At England’s Edge

As A. E. Housman had it, ‘Clunton and Clunbury/ Clungunford and Clun/ Are the quietest places/ Under the sun.’ The villages are dotted along the valley of the River Clun, down in the south-west corner of Shropshire and nestled up against the border with Wales. Like many Midlanders, I find my weekends often turn westward, along the A5 through Shrewsbury and up into the hills that look across to Wales. Walking guides and maps will take you so far, but it was a joy to discover an overlooked little book which digs so much deeper into this country at the edge of England.

Published in 1970, when its author Ida Gandy was approaching her eighty-fifth birthday, An Idler on the Shropshire Borders is her account of life as a country doctor’s wife in south Shropshire in the years before the Second World War. The book, as befits its title, idles and meanders in its telling of the story of the Clun valley and those who called it home. It is a notebook of sorts, a selection of stories and sketches picked out from the diary that Ida kept during her time living in the tiny village of Clunbury. This charming book opens in 1930 with Ida and her young children venturing forth in their Baby Austin from their home in Oxfordshire, in search of a new home and practice for her husband Tom. They motor through Wiltshire and Herefordshire, picnicking and camping their way almost into Wales. When they stop for tea in Clunbury and learn that the doctor’s practice has just been put up for sale, it seems like fate. The village and its inhabitants provided a rich seam of inspiration for Ida, who had written plays and children’s books while living in Oxfordshire. The farmers’ wives, the poachers and even the town drunk – who moved in with the doctor and his family to keep himself on the wagon – all found their way into the diaries she kept. She wrote short plays based on life in Clunbury, one of which was picked up by the BBC, which had a radio studio in distant Birmingham. The BBC men so enjoyed Ida’s drama that they asked her to record a series of broadcasts from the village, with the local residents gathered round the Gandys’ hearth to recount their tales of rural Shropshire into a microphone for the benefit of listeners across the country. Alongside everyday life in a small village, Ida carefully recorded her observations of nature, the landscape, local history and folklore. She encountered red squirrels in the woods, otters in the river and countless birds circling above the hills that march north to south through this borderland. Her descriptions of her walks capture the understated glory of these hills:

The radiance of the morning tempted me up soon after sunrise, when the Hill threw a deep shadow over the whole village. The harvest moon, three parts full, glimmered overhead but the sun was still hidden. As I approached the summit the bracken began to burn ahead of me; each leaf a flame. I stepped from the shadows straight into the brightness. Fleecy golden clouds lay along the top of Corndon and the Long Mynd, till suddenly the hills threw them off and stood up triumphantly. A scarf of mist still wound between the terraces of Wenlock Edge.

Then there are the strange tales, those of witches and ghosts, which were widely believed in the area. Ida took herself up the Black Mixen hill in Radnor Forest in search of the legend of Elizabeth Lloyd, suspected of practising witchcraft there in the early eighteenth century. And she described an eerie evening around the ruins of Hopton Castle, said to be haunted by the spirits of the Roundhead soldiers who died during the siege of the castle in 1644. Of course, Ida was not the first writer to be inspired by the countryside of the Clun valley. Several decades before the Gandys’ arrival, Housman had drawn on the natural peace of the area in A Shropshire Lad, and Ida also mentions Mary Webb, whose books are intimately associated with Shropshire in the early twentieth century. On an expedition to the Stiperstones, the family meet a farmer’s wife who is doing a roaring trade in tea and cake for visitors drawn to the area by Webb’s melodramatic novels Precious Bane (see SF no.10) and Gone to Earth. This brooding ridge of jagged tors which dominates the hilly landscape to the south of Shrewsbury is rich in local legends and also features in D. H. Lawrence’s novella St Mawr. A Saxon chieftain known as Wild Edric is still said to emerge from beneath the rocks of the Stiperstones and gallop over the hills whenever conflict threatens England. To those in the know, Clun itself is easily recognizable as the town of Oniton in E. M. Forster’s Howards End. ‘It was a market town – as tiny a one as England possesses – and had for ages served that lonely valley and guarded our Marches against the Celt.’ The protagonists’ journey to Oniton, changing trains at the busy county town of Shrewsbury, is equally evocative of the quiet allure of this area:

They were nearing the buttresses that force the Severn eastward and make it an English stream, and the sun, sinking over the sentinels of Wales, was straight in their eyes . . . Quiet mysteries were in progress behind those tossing horizons: the west, as ever, was retreating with some secret which may not be worth the discovery, but which no practical man will ever discover.

But Ida’s valley couldn’t keep out the modern world entirely. An Idler on the Shropshire Borders closes with the coming of the Second World War and its effects on all the villagers. Sensing that something is about to change, Ida and her daughter Jill make a final camping trip into the Clun Forest where they awake to find the trees shrouded in fog; a couple of days later war is declared. Ida’s eldest son Thomas is called up and she is appointed as Clunbury’s billeting officer, in charge of finding homes for the expected evacuees. The family left the village in 1945 on Tom’s retirement, and Ida continued to write for the rest of her life. An Idler was one of her last books, written several decades after her time in Clunbury. But it remains a charming and personal guidebook, capturing the quiet draw of a place that, even today, feels slightly out of time; once you have crossed the Severn from the east, the world becomes sleepier and slower somehow, as if dozing in a perpetual Sunday afternoon.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Kate Morgan 2025