10/05/2025
It’s not only our guests staying with us at Puddle Duck Cottages that enjoy a 👣 🐾 around The Wrekin, we do to!
We love a spot of taking you through beautiful woodland, with a magical carpet of blue bells and ferns, then walking up to the summit and back down 🐶🐾
👀 At the top you can marvel at the views from this ancient hilltop fortress, which crowns some of the world’s oldest rocks in Shropshire with this hilltop walk.
Capping the summit of one of Shropshire’s iconic hills is a 20-acre Iron Age hillfort, once home to the Cornovii tribe. This ancient stronghold, built around 400BC, crowns the summit of the Wrekin.
On a clear day, you can see 17 counties from the Wrekin’s 407m (1,335ft) summit, and other hillforts, on the Malvern Hills (40 miles away) and in west Wales, would have been visible, too, in their heyday. This route explores the earth rampart remains of Hell and Heaven’s Gates, while treading on volcanic rock millions of years older than Mount Everest.
The Wrekin is the subject of a well-known legend in Shropshire folklore.
A giant called Gwendol Wrekin ap Shenkin ap Mynyddmawr with a grudge against the town of Shrewsbury decided to flood the town and kill all its inhabitants. So he collected a giant-sized spadeful of earth and set off towards the town. When in the vicinity of Wellington he met a cobbler returning from Shrewsbury market with a large sackful of shoes for repair. The giant asked him for directions, adding that he was going to dump his spadeful of earth in the River Severn and flood the town. "It's a very long way to Shrewsbury," replied the quick-thinking shoemaker. "Look at all these shoes I've worn out walking back from there!" The giant immediately decided to abandon his enterprise and dumped the earth on the ground beside him, where it became the Wrekin. The giant also scraped the mud off his boots, which became the smaller hill Ercall Hill nearby.