Over the summer I had the opportunity to spend the afternoon on the Wrekin, which rises 407 metres above the market town of Wellington. As a child, then teenager, and in to adulthood, the Wrekin and its smaller sister the Ercall were a familial stamping ground for my friends and I. We were intricately familiar with all its paths and streams, we knew where to camp and where to ride our bikes and explored it extensively in all seasons.
It had been raining on and off for 24 hours and the top of the Wrekin was just about visible through thick cloud. Its lower slopes were shrouded in mist and despite the rain having subsided; the air was still thick with damp. I parked close to the former rifle range and walked along the edge of the now defunct range to the butts. Well I remembered sitting in the butts as a private territorial soldier raising and lowering the targets to the orders of the platoon sergeant and patching the holes with coloured paper and wallpaper paste before taking my turn on the range. The track that crosses the butts we used to call the Pyg Track and it makes a complete circuit around the lower slopes. I turned to the north and skirting gently around to the east came to the car park at the Forest Glen. The actual Forest Glen building was painstakingly taken down and reassembled at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum some years ago.
From the Forest Glen I took the main track, which heads up towards the Halfway House. Although on this occasion I actually went up to the Halfway House and over the top, the best route to circumnavigate the Wrekin is on the Pyg Track. This leaves the main track just before the Halfway House at the point where the main track takes a sharp right hand turn. I was surprised to see the Halfway House undergoing some renovation and roofing works. Over the decades it has had many different owners and has been open and closed as a café on an equal number of occasions. Today it was closed and I passed the builders van and trod the well compacted gravel onwards and upwards, first through Hell’s Gate and then through Heaven’s Gate to the top.
The top is adorned with a trig point, a direction pointer giving mileages to various places and just below the summit a large TV Mast. On a good day there is much to see and the view is uninterrupted well beyond the Welsh border. Today there was no view and I went straight over the top, hardly stopping at the Needles Eye and headed down the steep decent on the southern spine to pick up the Pyg Track again on the lower slopes. From the Pyg Track I headed first west and then gradually round to the north towards the Rifle Range. The trail here is not as wide, but still clearly defined and good underfoot. I quite like this section because of its diversity of trees and the many undulations and it wends its way along.
Although familiar, today I felt that I no longer had the intricate knowledge of these woods that I once had. Don’t get me wrong they still felt friendly and were spectacular in the wet where their colours were accentuated and deeper, but I felt they were intimate with others now and I was a stranger to them.
Total distance for this walk was just 4 miles with some steep climbs and descents. The tracks are all good, mostly gravel, but beware of loose stones and tree roots on the steeper sections particularly in wet conditions.