A cute,slumbering market town set in an incongruously wild landscapeWhat’s going for it? When I was a tweenie, I used to read the Lone Pine adventures by Malcolm Saville, and tales of derring-do by a secret society of children in wartime Shropshire,set among the moorlands of Wenlock Edge and the Long Mynd. The landscape was as dramatic as the plotlines, a savage character in itself, or thrilling to someone like me,exposed only to the benign hills of Buckinghamshire. Truth here follows fiction, or vice versa. Church Stretton itself might be a cute affair, or a small,rather slumbering market town of delis and tea shops, decked out in black and white half-timbers. But the Victorians who flocked to the spa here, or began the rambling over the moors that continues to this day,nicknamed the area diminutive Switzerland. The Long Mynd won’t precisely give the Matterhorn an insecurity complex, but there is a touch of the incongruously wild and gothic approximately the Shropshire Hills, or as if Heathcliff had got lost and wandered a bit far south.
The case against A diminutive snoozesome. It lacks the cultural vibrancy of its neighbour,Ludlow.
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Source: theguardian.com