Birmingham; Wednesday, 22 December, 2010

I had originally planned to spend today visiting Wroxeter Roman City out in Shropshire. I normally wouldn’t bother checking, but for some reason this morning I decided to give the site a call just to check that they were open, as it was going to be a pretty long journey to get there. I’m glad I did as the recorded announcement was that the site was closed today due to the weather conditions.

So instead, I went for plan B, which was a trip to Ironbridge Gorge instead.

Unfortunately, I didn’t bother phoning ahead there to check to see if anything was open and consequently found everything shut when I got there, but the visitors centre and museum weren’t my reason for coming to Ironbridge. I’d come to see the spectacular bridge that proved you could use cast Iron to make major structures and put this part of rural Shropshire at the heart of the industrial revolution.

I had a long wander around the area taking in the beauty of the Gorge and the elegance of the bridge before retiring to a very nice pub for lunch.

In fact the pub was so nice that I booked a room for three nights in August to come back and properly take in the World Heritage Site.

By the time I had finished lunch it was coming up to three and I needed to start heading back into Birmingham. I caught the bus back into Telford no problem, and then managed to get a bus straight away back to the station, thus avoiding the 20 or so minute hike that I had endured on the way out.

However, on arrival at the station I found out I shouldn’t have bothered. The train I was aiming for was delayed by over 30 minutes (in fact it continued to get later and by the time I finally left on the following train, it was nearly an hour late) so I had a 25 minute wait for the stopping train back into Birmingham.

The light finally disappeared from the sky over Wolverhampton and by the time I got back into Birmingham it was definitely night. I popped up to the station building to pick up my luggage from the left luggage office, before heading back down onto the platform and my train home.