THE TRAVELLING HILLS

The Shropshire Hills have been on one heck of a journey. Around 600 million years ago they sat within the Antarctic Circle, but when the earth’s tectonic plates began to shuffle about, the hills began a long, slow journey that would bring them all the way up here.

Along the way they picked up almost every kind of rock strata known to science, from coal seams to sandstone to limestone to coral reef. Fossils discovered in the Carding Mill Valley helped to prove that complex plant life evolved on Earth far sooner than previously thought.

And the Stretton Gap around which this route runs is actually the Stretton Fault, a huge geological fissure which tells the whole story of that remarkable journey. Little wonder that palaeontologist Tori Herridge, presenter of Channel 4’s Walking Through Time, calls these hills “a classroom and a paradise”.