This county is full of poetry from the Serven Valley Steam Railway to the shire horses at Acton Scott Historic Farm. There is mystery in the quill pen at Shrewbury Quest and at the Hidden passages at the medieval county town of Shrewbury.

At the centre of the Ironbridge Gorge are a series of museums. And at Ludlow the gem of Shorpshire border county is the Norman Castle in this English town.

Shropshire takes pride in having the Spitfire and Hurricane in the RAF Museum Cosford and for the golfer on our championship courses or the stride of the walker atop the sunfilled Long Mynd.

Whether you' like farmhouse hospitality country house hotel splendour, cosy pub lunches with home-brewed beer with a sheepdog by your feet, or gourmet dinners - amazingly all can be offered.
Other principal cities/towns include Shrewsbury, Telford, Oswestry, Market Drayton and Ludlow.

Ludlow

For those who have an interest in architecture will like the streets of Ludlow’s town centre, this includes Broad Street. In the town there are Georgian Buildings and Tudor half-timbered buildings. A short distance away from the market you can find Grade I and Grade II listed buildings. And has a church called St Laurence’s and is the sacred jewel in the architecture of Ludlow.

In Ludlow you can find more Michelin starred restaurants than any other place outside of London. If you want a gourmet meal you are best to book in advance. The gourmet chefs have an international reputation - Shaun Hill’s The Merchant House was been voted 14th out of the top 50 restaurants in the world as well as ‘Best Value Restaurant in the World’ by Restaurant Magazine.

Claude Bosi at Hibiscus and Chris Bradley at Mr Underhill’s also have one star each, and regularly have excellent reviews.

Also in Ludlow you can find restaurants and dining pubs that are in or on the edge of town which can also be found in the Michelin guide, this includes Overton Grange, The Cook House, Japanese restaurant Koo, The Cliffe, The Roebuck and Dinham Hall.

Besides good food in Ludlow, it has been Named the Finest Market Town in England by Country Life Magazine a few years ago. And has an established tradition of selling quality local foodstuffs from the regular market that still trades every week of the year in the square. There is a wide selection of traditional shops that have quality food and drink where the Michelin-starred restaurants may grab the food headlines, also Ludlow is proud to its butchers, bakers and traditional food producers.

This market town has family owned butchers that make good business every day, each one has its own specialities, but all selling quality produce, this also includes home-cured bacon and home-made sausages. When it’s in season you can also find game and fresh venison from the nearby Mortimer Forest, and through the year you can buy meat from Rare Breed animals at Wall’s. From Carter’s Reg Martins and Griffith’s where you can buy pork pies and pasties. You can’t leave without trying some black pudding and some white pudding when in Ludlow.

Ludlow’s bakers also do well. Price’s in the market square, still use traditional, slow-rising dough for its breads and usually has speciality loaves on offer; try the dark beer and walnut loaf made with local brewer Hobson’s dark beer, Old Henry.

Fruit and veg shops are accompanied by regular market traders who offer a wide range of produce day in, day out. And every second Thursday in the month, Farmers’ Market takes place on the square. Ludlow has a dedicated cheese shop, The Mousetrap; The Chocolate Gourmet; The Marches Little Beer Shoppe offering an impressive range of bottled beers, ciders and perries; and, tucked away in the aptly-named Pepper Lane, a cook’s shop that crams thousands of lines into a surprisingly tiny space. And for organic produce, take a walk down Corve Street and you find Myriad Organics.

It’s not surprising that a town with this attitude to quality food and drink hosts to the internationally known Food and Drink Festival.
The town of Ludlow was built around the castle that is found at the top part of the square, with no roof but still has the defensive walls intact, and has a selection of towers and skeletal buildings and an open space laid to turf. The castle, used to be the seat of government from which tracts of Wales were once run which is now a more than an attractive heritage site. Today it has become the exhibition centre fro Ludlow, a medieval Earl’s Court or NEC that plays host to four major festivals every year.

Ludlow Food Festival

For this festival huge marquees are put up in the grounds of the castle which is hosted by a few small producers of traditional food and drink, that offer there produce for tasting and for purchasing. And are all found in the Ludlow area and the rules for this festival were organised by a group of volunteers, that states that only producers who are in the counties that are either side of the Welsh border are eligible.

Out of the castle, Ludlow town is taken over by a series of trails that visitors can sample and vote for breads, cheeses, ales and sausages. The Sausage Trail is one of the elements of Ludlow's food festival, which is different that makes it stand out from the rest. Every year Ludlow’s five butchers each come up with a new sausage recipe for the Sausage Trail. Around 1,500 people buy a voting form on the Saturday morning of the Food Festival and walk round the five butchers' shops tasting a sample of each butcher's festival competition sausage, and then vote out of ten for each one. When people have completed the trail they hand in their voting form and get a whole cooked sausage of their choice in a bun.

Included in the ticket price and over the weekend of the Food Festival a full programme of talks and demonstrations that includes some of the Michelin starred chefs, take over the town and host events like a growing fringe. If you are watching your waistline it’s the last place you would want to come to, but we are all allowed treats from time to time.