The Shropshire Dragon: Let Sleeping Hills Lie

Shropshire's landscape is famous worldwide for its beautiful hills, so beautiful in fact that they've been recognised as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and designated for conservation since 1958.

When a landscape is designated for conservation, it means no big companies can come along with diggers, bulldozers, drills and dynamite to make great holes in the landscape to build their factories or shopping complexes. And it's a good job, because underneath the Shropshire Hills, something enormous has been sleeping for a very long time.

Something enormous, something green, something scaly with great big mean teeth and a huge, spiny tail, and wings like a bat. Something that is rather prone to lose its temper if woken from its slumber.

The Dragon of the Stretton Hills, or Shropshire Dragon, is said to have been asleep for more than two thousand years. So long that grass grew on its back, its scales weathered to look like granite rocks and outcrops, trees sprouted up from the earth to hide its features, and birds and creatures and wildlife of all sorts came to call its gargantuan body their home. For a time, the ancient people occupied a hill fort that sat right on top of the beast's shoulders!

In fact, some people forgot it had once been fearful beast and named its two humps as if they were ordinary hills - Earl's Hill and Pontesford Hill, once the lumbering form of a monster that terrorised the ancient people of Shropshire, now as peaceful and tame as a kitten.

What put it into so deep a sleep? Who knows. Maybe it saw the Roman legion coming from the East and knew its time was over. Maybe a wizard, or a witch, cast a spell on it to protect the land.

What is certain is that it would be best not to wake it.