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112/365: The Mere, Ellesmere
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I had a full day free today, so I thought I'd set off on a bus adventure! It's a good job I did choose that, actually, since rail turned out to be out of the question thanks to a train hitting a tractor on the line I might have used. Fortunately the buses weren't affected, so they ran as normal. As it was a nice day, I chose to go to Ellesmere. This was somewhere I'd never been before, in spite of its being in Shropshire, the next county over. It's a big county, though! It took me three buses and several hours to get here, and just three miles further north I'd be in Wrexham County Borough in Wales. Ellesmere is at the heart of the rather grandly named "Shropshire Lake District", which is a rather overblown designation really as there aren't any mountains to go with the lakes.

A couple of the meres are privately owned and are not really accessible to walkers, and a couple more are a bit of a step from the town. Fortunately, the biggest and best known -- which is called simply "The Mere" -- is on the edge of Ellesmere itself, just a few minutes' walk from the town centre. You can walk around most of it, partly along a pleasant wooded trail and partly on an open concreted promenade with the odd ice cream hut and the like. I did about half of the walk today. Ellesmere town itself has Norman origins but most of its buildings date from the 18th and 19th centuries, especially the years after 1805 when it was linked by canal to Ellesmere Port and thence Liverpool. (There's still a thriving canal trade here, though these days it's pleasure narrowboats that ply the canal.)

I'm very pleased that today's little adventure worked out, since it wasn't all that cheap and I really can't justify the spend to do extensive excursions too often. (You may have noticed that most of my days out are to fairly local spots.) I doubt I'll be going as far as this again for a while -- it's around 50 miles from home, which I think is enough for me to omit the "local" tag from this post despite my destination being in Shropshire. I don't especially mind, as I've never been a really extensive traveller and I'm lucky enough to have a lot of interesting things to see either in my own area or accessible via a shorter and/or cheaper trip. I do recommend Ellesmere, though only if the weather is good as there's not much to do indoors there.