Clunton and Clunbury,
Clungunford and Clun,
Are the quietest places
Under the sun.
A Shrophire Lad, A.E. Housman
Well, the cluster of Clun-dubbed places may be quiet, but I was destined for the buzz and bustle of Much Wenlock. I was there for a bookish event held along the road from the local independent bookshop at a pottery. A working pottery, which also quadruples as a B&B, event venue and bar. It is guarded by the most dark and gentle German Shepherd I have ever encountered who goes by the name of Shadow, and is run by a jolly woman who asked us on our arrival at 3.30pm if we would like tea or something stronger, as she had just had a tipple herself. Her partner at the pottery has a cider press in the garage and makes his own cider using home-grown apples.
The event itself was a great success, with people travelling in from surrounding villages and towns to come and listen to the two editors of a lovely little literary quarterly talk about how they modestly started up their project around the kitchen table over many bottles of wine more than ten years ago. It is now thriving and growing, with mad office dogs wreaking havoc among hundreds of boxes delivered by a broad-accented Yorkshireman named Bryan from the traditional printers at the crack of dawn on a regular basis. Many more charming eccentricities that are part of their working life were touched on too. The audience listened and drank and asked questions and got cosy by the fire. Anybody who had arrived alone was welcomed in and seated by the wonderful owner of the local bookshop, who knows everyone's name and whether or not they have a dog. 'This is Jane. Jane this is Sylvia. Sylvia has a spaniel, Jane has a schnoodle. You may have seen each other out dog-walking.' And the bar did a great trade. One of the woman working behind it clocked that there wasn't enough wine left in one of the bottles for a full glass so took it upon herself to quaff it.
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| A Much Wenlock door - take note of the terrific sign |
So, as I say, the event was splendid, but I was interested in exploring the village the morning after the night before. It is an other-worldly place of crammed-to-the-rafters junk shops, markets awash with fresh veg (soil-clumped potatoes and carrots with masses of thick green tops), home-made pie shops that do a nice side-line in sparsely bristled salty pork scratchings, and the most beautiful 17th century buildings decked out in time-worn timber. One such building is the bookshop. It is gorgeous. Bunting made from comic books hangs in the children's section and The Guardian is spread invitingly on the large round table upstairs. The owner runs this bookshop almost single-handedly and is enthusiastic, passionate and pro-active, with the likes of poetry festivals, children's activity groups and literary events spilling from her imagination into the community. She read The Dean's Watch by Elizabeth Goudge as a child and was captivated by the description of the fictional bookshop with its wooden beams. She decided then that she would like to be a bookseller when she grew up. It was only a little while ago, when standing on the upper floor, beneath beams and between second-hand books, that she realised that she has the bookshop she'd wished for.
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| Dream bookshop |
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| Just inside my favourite novel |
