Ice Age Oswestry – Week Sixteen of the Oswestry Heritage Comics
The Ice Age was, perhaps, not the most exciting period in Oswestry’s history. Like most of North Shropshire, the town was buried underneath 300 metres of glacier – compacted snow and ice that had accumulated slowly over centuries. Just to give you some idea of how thick that ice was, 300 metres is the height of the Eiffel Tower – or twice the height of the Great Pyramid. The surface of the ice was a bleak place. Even the great herds of wooly mammoth we think of when we think of the ice age wouldn’t have spent much time on the top of the ice – there would have been nothing to eat. They would have stayed further south, down in central Europe, where the ice hadn’t built up, and where there was still tundra grass for them to feed on.
But there would have been a few spots in Shropshire where the hills would have poked up higher than the glaciers – a few frozen “islands” in the ice. One of these would have been the Stiperstones, the dramatic ridge of rocks just south of Shrewsbury. And although the glaciers and all that ice has long since vanished from Shropshire – it all melted away about 10,000 years ago – you can still see evidence of the Ice Age right across the county:
The Ice Age may be invisible in many ways, but it has left a lasting impression on our history. The hills that form Old Oswestry Hillfort and the Coppie are both made out of sand and gravel left behind by the glaciers. And the warming climate and melting glaciers left behind lush grasslands quickly populated by mammoths and other animals – and our early hunting ancestors – moving north from southern Europe.
And so the Ice Age sets the scene for the whole of the human history of Oswestry – something to think about as you look at the hills and valleys of Shropshire!