Distance: 1.8 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Walk across fields from the village of Minsterley to little Snailbeach nestled beneath Stiperstones, once Shropshire’s lead mining capital, and today, home to a brilliantly preserved set of mine ruins.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
Shropshire’s Heavy Metal Capital
These days Snailbeach is a sleepy little village nestled part way along the Stiperstones ridge in the northwestern part of the Shropshire Hills National Landscape.
However, for centuries it was Shropshire’s heavy metal capital. A major mining centre, chiefly for lead. While the dramatic, six mile long, Stiperstones ridge today, is given over to a mixture of pine plantation to the north of the upland area, and moorland type hillside that is a National Nature Reserve to the south, for millennia the hills were worked by humans to extract rich veins of metal.
Lead was the metal upon which Snailbeach was built. In early Victorian times the introduction of better steam engines meant that several deeper workings could be sunk. This meant that by the middle of the 1850s around 500 men were working in Snailbeach as miners, suggesting that thousands of people were living in and around the village. Some of them were illegally squatting, a few of their dwellings surviving in valleys running up from Snailbeach onto Stiperstones, to this day several of them remain.
The feel may have been a bit like the old American West albeit in the Shropshire Hills. Though the whole area, for the hardscrabble coal mining at Pontesbury, to the smelters which once stood in Snailbeach and Ponestbury, and the little narrow gauge railway which from 1877 connected the mine at Snailbeach to the standard gauge branch line at Minsterley, was once highly industrial.
How extensive the industrialisation of the area around Snailbeach and Stiperstones in the 19th and early 20th Centuries is very tricky to imagine these days. Though to this day there are spoil heaps towering over the village, and numerous, well preserved, remains of Snailbeach’s lead mines dotted around the woodland and even amongst the houses at the top of the settlement.
Snailbeach’s last lead mine closed in 1955, though the vein had been evidently largely exhausted by the late 19th Century, meaning that from the time of the First World War onwards relatively little lead was mined. As well as lead and barytes, at times zinc and flurospar was extracted at Snailbeach. These days it is reckoned that while there may still be recoverable lead in the hills above the village it is over 300 metres below ground and likely uneconomically to extract.
Following closure, reworking of the spoil tips, primarily to produce a substance called spar for use in pebble dashing on housing, continued up until the 1970s. Shortly after the mine closed barytes were extracted from the former mining waste piled up around the village to cover over the damaged Windscale Reactor in Cumbria which caught fire in 1957.
For many years the spoil heaps were distinctive because of the white colour of the waste material. This was a major public health hazard with lead and other harmful metals being blown by the wind onto the village and surrounding countryside.
In the 1990s Shropshire County Council received grants to clean up and begin rewilding the former waste tips. These grants also enabled the conservation of the mine remains and remnants of the narrow gauge railway which once linked the village to Minsterley.
Today while the mine ruins remain owned by Shropshire Council, they are cared for by the Shropshire Mines Trust. They open the site, including some underground workings up, during warmer months of the year, and run a visitor centre which tell the story of when Snailbeach now exceptionally well preserved lead mining heritage, was alongside sites like the Magpie Mine in Derbyshire, one of the UK’s most significant modern lead mines.
The Walk
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.
This walk near the north western edge of the Shropshire Hills National Landscape begins from the large village of Minsterley north of the ridge, and ends at the extensive lead mine ruins in Snailbeach.
A relatively frequent bus service (at the time of writing in September 2024) from Shrewsbury, at least on weekdays and Saturdays, runs from Shrewsbury to Minsterley, with a few services each day continuing to Stiperstones village.
Having passed the Muller yoghurts factory and the church in the centre of Minsterley alight the bus at the final stop on the south of the village.
Once off the bus walk straight ahead from the bus stop along the main road, crossing a couple of driveways and minor roads running off to the left, passing the village’s primary school.
Presently the pavement looks to peter out. At about this point look on the left for a gap leading through the hedgerow out onto a field.
Through the hedgerow and out in the field, begin walking across, following the faint outline of a path.
As you walk head diagonally to the right making for a distinctive old tree jutting out of a hedgerow.
Upon reaching it turn right and follow the line of the hedgerow.
Approaching another, thicker, older hedgerow follow the footpath into it.
Inside the hedgerow there is a stile which you cross heading to the right making for a track running along the edge of a field.
Once on the track turn left and walk along it. Note that at the time I walked the route the landowner had erected electrified fences around all of their fields, including over footpaths, but that the wires could be fairly easily and safely detached to allow people to cross and access gates and stiles.
At the top of the track, crossing into another field and approaching a large farm, there is a stile to the left which you cross.
Once in the other field walk straight ahead uphill approaching another stile set in a hedgerow.
Across the stile and into the next field turn right walking diagonally, heading for a gateway out onto a track.
Once on the track continue walking straight ahead across the track and into another field approaching an old stone wall with thick woodland behind it.
Upon reaching the wall turn right following the wall.
On reaching the end of the wall turn left heading for a stile, with a derelict house surrounded by abandoned cars, beyond it.
Having crossed the stile walk uphill following the track, past the derelict house for a short distance.
Soon the track curves around sharply to the right.
After following it for a short distance, you emerge into a scattered hamlet on the edge of the village of Snailbeach.
Continue along the track, passing an array of houses, and some disused farm buildings being slowly converted into houses, until you come out on a main road.
Here, turn left and walk along the road for a short distance, cross a bridge over the course of a former narrow gauge railway line, and continue towards a car park for the woodlands which lie on the northern end of the Stiperstones ridge.
Upon reaching the car park the road forks. Here take the narrower left hand fork running uphill past spoil heaps from when Snailbeach was a major lead mining centre.
Off to your left as you walk you pass some of the ruins of one of the mines where a wooden replica of some mining gear has been set-up.
Just past this museum site the road curves around sharply to the right and continues running uphill towards a cluster of cottages behind the former mine site and on the edge of thick, pine plantation, woodland.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
At the time of writing (September 2024) there were buses from the car park on the northern edge of Snailbeach to Shrewsbury (for onward bus and train connections) at 11:15, 14:35 and 16:50 on weekdays. On Saturdays there was a single departure at 14:45, and Sundays saw no service. On Saturdays there was a more frequent service from Plox Green just south of Minsterley, reachable with around 40 minutes walking along roads from Stiperstones via Snailbeach. A roughly hourly service also departed Minsterley on weekdays. Plox Green and Minsterley also did not have a Sunday service. There was also a Stiperstones Shuttle under the auspices of the Shropshire Hills National Landscape, which ran on weekends (including Sundays) from Church Stretton Railway Station, but only between late May and early September.
