Meet Mad Jack Mytton
Discover seldom-walked paths in lovely Shropshire, on the trail of one of the country’s most spectacular eccentrics – Mad Jack Mytton
Walk the misleadingly peaceful trail of a man who rode a bear to dinner.
IMAGINE YOU’VE BEEN invited to a dinner party by the owner of a very wellto-do country house. You’ve dressed in your finest attire, arrived in good time, and are making polite conversation in the drawing room with the other guests. There is, however, no sign of your host.
Just then, the door swings open and there he is, dressed in full hunting gear, sitting on the back of a bear. Not a stuffed bear, nor a giant teddy – but a real, live bear with the same teeth and claws it would use to rip its prey to shreds.
After the initial wave of panic, everyone tries to make sense of what’s going on. This is just a stunt, they convince themselves. Clearly this animal has been well trained... no-one’s at risk... he must play this trick on everyone.
But then your eccentric host accidentally pricks the skin of the carnivorous mammal with a spur on his foot, sending it into a frenzy and biting him in the calf... One can only imagine the chaos that ensued.
The ‘victim’ in this story was John ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton – an aristocrat who started life in 1796 with everything and left 38 years later with nothing at all. He was a drunk, a gambler, and a colossal spender. And yet his bizarre antics were so legendary that Mad Jack is remembered (and in many ways adored) to this day. A pub, a bar and a hotel are all named after him, as is the Jack Mytton Way – a long distance trail of
bridleways and country lanes running east to west across Shropshire.
In many ways the trail is as nonsensical as Jack Mytton himself, not least because it seems tenuous at best as to why it was named after the 19th-century eccentric in the first place. True, the trail was primarily created for horses and Jack was very fond of these. He even gave one free rein of his house and it would join him in front of the fire. But Jack was also guilty of accidentally killing one of his horses when he fed it a bottle of port.
He used the animals for many of his more illustrious stunts, such as the time he rode into a grand hotel, up the stairs and onto the balcony before leaping over diners and out the window; and the time he discovered first-hand that a horse pulling a carriage is unable to jump over a toll gate.
The other link is that the trail is based in Shropshire. And though this was indeed Mad Jack’s home county, the part of it the way covers has absolutely nothing to do with the man it’s named after. The Jack Mytton Way cuts through 75 miles of southern Shropshire, starting at Cleobury Mortimer and passing the likes of Much Wenlock, Church Stretton, the Long Mynd and Clun. Conversely, Jack’s home was near Oswestry in the north of the county, as was his favourite racecourse. He also briefly served as MP for Shrewsbury (also in the north of Shropshire) after bribing constituents with £10 notes then sitting in parliament for a whole half-hour before getting bored and leaving.
To get a flavour of the Jack Mytton Way I start my walk from the western end, on the Welsh border. Naturally, the trail’s creators would want to find a significant place for it to begin – Montgomery perhaps with its historic castle, or maybe the lovely market town of Knighton. But it’s perhaps in keeping with Jack’s oddities that they chose Lloyney – a hamlet along the B4355 with a pub that has recently closed and… well... little else.
It is, however, an utterly charming place with wooded hills either side and the gentle River Teme meandering through. I cross this over a narrow stone bridge where a sign welcomes me to Shropshire. I assume this is the official start of the trail, though there’s no signage to tell me so. In fact there are several turns before I see the first Jack Mytton Way sign, looking sad and faded.
A lane leads uphill and I’m soon enjoying a landscape that feels very open and benign for a place so hilly. The land rises to upward of 1600 feet in these parts, and yet I’d struggle to describe the hills as anything more than ‘rolling’. They
all look pleasantly achievable and the views are widespread, with farmland and green pockets of woodland continuing to the horizon.
A moderately steep ascent brings me to one of the best-preserved sections of Offa’s Dyke. This linear earthwork predates Donald Trump’s wall by more than 1200 years. No-one knows exactly why Offa, an Anglo-Saxon king, ordered its construction, but it follows close to nearly the entire length of the Welsh border. The ancient dyke is as pronounced here as anywhere, and it shoots off into the distance as straight as a railway line.
