significant geographical and geological landmark. In the low-lying northwest of the county (and overlapping the border with Wales) is the Fenn's, Whixall and Bettisfield Mosses National Nature Reserve, one of the most important and best preserved bogs in Britain. The River Severn, Great Britain's longest river, runs through the county, exiting into Worcestershire via the Severn Valley. Shropshire is landlocked, and is England's largest inland county." (from Wikipedia)
A.E.Housman
Read 'Collected Poems of A.E. Housman' Read 'A. E. Housman: The Scholar-Poet' (Biography)
Brother Cadfael
As a character, Cadfael "combines the curious mind of a scientist/pharmacist with a knight-errant", entering the cloister in his forties after being both a soldier and a sailor, this experience gives him an array of talents and skills useful in monastic life. He is a skillful observer of human nature, inquisitive by nature, energetic, a talented herbalist (work he learned in the Holy Lands), and has an innate, although modern, sense of justice and fair-play. Abbots call upon him as a medical examiner, detective, doctor, and diplomat. His worldly knowledge, although useful, gets him in trouble with the more doctrinaire characters of the series, and the seeming contradiction between the secular and the spiritual worlds forms a central and continuing theme of the stories." (from Wikipedia)
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"Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire, is a historic market town with the
town centre having a largely unaltered medieval street plan. The town features over 660 historic listed
buildings, including several examples of timber framing from the 15th and 16th century. Shrewsbury Castle, a
red sandstone castle fortification, and Shrewsbury Abbey, a former Benedictine monastery, were founded in 1074
and 1083 respectively, by the Norman Earl of Shrewsbury, Roger de Montgomery.
"Shropshire, sometimes called Salop, is a county in
the West Midlands region of England. It is one of England's most rural and sparsely populated counties.
"Alfred Edward Housman (26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936), usually
known as A E Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his
cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before
1900. Their wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive
imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste, and to many early twentieth century English
composers (beginning with Arthur Somervell) both before and after the First World War. Through its
song-setting the poetry became closely associated with that era, and with Shropshire itself." (from 
"Brother Cadfael is the fictional main character in a series of historical murder
mysteries written by the linguist-scholar Edith Pargeter under the name "Ellis Peters". The character of
Cadfael himself is a Welsh Benedictine monk living at Shrewsbury Abbey, in western England, in the first half
of the 12th century. The historically accurate stories are set between about 1135 and about 1145, during "The
Anarchy", the destructive contest for the crown of England between King Stephen and Empress Maud.
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