The Bromlow Callow is a distinctive landmark on the South Shropshire skyline, I must have been aware of it for the best part of 70 years now as it was familiar to me as a child being driven by my father between my home farm to my grandparents' farm. I recent years it has lost some of its neat shape, a trim waistline has given way to a rather more fashionable profile of obesity, this sadly does not make it quite so distinctive, in the way that those artists, who recorded skylines for Antique engravings depicted this feature.
The Callow is particularly distinctive as a hilltop copse because it appears the same from all points of the compass, so as a young farmer returning from farm visits it was familiar on the evening skyline as these journeys around the county became merged with village dances and early morning skylines. When I took to the crags of North Wales I found myself pointing out The Callow to fellow mountaineers from the Midlands, Liverpool, from all over I suppose, without questioning why it was there, because to me it has always been there and I have lost track of the places I have spotted it from, without fully realising its full significance.
Droving to me was a local phenomenon, getting cattle and sheep to market in a county town, so when I attended a talk by the late Idris Evans about the Anglesea cattle drives to London supported by evidence that he had collected using a metal detector bought home to me the cross-country routes taken over many centuries, by drovers who could not read, had no maps and passed the knowhow on to close family members of how to safely drive livestock a huge distance, keeping them watered and fed and under their control. The part the Scots Pine played in this over the centuries is more than just a direction finder, hints that locations were connected with safe paddocks, marshalling points, grazing and clean water are now just feelings that might occur to those with some understanding of animal husbandry.
These locations seem to lure one from the Welsh coast in a variety of ways towards the Bromlow Callow, a copse of pure Scots Pine and openly stated that it was a Drover's Beacon, yet so few of the surrounding indicators are linked to it. These indicators could include a sighting I had on a cross Wales walk beyond Caersws, not from the top of a hill but between hills that blank off the eastern horizon at a point on a trail where one might be looking for a direction mark to cross a valley.
Many such sightlines I have noticed, but none so intriguing as the most recent, because I could not have been in a place more unlikey to spy a distant feature on a skyline. I was sitting in a mown meadow with my back against a big bale of haylage drinking coffee. We had just been denied a crossing of the River Severn by an order of the Powys CC, where overdue repairs have not been carried out to a footbridge, an actual Mini Suspension bridge gives sole rights to walkers to cross the geographical barrier between England and Wales. As I looked at the skyline between the immediate shoulder of the Montgomery hills and the long Mountain, there was a curiously familiar knoll with a rather fat, blowsy, iridian blob on the top. That can't be the Callow, oh beautiful slim and trim maid of my youth, beacon of hundreds of safe journeys home
, I took a bearing.
With aid of a smaller-scale map and an elevation profile, it is quite clear that the Bromlow Callow is visible from the banks of the River Severn where the walker can cross safely isolated from the thunderous roar of heavy traffic. What was once a beacon for those taking meat to hungry Londoners could be turned around a used as a guide to a safe and beautiful route into Wales from the Midlands, because the link beyond the Bromlow Callow is the Wrekin. Not recognised on the Idiot Board provided by tourist explanation, but obvious to those who might stand at the passes beyond and see the Wrekin indicating how the River Severn might be crossed in its lea at Cressage.
Less obvious to those route obstructors, who deny the blatant lostways that lie between these features of ancient route finding. Should we add new footpaths from the bottom of the Wrekin to the Cressage bridge as one of a current set of lostways caused by a system that fails to create new leisure ways avoiding motor highway?
A route that links the Fron footbridge, Berriew to the base of the Wrekin is the essence of the sort of walk that the Macmillan Ways are trying to achieve a countryside walk across central England & Wales. By reversing the ancient guideline set by the Bromlow Callow does this once familiar skyline feature deserve more attention than to be allowed to become just another unrecognised blob.
