Let’s move to Oswestry, Shropshire: chocolate-box pretty with skeletons in its past

It has seen battles aplenty and the scars are there, if you care to look

What’s going for it? With its red-brick Georgian townhouses, porticoed coaching inns, award-winning bookshop and black-and-white half-timbered cottages, Oswestry looks harmless, as pretty as a picture, as if it had peeled itself off the lid of a box of fudge fancies. Don’t be fooled. We are in border country here, and any border country hides a sizable cupboard of skeletons in its past. Oswestry has seen battles aplenty, horrifying dismemberments (don’t even think of Googling the tale of poor Oswald of Northumbria’s arm), pillaging, and regular burnings to the ground. It’s a wonder there’s anything left of the place and its people. The scars are there, if you care to look, deeply incised in the landscape beneath the undergrowth, like the mammoth iron-age fort of Old Oswestry, looming at the city limits (and home to Guinevere – yes, that Guinevere), and Offa’s Dyke, a few minutes further. This is a place that has been fought over for millennia. It’s happy in its slumber these days. Don’t mention the wars. Let sleeping dogs lie.

The case against It’s a trek away from anywhere (but a lovely trek), and there’s no train station in town (though there is one nearby, at Gobowen). It suffers, like so many places, from a spot of town-centre blues, although there are plans afoot for revitalisation. Culture-wise, it could do with some rocket fuel; the less easily entertained and those with metropolitan habits should look elsewhere.

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from Home And Garden | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2H0dXdZ
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