Qualla: Much Wenlock

Much Wenlock: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MichaelMaggs, CC BY-SA 3.0. Pierre de Coubertin walked into the Raven Hotel in Much Wenlock in October 1890 as the guest of honour at a small Shropshire dinner. He was twenty-seven years old and obsessed with reforming French physical education. The man who had invited him - William Penny Brookes - was eighty-one, a country doctor and lifelong magistrate of this limestone market town, and he had been running the Wenlock Olympian Games every year since 1850. They sat down to dinner. Brookes walked Coubertin through his archives, showed him the medals struck for the games, and explained his decades-long campaign to revive the Olympic ideal. Six years later, the first modern Olympic Games opened in Athens. Coubertin never forgot. "If the Olympic Games that modern Greece has not yet been able to revive still survives today," he wrote in 1890, "it is due, not to a Greek, but to Dr W P Brookes."

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Image: MichaelMaggs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Much Wenlock: A White Place on Limestone

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dpaajones, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name probably comes from Celtic Wininicas, "the white area" - a description of the pale limestone of Wenlock Edge, the long escarpment that runs southwest from the town for about twenty miles. "Much" was added later to distinguish this place from Little Wenlock a few miles no...

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Image: Dpaajones | CC BY-SA 3.0

Much Wenlock: Dr Brookes and His Idea

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Law, CC BY-SA 2.0. William Penny Brookes was born in Much Wenlock in 1809, took his medical degree, travelled to Padua and Paris, and came back to practise as the town's surgeon - the same year, by coincidence, that another Shropshire boy named Charles Darwin was born up the road in Shrewsbury. Bro...

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Image: Richard Law | CC BY-SA 2.0

Much Wenlock: Coubertin Comes to Wenlock

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Row17, CC BY-SA 2.0. Brookes had been corresponding with Coubertin since 1889, exchanging ideas about physical education. When Coubertin visited in October 1890 - a special games was staged in his honour - the older man laid out his decades of work. Coubertin was deeply moved. Two years later he conv...

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Image: Row17 | CC BY-SA 2.0

Much Wenlock: Wenlock the Mascot

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mat Fascione, CC BY-SA 2.0. When London won the right to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, the organisers chose two mascots for the games - one for the Olympics, one for the Paralympics. The Olympic mascot was a single-eyed creature made of polished steel. They called him Wenlock, after the town. On 30 May 201...

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Image: Mat Fascione | CC BY-SA 2.0

Much Wenlock: Mary Webb and the Edge

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Grahamec, CC BY-SA 3.0. Much Wenlock is also the kind of place that breeds quiet imaginations. The novelist Mary Webb - born Mary Meredith in 1881 - grew up at The Grange just outside the town from 1882 to 1896. Her later novels, Gone to Earth and Precious Bane, were rooted in the Shropshire hills she w...

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Image: Grahamec | CC BY-SA 3.0