Named for the English county of Shropshire (or Salop), where Church Stretton is located. Situated in the once-tumultuous borderland of the Welsh Marches, the earliest major settlement was the Roman garnison town of Uriconium built near the Wrekin, the county’s prominent hill. The current county town of Shrewsbury is situated on a meandering bend of the river Severn and was the birthplace of the naturalist Charles Darwin {see planet  (1991)}. The other main town, Telford, includes the Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge areas that were the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. The county was celebrated in A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and is the original ‘land of lost content’. (M 34626) _ _.