Qualla: Clun

Clun: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A. R. Yeo MortimerCat, CC BY 2.5. There is a verse in A Shropshire Lad that has hung over four small Welsh-border villages like a benediction for more than a hundred years: 'Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun, are the quietest places under the sun.' A.E. Housman wrote it in 1896 without ever having lived in any of them. In 2009 the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England published its national tranquillity map, and Clun ranked among the most peaceful places in England. The town has 680 people. It has a 14th-century packhorse bridge, a ruined Norman castle, two pubs, and a saying that whoever crosses Clun Bridge comes back sharper than he went. Housman, who never bothered to visit, somehow heard the place exactly right.

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Image: A. R. Yeo MortimerCat | CC BY 2.5

Clun: A Town on a Drove Road

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Percy Benzie Abery, CC0. Clun takes its name from the river running through it, the name itself coming from the very early Brythonic root that also produced the Lancashire and Essex rivers called Colne. The Anglo-Saxons built a church here around the end of the 7th century on what is now the south bank o...

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Image: Percy Benzie Abery | CC0

Clun: The Marcher Frontier

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0. When the Normans took the land after the Conquest, Edric the Wild's confiscated estate was given to Roger de Montgomery, who passed Clun on to Picot de Say. The de Says raised the castle whose ruin still dominates the bend of the river to the north, and Clun became the seat of a ...

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Image: Graham Horn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Clun: Writers, Cartoonists, Playwrights

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Percy Benzie Abery, CC0. Sir Walter Scott is said to have stayed at the Buffalo Inn here while writing parts of The Betrothed in the 1820s, basing his fictional fortress Garde Doloreuse on the ruin above the town. The Buffalo has been shuttered since 2004 and waits empty for someone to know what to do wi...

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Image: Percy Benzie Abery | CC0

Clun: Green Man and Quiet Streets

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Griffiths, CC BY 2.0. Modern Clun keeps itself busy in small ways. Over the May bank holiday the Green Man festival sees a man in foliage cross the bridge to do ritual battle with the spirit of winter, and a May Fair fills the castle grounds with a May Queen and stalls. The last weekend in June, aroun...

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Image: Ian Griffiths | CC BY 2.0