13 miles south of Shropshire’s county town Shrewsbury, which forms the western most tip of the relatively populous strip of the county extending along the M54 motorway and the railway line from Wolverhampton, lies the altogether different world of the Long Mynd plateau.
In the 19th Century this dramatic upland and the surrounding ridges and peaks was nicknamed “little Switzerland” and a tourism industry centred upon the town of Church Stretton in the valley where the railway line between Shrewsbury and Hereford, and the A49 run, got going.
This relatively low lying area is peppered with 19th and early 20th Century looking vaguely alpine looking buildings to this day, and it remains a popular day trip destination for people from the more populous parts of Shropshire and the western reaches of the West Midlands conurbation to this day.
Ascend two or three hundred metres from the National Trust car park at Carding Mill Valley and you fully enter the realm of the Long Mynd Commoners.
Since the 1960s the plateau, and much of the surrounding land has been owned by the National Trust. However, the management of the land primarily sits with the Commoners, who have collectively tended and farmed the steep slopes, wild tops and sharply defined valleys since at least the 13th Century.
With a total area – known to have been farmed since at least the late Iron Age – of 21 square miles, Long Mynd is large as surviving areas of common land go. Its historically remote location and relatively inhospitable landscape have made it, like other areas of the far west of the Midlands region like Castlemorton Common, unattractive to potential enclosing landlords from the 16th Century onwards.
This has enabled the Commoners distinctive forms of land management, stewardship and animal husbandry to have survived into the 21st Century. It is a relatively light touch approach. The Commoners hardy flocks of sheep and ponies graze very selectively, leaving large expanses of bush, bracken and heather which form the habit for all manner of species including ground nesting birds which struggle to maintain a toehold in more intensively farmed areas.
Notably the individual Commoners flocks, due to a custom called hefting, keep to their own designated sections of the hills. A sense of territory passed down between generations of sheep.
The polar opposite of tragedy, the common’s heritage of humans, animals and the landscape co-existing with a relatively high degree of symbiosis, makes the Long Mynd Plateau one of the most beautiful and distinctive parts of the western Midlands region.