Ludlow

Ancient pubs and Jacobean timber

There has been an ale house on the site of the Rose & Crown since 1102, which makes it Ludlow's oldest pub. You reach it through an ancient courtyard off Church Street, near St Laurence's. Joule's Brewery restored it fully in 2016, turning up a fireplace and beams hidden since the 1960s. The 13th-century mullioned window in the rear stone wall was never lost — it just kept being there.

The Feathers Hotel has a half-timbered Jacobean frontage built in 1619 by Rees Jones, an attorney at the Council of the Marches. The timber carries the Prince of Wales's feathers, which is where the name comes from. The New York Times called it "the most handsome inn in the world" in 1983.

Historic inns and Ludlow food

The Church Inn, a 14th-century building near St Laurence's, was called "probably the best pub in Ludlow" by one TripAdvisor reviewer. The Wheatsheaf is built into Broadgate, the last of the town's seven medieval gates — single bar, real fire, four handpumps.

The food is the reason people come. Ludlow calls itself the food capital of the Marches, and it once had more Michelin-starred restaurants per head than anywhere in England outside London. What has endured is the shops. AH Griffiths on the Bull Ring makes prize-winning pork and a hawthorn-berry and ginger sausage. Just outside town, the Ludlow Food Centre on the Oakly Park estate sells estate-reared meat and roasts its own coffee on site.

Market tradition and St Laurence's

There is an open-air market in Castle Square four days a week, and a market has been held here for over 700 years — one was recorded outside the castle bailey in 1086. Every September the Food & Drink Festival fills the castle marquees; it began in 1995, Britain's first, and its Sausage Trail has local butchers each invent a new recipe while about a thousand people buy forms to taste and score them.

St Laurence's is the largest parish church in Shropshire, 203 feet long, its tower rising over the whole town. The 28 choir stalls have medieval misericords carved with Green Men, mermaids and wrestling matches. The bowels of Arthur, Prince of Wales, who died at Ludlow Castle in 1502, are buried inside. The ashes of A.E. Housman, whose *A Shropshire Lad* returns again and again to Ludlow bells and Ludlow market, lie in the churchyard under a cherry tree.

Castle power and River Teme walks

The town exists because of the castle, built by the Normans on a cliff above the River Teme around 1075. By the 16th century Ludlow Castle governed all of Wales and five English counties as the seat of the Council of the Marches. Before any of that there was nothing here — Domesday found only Ludford and Stanton Lacy, older settlements across the water.

The walking starts at the door. The Ludford Bridge loop follows the Teme for under four miles, and across the river Whitcliffe Common gives you the classic look back at castle and church. The Mortimer Trail runs 30 miles from town to the Welsh border. Ludlow sits on the A49 halfway between Shrewsbury and Hereford, with its own station on the Welsh Marches Line.

Riverside recreation behind the castle

Behind the castle, Linney Riverside Park has a gated jetty where people put in kayaks and paddleboards and swim in the Teme when the weather allows. Two pounds all day to park.