Shropshire

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/20460048

“Marley was dead: to begin with,” begins Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the ghostly morality tale of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge who, through a series of encounters with spirits in the early hours of Christmas morning, realises he needs to change his ways.

It is an imagined story – there is no Scrooge and, unlike his unfortunate business partner, he is not dead. But that does not appear to have mattered to a vandal in Shropshire, where a gravestone of Scrooge used in a 1984 film adaptation has been smashed into multiple pieces.

The prop, a heavy piece of stone several centimetres thick engraved with the name “Ebenezer Scrooge”, has lain in the graveyard of St Chad’s church, Shrewsbury, since the movie 40 years ago starring George C Scott.

While Scrooge is definitely fictional, the stone may have belonged to an unknown real person whose name was weathered away over hundreds of years, according to a BBC interview with Martin Wood, Shrewsbury’s town crier, who was a body double in the film.

It can be seen in the scene where Scrooge, described by Dickens as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner”, is taken to the grave of an unloved man by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and discovers it bears his own name.

Town council clerk Helen Ball said the prop was a popular attraction in the village. “It’s one of those things that is very dear to everybody’s hearts,” she told BBC Radio Shropshire. “When you look at the Facebook messages that people put on yesterday, it’s united a community in terms of the disgust that somebody can do that.”

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She said: “Maybe if it’s someone in their drunken revelry, they might have posted it on Facebook or something, and maybe somebody with a bit of conscience might let us know who that is.

“Or equally,” she said, providing a potentially satisfying ending, “the person who did it may have a conscience and decide to own up”.

Ball added, in true Victorian style, it would be a “good reason to bring the stocks back”.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17555750

The search for an escaped capybara which fled a zoo four days ago is continuing "around the clock".

Cinnamon fled her habitat at Hoo Zoo and Dinosaur World in Telford on Friday and entered woodlands within the zoo grounds.

The last sighting of her was on Saturday, after she managed to get beyond the perimeter fence.

Zoo owner Will Dorrell said he believed Cinnamon had made it to the Humber Brook river, near the attraction's northern boundary, where "she's probably living her best life".

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Cinnamon escaped when keepers entered the capybara enclosure to mow the paddock, as she was hidden in long grass near the gate, Mr Dorrell said.

When the gate was opened, she slipped around the side of a tractor to leave the enclosure.

"Our two young capybara here are always trying to work out a different way of trying to cause us headaches," Mr Dorrell said.

"They’re extremely intelligent which a lot of people might not necessarily appreciate.

"She seemed to know what we were going to do and was waiting there ready for that gate to be opened."

While a capybara has never escaped from the zoo before, Mr Dorrell said one managed to dig under a fence to get into an ostrich enclosure a few years ago, but quickly realised she wanted to come back

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16109464

A 2,000-year-old mosaic has been discovered during excavations at a Roman site in Shropshire.

The piece at Wroxeter Roman City depicts brightly-coloured dolphins and fish.

It was uncovered during work to search for the main civic temple.

"Our excavations were in hope of discovering the walls of this building, but we never suspected we would find a beautiful and intact mosaic, which had lain hidden for thousands of years," said Win Scutt, from English Heritage.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13590440

Farmer James Steele, 95, lost the treasured timepiece in the early 1970s when the strap broke while he tended his cattle.

It is thought one of his animals must have swallowed the watch, which ended up in a cowpat in the field.

He searched the field at his dairy farm in Morda, near Oswestry, but there was no sign of the watch.

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Incredibly, half a century later, he has now been reunited with the timepiece after metal detectorist Liam King found it buried in the mud.

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"I was really pleased because I never thought I would see the watch again. I only have half the bracelet because the other half must have disintegrated.

"Unfortunately it is not going. The face has gone a greenish colour but it has not rusted up. It shows how well-made it was, to survive 50 years under a field.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/12033907

A homeowner is searching for answers after an obscure inscription was found written underneath a stone slab in his garden patio.

Builders made the discovery while working on the 300-year-old home of John Adams in Norbury, Shropshire.

Mr Adams shared a photograph on social media to try to work out what the text might say with several people suggesting it was in Hebrew.

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Mr Adams, who works for the National Trust, said his house was located on a road that was once a major travelling route.

"It was an inn previously. It was also a pub," he said. "Maybe it was [written by] somebody who happened to be passing through or staying here."

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Experts at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have been contacted to see if they can translate the stone.

