Churchstoke

Churchstoke is a border village in the fullest sense. The settlement is in Wales, the parish historically extended into Shropshire, and the county boundary through here has been redrawn more than once.

The English name means the stockade or enclosed place; the Welsh, Yr Ystog, is a borrowing of it, which is the reverse of the usual pattern in this county and tells you which way the influence ran.

The ground

This is the Vale of Montgomery: genuinely lowland, good farmland, gentle relief, and no natural defensive line whatever. Which is precisely why Offa's Dyke runs through it, and why the Normans covered it with earthwork castles.

The dyke is at its most legible in this country because the Mercians had to build a barrier where the ground offered none.

Roundton Hill

Immediately south-east of the village is Roundton Hill, a steep isolated knoll of hard igneous rock that has resisted erosion while everything round it wore down.

It carries an Iron Age hillfort on the summit and is now a nature reserve managed by Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust, notable for rock outcrop plants, unimproved grassland and a substantial number of butterflies and moths.

The rock is the remains of Ordovician volcanic activity, and Corndon Hill just over the border in Shropshire is the same kind of thing on a larger scale. Stone from Corndon was used for Bronze Age axe production and has been identified in objects a long way from here.

Bacheldre

A mile west is Bacheldre Watermill, a working water-powered flour mill that has been grinding on and off since the eighteenth century and is currently in production.

Working mills are rare enough now that one is worth noting, and it is a useful corrective to the impression that everything in this line of business is a museum.

Now

Churchstoke has a shop of disproportionate size and regional fame, which is the sort of thing that happens when a village sits on a main road in an area with no towns for some distance.

Montgomery is four miles north-west, Bishop's Castle five miles east over the border, and the Kerry Ridgeway runs west from near here along the watershed.