Last night I stayed in the Mytton and Mermaid Hotel. Mad Jack Mytton was a bit of a character. At the age of 2 in 1798 he inherited the family fortune, about £5m in today’s money plus an annual income equivalent to £800,000 a year. He was expelled from Westminster school and so moved to Harrow where he was expelled on three occasions.
He won a seat in parliament by offering the voters of Shrewsbury a £10 note each but he only spent 30 minutes in the house of commons as he found it boring!
He was obsessed with hunting and horse racing and supposedly had 150 pairs of riding breeches and 700 pairs of hand made boots. But with his extravagance and gambling by the age of 35 he had spent all his inheritance and was in debt so ran away to France.
Eventually he returned to face the music and was in prison when he died at the age of 37.
There is a long distance bridleway in Shropshire called the Jack Mytton Way and of course the pub, why name something after such an idiot?
The Hotel was bought in the 1930’s by Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect who designed the Portmeirion village in North Wales. He renamed the Hotel the Mytton and Mermaid (it was the Berwick Arms), Jack Myttons funeral cortège supposedly stopped outside on its way from London, no idea who the mermaid was.
Today’s walk was mostly along quiet roads so an easy 12 miles so long as you don’t get run over. The first place of interest on the way was Wroxeter Roman city called Viroconium Cornoviorum. It was the forth largest city in Roman Britain with a population of 15,000. Much of it is still to be excavated but the remains which are visible are, by British standards, quite impressive despite stone being stolen for the church and other local buildings.
The TV programme “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day” was filmed here with modern day builders building a villa using Roman techniques (and slaves recruited in Shrewsbury). The villa is shown in the picture, taken from a long way off, the site was closed at 9am when I walked past this morning.
Wroxeter Church is also build out of Roman stone and the font has been carved out of a pillar taken from the site next door,
Towards Ironbridge I visited a more recent ruin, Buildwas Abbey which dates from about 1200 and is pictured in the banner below. I arrived in Ironbridge in time for a late lunch in the Tontine Hotel. An unusual name whose origin I looked up so you don’t have to. Apparently a Tontine arrangement was a deal whereby a group of investors bought shares in a fund and received equal share of the interest, as each investor died the remaining investors share increased until only one investor is left and they get the lot. I seem to remember a film called The Wrong Box with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore trying to close such a deal with the last two investors on their death beds.
Presumably the Hotel was bought with a Tontine fund. I am staying down the road is a less salubrious but OK pub called the Malt House in a room in which I am surrounded by pictures of Audrey Hepburn. I noticed that she starred in a film called Sabrina, the Roman name for the Severn, perhaps that is the connection.
The bridge itself which was cast in 1779 was the worlds first iron bridge. This was all thanks to Abraham Derby who discovered you could use coke to heat a furnace to cast iron, up until then charcoal had been used which was very expensive and, perhaps worse, resulted in deforestation of England caused by the need for more and more charcoal. So perhaps Abraham Darby’s discovery was not quite as bad for the environment as we are led to believe when the history books talk about the industrial revolution.
I have now turned the corner and am heading south at last, tomorrow night I will be in Bridgnorth.