A metal detectorist in Shropshire has unearthed England’s largest ever gold nugget worth £30,000 – despite turning up an hour late for the dig with a faulty metal detector.

Richard Brock, 67, travelled three and a half hours from his home in Somerset to join an organised expedition on farmland in the Shropshire Hills last May, and ended up arriving late. He also had problem with his metal detecting kit, and was forced to use an older machine that was not working properly.

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“At first I just found a few rusty old tent pegs with this back-up detector, which had a fading screen display.”

But just 20 minutes later, Brock unearthed a huge 64.8g golden nugget buried about 13–15cm (5–6in) underground. The metal, which has been named Hiro’s Nugget, is now expected to fetch at least £30,000 at auction and is believed to be the biggest find of its kind on English soil.

The nugget was found on a site near the village of Much Wenlock believed to have been an old track with railway lines running through, containing stone possibly distributed from Wales – an area known to be rich in gold.

Brock said research suggested the only bigger gold nuggets found in the UK have been in Wales and Scotland. A nugget weighing 97.12g was found in Anglesey/Ynys Môn, Wales, while the Reunion Nugget, at 121.3g, was found in Scotland in 2019.

The previous biggest rock uncovered in England weighed 54g. “We’re pretty confident it is the biggest found on English soil,” said Brock, a retired cameraman. “I’m going to split whatever it sells for with the land owner.”

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/3953408

Donkeys have a reputation for being stubborn. But in the case of “poor Amigo”, a donkey who has been rescued by firefighters from a field in Shropshire, it wasn’t stubbornness that kept him stationary – it was mud.

A spokesperson from Shropshire fire and rescue said a team of “10 or 11 firefighters” attended a call to rescue the hapless animal, who got stuck in waist-deep mud after falling into a hidden storm drain covered in leaves.

Logging the incident as “one donkey, stuck in storm drain”, firefighters used straps and lines to pull Amigo out safely, after a vet sedated the trapped animal to ensure it did not panic and injure itself.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/2526339

One senior West Midlands detective – a big cat believer – said: “You can get anything into this country.

“For some years, owning a big cat was something of a status symbol for criminal hierarchy – blame Mike Tyson.

“Some of those pets escaped.”

Have the beasts bred in our countryside? Not a chance. We have proof the animals are – or certainly have been – with us. On February 3, 1989, an Asian jungle cat – actually, not much larger than a domestic moggie – was discovered dead on the roadside at Richards Castle, Ludlow.

There have been others. A puma was shot in Inverness in 1980, a lynx captured in Cricklewood a year later. All are believed to have been on the run from captivity.

The British Big Cats Society claims to have evidence of 23 big cat releases into the countryside after the Dangerous Animals Act came into force. The same organisation caused a storm in 2005 when revealing a puma skull discovered by a Devon farmer. It was a puma skull.

Back in 2015, TV naturalist Gordon Buchanan said in an interview: “I said about five years ago that, with everybody carrying mobile phones with cameras, we will soon have conclusive evidence if there were really big cats out there.

“So far, that has yet to materialise. Having spent some time with big cats, I know they are expert at concealing themselves and hiding, so it is possible.

“But in the absence of hard evidence, I think it’s looking less likely.

“That’s not to say that people are making stories up.

“A friend-of-a-friend showed me a picture of what they thought was a big cat, and I thought it looked like the real deal.”

He said: “It didn’t look like a domestic cat, but when I saw where it had been taken, and paced out the distance, I realised it probably was a feral cat.

“But the way the image had been taken, unless you actually went out there and paced the distance you wouldn’t have realised.”

When you think of Shropshire, giants may not necessarily be the first thing that comes to mind. However, littered across the landscape are tales of giant beings, each with their own unique narratives. These creatures are somewhat underrepresented in discussions regarding our lore, but despite this I believe they are intrinsic to the county. They can symbolise the savage elements of nature, which are in constant conflict with human kind. Furthermore, they come to symbolise the spirit of the land itself, something that is altogether primordial, unrestrained, and untamed. Some of our giants whisper of Celtic influences, however others seem distinctly ‘Shropshire’ in design. Some are successful, whereas others are resigned to a fate that is controlled by humans, or the forces of nature. We are going to explore some of these stories, travelling across the breadth of shropshire, in hope we can discern more about the counties wonderful folklore.

Great read. I know Shropshire reasonably well but a lot of that folklore had passed me by.