Wanting to maximise the use of the rental car during the weekend we decided to go to Shrewsbury. Why Shrewsbury? Well it didn’t appear to be near a canal and we wanted to save all the locations near a canal for the time when we are cruising the network.
The direction of our route took us via the Battlefield Industrial Park so we took the opportunity to look around Homebase, B&Q and Wickes. All window shopping to get an idea of what is available.
I continue to be fascinated by the Tudor style buildings.
Looking at the map I could see the heart of the town is located in a loop of the River Severn. The river almost circles the town and one assumes this obstacle assisted in defending the medieval town.
The buildings don’t appear to have a straight edge in them; leaning and tilting in all directions. My assumption is the original builders didn’t have the means to machine the timber. Or perhaps they just didn’t bother! Whatever the reason it must make modern renovating interesting.
Jan rather liked this scene near Shrewsbury Abbey.
It was an interesting walk around the town and we spent a pleasant afternoon before returning to Kelly-Louise. We didn’t explore all of the town and if the opportunity presents itself we’ll go back for a further look. We returned to KL via the big Tesco on the outskirts of Shrewsbury where we used the opportunity of having a car to fill a large shopping order.
1 comment :
Just another snippet of useless information! The medieval black and white timber frame buildings were, up until the 19th century, coloured natural wood with yellowy lime, manure and sand daub infill, (with a little urine thrown in). It was the Victorians who took a shine to them, and not only followed a fashion for painting all the timbers with black tar, also painted the daub white. In fact they became so fashionable that many replicas were also built around that time. The original ones though, as you say, have timbers that remain in natural tree shapes, and often the roof is formed from two oak trees propped together to form the arch of the gables. Consequently the building takes its shape from the shape of the available trees. The more modern replicas can be identified by their machined timbers making the building a uniform shape.
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