Get away from the games console, and meet and greet farmyard friends at Ray’s Farm Country Matters, Hoo Farm or the Park Hall Countryside Experience, complete with hay rides and huge play area. See nursery rhymes and fairy tales come to life at Wonderland, or meet owls, hawks and falcons at Battlefield Falconry Centre.
Visit Enginuity in Telford to find out how to pull a ten-ton locomotive or generate electricity from flowing water. Experience the sights, smells, sounds and tastes of another age at the Blists Hill Victorian Town, or see amazing artefacts from the last century at Land of the Lost Content museum.
Get your skates on and get down to Telford Ice Rink, get zapped with lasers at Quasar Shrewsbury, hit the 85-metre slope at Telford Snowboards and Ski Centre, the 50-metre flume at The Quarry Swimming Centre, or the 90kph Rednal Karting.
Go potty over pottery at Doodle Alley, explore our industrial past at the Ironbridge Gorge Museums, take your bike off-road at a four-acre slice or rural Shropshire at the Shropshire Hills Mountain Bike Centre, or ride the funicular railway at Bridgnorth.
Wend your way to the town of Wem, a quaint and quintessential slice of Olde England bursting with delightful delis and suchlike. It’s a similar tale at places like Market Drayton, Bishops Castle and Much Wenlock, dotted among the timeless landscapes and offering gems in the shape of antique shops, inns, teashops and traditional butchers and bakers.
This is border country and Shropshire’s history of conflict with Welsh marauders has left a legacy of storybook forts and castles. Try Blandings Castle, Powis Castle or Ludlow Castle. Prefer a more mythical feel? Take the King Arthur Trail. Man-made?
How about the pathways, ravines, arches and bridges of Hawkstone Historic Park? Walk or ride Housman’s blue-remembered Shropshire hills, rising Alpine-style from above Church Stretton, tee off on fine golf courses, or jump, tunnel and climb at The Adventure Ropes Course. Book a Bywater Cruise and watch the world go by from a canal boat tugged by a shire horse.
Drop the pulse a little at the Thai Serenity and Soul spa or the Tootsies Beauty Retreat. Retail therapy? The Parade in Shrewsbury offers more than 30 individual shops without a high-street name in sight.
