The final destination of the West Midlands Odyssey was Ironbridge, a small town I have wanted to visit for a long time. Having been, I can say that this was a wise travel decision. Ironbridge is utterly bewitching. On my return to London, I started working out where I’d live in the town and if I could move somewhere that had a view of the gorge and ideally, the bridge. The journey from Ludlow to Ironbridge was in parts nice and a bit bleak. Arriving at Telford Central, we wait at the bus stop that will take us near to our hotel. Unfortunately, the first bus driver doesn’t know what Ironbridge is because he lives in Wolverhampton. I live in London but I know what Ironbridge is. The second bus driver seems equally confused and suggests a route that takes 50 minutes instead of 25. In the end I have to just take faith that Google knows the way better than the bus driver, so we settle in to a journey of a lifetime. We’re treated to the sounds of a thoroughly stressed out mum telling her kid to shut up the entire way before we get off at an unlovely stop that looks a million miles away from the pictures of Ironbridge I’d seen. We proceed to head down paths that get steeper and steeper until we’re not so much walking down a hill as sliding down. Thanks to the zig zag streets, we escape plummeting into a void by becoming human pinballs that stumble out into streets that look more appealing by the minute.
We stayed at The White Hart that is a delightful pub minutes away from the bridge that looks out onto the River Severn. The information pack to the hotel includes some outrageous sentences that belong in the 1970s, such as “Chinese restaurant, called something unpronounceable – pretty nice” which reminded me that Telford and the Wrekin voted for Brexit by a large margin. It all made sense. Casual xenophobia aside, The White Hart does great beers, even some foreign ones. It also has a covered terrace, ideal for the weather and the space it affords us from other people. I assume Ironbridge is overrun with tourists in a normal summer, but it was still busy with tourists queuing for ice creams and anything cold when we were there. We had lunch at the Malthouse pub which is about as hipster as Ironbridge gets, with bizarre toilets that look like they’re out of a western. Men don’t pee into urinals, but tin buckets. Inexplicable. Outside, music choices include The Libertines, Franz Ferdinand and Jamie T. When I say hipster, I am talking about 35 year olds and over who were cool once but now live in Ironbridge. But this was the music from my youth so I was more than happy.
After lunch, I entrusted my life and sanity with a walk from The Guardian, from 2009. Things have changed since this walk was written and it was a challenging, frustrating and at times, hateful walk. We start by walking along the river, but soon get stuck in brambles and spend time staring at partially capsized boats. We re-route and end up on a busy road, hoping that we won’t end up flung into a hedge by a truck. The landscape the walk suggests we walked through is a million miles away from the overgrown nightmare that takes up much of the route. Some parts have been vaguely maintained, which is the only thing that keeps us from not abandoning the whole thing. The walk through the meadows alongside the meandering Severn is very pleasant, with butterflies everywhere as well as dragonflies whizzing about. It is after the meadow that things become bleak. We cross the river by the bridge at Buildwas and walk down a path by a quarry, with dust swirling in the air. The guide says to walk down this grim road and head towards a caravan park. Eventually we find where we’re supposed to go and hack our way through fields that are chest high with brambles, nettles, weeds and probably snakes, too. The guide says to cut through a field. A tangle of barbed wire stops this. We alter our tracks again and somehow end up in the caravan park where, in a brief moment of joy, we see three deer eating grass. Then, we walk up a steep hill, following the soothing sounds of electricity pylons buzzing above us. By this point, I wanted to punch the entire walk, if only I could have found a way.
Once we get past the pylons and vertical climb, we broke free into some proper countryside, only an hour or so after we started the cursed walk. Soon, despair gives way to a sense of relief as we can relax into the views around us and we walked in the direction of Benthall Hall, which looks very nice indeed. Naturally, it’s closed. On Spout Lane we see people filling up large containers of spring water from the pipe on the side of the road. Not long after, Ironbridge comes back into view and the road leads us directly onto the iron bridge which looks gorgeous from every angle. It really is an incredible feat of engineering, the first bridge of its kind built in 1777 and opened three years later. The bridge recently went under a year of repair work where it was entirely covered up as they worked on it, turning the colour of the bridge from grey to a deep red, the colour of the bridge when it was first built. The red works so well that I can’t imagine it looking any better than it did when we visited.
In the evening we ate at The White Hart and it was excellent; the heritage tomato salad with dashi and red wine vinegar was outstanding as was my seafood main. We rounded the night off by walking back to the bridge to see it lit up beautifully, watching the insects have a party all around. Despite the partially hellish walk, Ironbridge was something of a revelation in its beauty.
The next morning was our last day and we wanted to make the most of it by going on a walk that didn’t involve a nervous breakdown so we walked from the hotel towards Bedlam Furnaces which to me sounded like an old asylum where the inmates smelted stuff, but I was wrong. It was just a large set of furnaces that is supposed to have cast much of the iron for the Ironbridge. When you look at the remains of the furnaces now, it is easy to lose track of history. Everything around you is beautiful and the gorge is luxurious with foliage. The reality would have been a vision of hell. The painting Coalbrookdale by Night by Philip James de Loutherbourg shows as much, with the skies filled with smoke and the furnaces glowing with flames. We have successfully romanticised heavy industry and I’m curious as to how the nearby Blists Hill Victorian village would have made the time feel. In my head, it’s full of chirpy kids in flat caps running amok but I bet they’d have been consumptive urchins with flat caps, robbing you. I think I just invented the plot of Oliver Twist.
After Bedlam Furnaces, we crossed the river and found more remains of a mining site on the side of the gorge and then we followed a path that took us to a viewing point up many steps. A family came down from the hill with one of the children counting how many steps they’d taken and they were up to nearly a thousand. Oh what larks! About a thousand steps later, we get to the top and are finally rewarded with a view that stretches out for what looks like miles of countryside, woods and village. The walk down is far less steep and arduous, but offers more sensational views of Ironbridge and beyond. It was truly wonderful.
I have always found the last day of a holiday to be my favourite. You get one last little trip and a chance to make the most of what time you have before you head home, in a high state of grief. The walk around Ironbridge and up in the hills is a great goodbye. And there we have it, the West Midlands Odyssey is over. The region is criminally underrated, the people have excellent accents and there is beauty in these towns that makes me want to go back for more.
