Lilleshall | |
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St Michael and All Angels church |
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Lilleshall shown within Shropshire | |
OS grid reference | SJ731155 |
Civil parish |
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Unitary authority | |
Ceremonial county | |
Region | |
Country | England |
Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
Post town | NEWPORT |
Postcode district | TF10 |
Dialling code | 01952 |
Police | West Mercia |
Fire | Shropshire |
Ambulance | West Midlands |
EU Parliament | West Midlands |
UK Parliament | |
Lilleshall is a village in Shropshire, England.
It lies between the towns of Telford and Newport, on the A518, in the Telford and Wrekin borough and the Wrekin constituency. There is one school in the centre of the village.
The village dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, the parish church being founded by St Chad. It is mentioned in the Domesday Book. The Norman parish church of St Michael and All Angels is a grade I listed building.
There is a monument, a cricket club, a tennis club, a church and a primary school clustered around a bracken-covered hill named Lilleshall Hill.
Lilleshall Abbey, some distance to the east of the village, was an Augustinian house, founded in the twelfth century, the ruins of which are protected by English Heritage. After the dissolution of the monasteries the estate was bought by the Wolverhampton wool merchant James Leveson. His family held the site for four generations and, after two owners died without issue, it passed into the hands of the related Leveson-Gower family in the late 17th century.
Lilleshall is surrounded by farmland. The village and surrounds were the site of considerable early industrial development from as early as the 16th century, when Walter Leveson (1551-1602) established a bloomery. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relatively shallow deposits of coal and limestone were mined, with resultant subsidence. The history of the mining of limestone is reflected in the naming of a road called 'Limekiln Lane' in Lilleshall. The former limestone mines are tucked away in treeland at the Newport end of the village, locally known as "the Slang", which is effectively several pits now filled with water, popular with local fishermen and unpopular with local parents of young children - the water is deep and the former minepits area quite dark, abandoned and dangerous.