Nice photos bww & lovely suspension bridge
Would be a really lovely bridge if access across it was allowed
. Many may have walked under it as part of the Severn Way but how many have pondered its use and why it is there. As part of the
Apley Park Estate it appears to serve no other purpose that to get shooting parties across the river. One wonders when the railway was there how much the commercial impact of siting a station there was purely down to the convenience of the Foster Family, who had recently bought the estate. Foster was a business man, an ironfounder, and the plaque on the bridge reserves the rights for tenants etc to use the bridge for access to the station.
Now the railway is closed, has been ever since Dr Beeching, but access has been opened up along it from Much Wenlock to Bridgenorth, most of it I think,
met a Rottweiller along part of it a few years ago, another adventure. But wonders how many children went to school, even university along that line? Did milk get taken to the station before farm collections? How many country people walked down the footpaths from the west to catch the train from Apley Forge station? Perhaps met friends and relations from the east side.
Trouble with estates was their heirs, they tended to target their marriages into the aristocracy, where we see the excessive need of privacy. Irony is that the house at
Apley Park was too big for the upkeep of 'a family', it became a
secondary modern boarding school, until it nearly fell down.
The Apley Estate boast of 8,500 acres (3,500 hectares) set in beautiful Shropshire countryside, but you cannot pick up the trails of those who worked there, help to fashion the countryside on the east, even follow the last walk from homes of many of those who went to recruiting offices to sign up for 2 World Wars,
not the legacy intended to be bequeathed by the 1949 Act of Parliament.
Interesting, since my visit to the bridge, and perusing the internet was Hitler's interest in Apley here;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103362/Hitler-wanted-set-base-sleepy-market-town-Midlands-UK-invasion-successful.htmlWas the bridge one of the items of the properties portfolio that caught his eye? I think I read somewhere that an Act of Parliament was necessary to build a bridge over a major river.