Those Places Thursday - Ludlow

I succumbed to temptation (as usual) today and bought a book in the Summer Sale in The National Archives bookshop. The book that I bought, Ludlow: an Historical Anthology, by David Lloyd and Peter Klein, isn't one of the online bargains, it was only available in the on-site shop, and there were only a couple of copies (sorry). I mention it because it's about Ludlow, a place I have only visited once, several years ago, but I just loved it.

Ludlow has a lot of history, which always tends to endear a place to me, and a lot of old buildings there are intact. The biggest of these is Ludlow Castle, and one of the most famous is the Feathers Hotel.

Thomas Wright's History of Ludlow (1852) is on Google Books, with some fine illustrations, and the Historical and Descriptive Sketch of Ludlow Castle and the Church of Saint Lawrence, Ludlow (1869) by the same author. You can find some gazetteer entries and a several travellers' accounts of Ludlow on A Vision of Britain Through Time.

As befits such an historic town, it contains many listed buildings - 402 of them to be exact. You can feast your eyes on these on the English Heritage Images of England site, and a collection of old photographs the related Viewfinder site.

The Feathers hotel

Records for Ludlow are held at Shropshire Archives, which has a good range of information leaflets and guidance on family and local history. They are also working on a series of Place Guides, which look very promising, although they are working through the alphabet and have reached the letter G, so no Ludlow yet, but it will be worth looking out for, judging by the standard of the guides they have produced so far.

The historic Feathers Hotel dates back to 1619, and as you would expect in a building of that age there is hardly a straight line in the place. It is reputed to be haunted, but I suspect this is the result of a combination of overactive imaginations and creaky floorboards. I didn't see any ghosts when I was there, and I loved it. Writing this has made me want to go back to Ludlow - and the rest of Shropshire, come to that, it's a lovely county.

Ludlow is dominated by its medieval castle, which has a fascinating history of its own. it is adjacent to the town, but is not part of the parish of Ludlow, it is an extra-parochial place.

Ludlow Castle