Shropshire

I found the land of lost content last week, west of the Clee Hills in the Shropshire Housman wrote about, but hardly knew. It is deep England, thick with trees, stone-built farms that look like forts and tracks in gullies cut by ancient feet.

The villages here have rhythmic names: Bouldon, Peaton and Cockshutford — or simple Heath, where there is now no village at all, only the pure Norman chapel standing in grass with its long old iron key on a hook outside. It was built for a settlement lost at the Black Death. Few sounds here are unnatural: you hear birdsong more than cars or planes.

I was riding my horse James, with two friends on Cassie and Rubin, along paths bursting with nettles. We scrambled over streams and slippery red mud on to the Brown Clee Hill by Nordy Bank, where our horses nibbled at turf on Neolithic ramparts.

There is no better way to get the feel of the place you are in, above the ground but travelling slowly enough to sense changes you miss in a car. The parkland of the Burwarton Estate gave way to the fringes of the Midlands, where we rode through wheat fields and eyed up hunt jumps before we climbed into the marches, heading for friends who live outside Craven Arms, the only town to be built by a railway junction named after a pub. At friendly Tugford Farm we stabled our horses and ourselves, and commiserated with Cassie, who had been disgracefully kicked by her friend James as they raced around in celebration at eating the greenest grass of their lives.

Amid all this: the castles, the half-timbered barns and the big old inns which line the turnpike road from Much Wenlock to Ludlow, there was power, too in the flashes of failed modernity.