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Lilleshall is a village in Shropshire, England.
It lies between Telford and Newport, on the A518, in the Telford and Wrekin borough and the Wrekin constituency.
The village dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, the parish church being founded by St Chad. It is mentioned in the Domesday book.
An Augustinian Abbey was 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 a merchant called Leveson. The family became lords of Stafford and later Dukes of Sutherland (as the Leveson-Gower family).
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'. The Lilleshall Monument is a famous 70-foot high local landmark which stands on top of Lilleshall Hill and was erected in honour of the Duke of Sutherland.
An old myth that circulates in Shropshire says that the hill was created, along with The Wrekin, by a giant who was carrying a spade full of earth with which he intended to bury the town of Shrewsbury.[citation needed]. But there are many versions of this story, including the giant emptying his boots after a hard days work.
Local children use the hill as a de facto local amenity for adventuring in summer and sledging down in snowy winters. Popular summertime games have traditionally included:
- making secret dens part-concealed within bracken
- playing 'I see you' with one child stood on the monument spotting others trying to approach and climb the steps of the monument before being spotted
- watching the fire service beat out bracken fires by hand
Lilleshall, like many Shropshire villages, is surrounded by farmland. A rite of passage for local children is to be able to identify the boundaries between the six or seven family farmlands around the village, seen from the monument.
The village and surrounds were the site of a lot of early industrial development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with relatively shallow deposits of coal and limestone being mined. 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'. The Slang 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.
At a similar time to the mining of limestone a very early example of the English canal network was dug - The Donnington Wood Canal and its Lilleshall branch which were connected by an inclined plane, reflected in the naming of a road called 'The Incline' in Lilleshall.
The Dukes of Sutherland became one of the richest families in the UK partly as a result of this industrial development and in the late nineteenth century built a new residence, Lilleshall Hall which lies at the heart of the estate a mile from the village.
The Sutherland estate was sold off between 1915 and 1917 and the hall eventually passed into state ownership as a sporting facility. It is now the Lilleshall Hall National Sports Centre, once the site of the Football Association youth Academy, and now the home of British gymnastics and Archery. The Lilleshall Hall Golf Club link title is also in the grounds of Lilleshall Hall.
Coordinates: 52°44'N, 2°24'W
(Source: Wikipedia) |