The Offa’s Dyke Path runs along the top of the earthwork, whereas the Jack Mytton Way heads parallel to it on a bridleway. This is because the trail is primarily for horses, which aren’t allowed on the dyke here. In fact, the whole purpose of the Jack Mytton Way when it was knitted together in the early 1990s was to link the bridleway network across Shropshire to similar networks in neighbouring counties.
A trig point in a private field next to the track marks the high point of Offa’s Dyke Path, as does a metal sculpture of a dragon, partially hidden in the grass, giving the impression it’s waiting to pounce.
A little further on, the track starts to drop and there’s a wonderful view of the grass-covered dyke heading off into the distance like a fault line, bending right as it descends before ducking out of sight down a distant valley.
I meet a lady walking with her dog – a charming spaniel full of energy and curiosity. It’s a moment that would have delighted our friend Jack Mytton. He was so fond of dogs that he kept 2000 of them, feeding his favourites steak and champagne. As I continue along the quiet hilltop, I can only imagine what sort of noise 2000 dogs make when it’s time for dinner. Many of his were bred for fighting, others were used for hunting – another passion
of Jack’s. He would often track prey on horseback stark naked and was even known to strip off in the middle of the night in winter to go out to shoot ducks.
Soon I leave Offa’s Dyke and gently descend a shallow valley, crossing a stream in a grass field and passing several majestic oak trees. I continue through a farmyard and along a paved lane to a road, where I leave the Jack Mytton Way. The longdistance trail continues straight ahead to the small town of Clun, but I veer right down a country lane.
Surprisingly, I pass no-one. Not a car, a horse, a fellow walker. In fact, the lady and her spaniel are the only ones to cross my path throughout the day. It’s clear the Jack Mytton Way is a low-key affair, and although it brushes Offa’s Dyke and heads over the popular Long Mynd, the vast majority of it takes you to farms, hamlets, hills and rivers I would otherwise never have heard of or contemplated visiting. And this makes it extremely inviting – the chance to explore a beautiful part of Shropshire seen by only a few.
Plus, if you worry about getting lost or having to wade through nettles when you’re out walking, then it’s worth noting that because this trail was built primarily for horses, it uses easy-to-follow tracks and country lanes, meaning you can spend more time enjoying the changing landscapes, and less with your head buried in a map.
For me, the rest of the trail will have to wait until another day, as I wave goodbye and follow a lane and brook down-valley before a sharp ascent takes me back to Offa’s Dyke, which I cross and embark on another slow descent back to Lloyney. As I approach my personal premature end to the Jack Mytton Way, I contemplate the premature end of Mytton himself.
It’s inevitable really that someone with such an addictive, outlandish character would meet his maker as a young man. His heavy spending caught up with him, and he ended up in a debtor’s prison – this is despite inheriting his father’s estate worth nearly £5 million and generating almost £750,000 a year in today’s money. But it was the drink that sent him to an early grave. He was said to consume eight bottles of port a day, plus a little brandy to boot. When he intended to study at university he apparently brought 2000 bottles of port with him to see him through. According to one account, when he died in prison in 1834, he was a ‘roundshouldered, tottering, old-young man bloated by drink, worn out by too much foolishness, too much wretchedness and too much brandy’.
But that’s not the Jack Mytton I like to remember. I prefer the Jack Mytton who tried to cure his hiccups by setting fire to the shirt he was wearing; the Jack Mytton who terrified two dinner guests who had just left his house by dressing as a highwayman and chasing them down the road on horseback; the Jack Mytton who inspired students at the University of Minnesota at the start of the 21st century to hold an annual running event in the nude until some humourless killjoys banned the fun.
Perhaps it’s time to remember this unforgettable character with our own annual event. Maybe an annual walk in the nude along Jack Mytton Way, with a bottle of port in hand… just so long as no-one decides to arrive on the back of a bear – history tells us that never ends well.