The English Maelor! It’s the appendix to Wales that dangles off the bulge of the Welsh north‑eastern border and reaches almost as far as Whitchurch in Shropshire. DH Lawrence regarded this as a strongly Welsh-flavoured county, and some of the earliest Welsh poetry, dating back perhaps to the sixth century, locates here. Remember the line from the 9th/10th-century Heledd saga, “Wylaf wers, tawaf wedyn?” (“I will weep for a while, and afterwards keep silence.”) What forgotten, deadly skirmish along these blood-soaked borderlands inspired that tragic utterance?
The great Welsh warrior chieftain Owain Glyndŵr, at the end of the 14th century, also rode this way, past the deep and phragmites‑fringed lake, to marry Margaret Hanmer. Six centuries later, the outstanding feminist literary critic Lorna Sage (1943‑2001) was brought up in nearby Hanmer, and her award‑winning memoir Bad Blood (2000) leaves a vivid impression of the place and her childhood there, before she moved on eventually to Durham and then to the University of East Anglia, where she was tutor to our distinguished diarist Mark Cocker.
Hanmer’s well worth a visit. I drove over there this week on a grey showery afternoon, leaving behind Wales’s “blue, remembered hills”, the Staffordshire moorlands ahead rising in the dim distance. This country around Ellesmere is a haunting, fascinating place, terrific for birds, and not just for the waterfowl either, though who can resist the bizarre courtship rituals of the great crested grebe, which you have as good a chance of witnessing here as anywhere I know? The smaller, rarer birds are also well represented. Sitting by the lake at Hanmer, I focused my glass on the reedbeds surrounding it.
Most of “the Shropshire meres” (a common name for this magical region) are kettle holes, formed by the melting of great blocks of ice left behind as the glaciers retreated in the last ice age, and Hanmer’s has similar origins. The mimicry of a sedge warbler drifted on the damp air. Small flocks of long-tailed tits scattered past.
Lake water lapped with low sounds by the shore, the faint scent of the guelder rose in flower filled the air, and only the thrum of a tractor muck-spreading and the skirling of children at play in the village disturbed the long peace of this quiet place.
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