Weald Moors
Weald Moors
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 The River Strine, here south of Cherrington, drains part of the Weald Moors. |
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 Weald Moors
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| Weald Moors shown within Shropshire | |
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| Ceremonial county | |
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| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| EU Parliament | West Midlands |
The Weald Moors are located in the ceremonial county of Shropshire north of Telford, stretching from north and west of the town of Newport towards Wellington, with the village of Kynnersley lying roughly at their centre.
Although the Weald Moors are now largely agricultural land, they were among the last parts of the area to come into cultivation. The word weald (which elsewhere means open uplands or waste) in this context means "wild" or uncultivated: the "wild moors". A moor, in Shropshire usage, was a marsh. The spelling "Wildmore" or "Wyldemore" appears in documents from 1300 to 1586, and "Wildmoor" until well into the 19th century.
The historic marsh or fenland character of the Weald Moors was formed after the last Ice Age, when the area was part of the glacial Lake Newport, connected to the larger Lake Lapworth. An underlying accumulation of peat led to the development of a large basin mire with waterlogged land: by the mediaeval period larger settlements had only developed on its edges, although an Iron Age marsh fort at Wall Camp is evidence that the defensible nature of the marshland was exploited by early inhabitants.
Under the mediaeval manorial system most of the area became classified as uncultivated "waste". Part of the Weald Moor, together with the Wrekin, seems to have for a time formed a royal forest known as Vasta Regalis, with Sir Humphrey de Eyton recorded as forest Warden in 1390; the old name was still remembered in a tract of land called "The Gales" as late as the 19th century.
Between the mid 16th and mid 17th centuries, there were a series of lawsuits as attempts were made to drain and enclose sections of the moor, leading to disputes over parish and township boundaries. For example, in 1583 Thomas Cherrington took a neighbouring landowner, Thurston Woodcock, to court alleging that Woodcock had employed "diverse desperate and lewd persons" to dig a drainage ditch across land claimed by Cherrington. Woodcock responded by arguing that the land was waste, and part of Meeson Moor. A good deal of land on the western side of the area was drained and enclosed by Sir Walter Leveson of Lilleshall, proprietor of the manor of Wrockwardine, in the late 16th century, and by the 1650s around 2700 acres of wetland had already been drained and enclosed.Peat digging was carried out on parts of the Moors, and the inhabitants of villages on the edge of the area, such as Wrockwardine, used some areas as summer pasture under historic rights of common. Wrockwardine's uniquely extensive common rights over the southern and western Weald Moors may have originated in its status as an 11th-century royal manor and administrative centre. By the 17th century the village was linked to the moors by a road whose verges had been enclosed for squatter's cottages, forming a separate settlement known as Long Lane.
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Wikipedia