Shrewsbury, United Kingdom Hotels, Vacations, Tourism

SHREWSBURY , the county town of Shropshire, sits in a narrow loop of the River Severn, a three-hundred-yard spit of land being all that keeps the town centre from becoming an island. It would be difficult to design a better defensive site, and fortifications were first built on this narrow neck in the fifth century, after the departure of the Roman legions from the nearby garrison town of Viroconium. The Normans were swift to realize the strategic potential of the site, too, building the first stone castle, which was expanded and strengthened by Edward I in the late thirteenth century. The eighteenth century saw the … more »