Titterstone Clee Hill

With evidence of human activity stretching back to the Bronze Age, the summit of this bleak and barren hill is strewn with prehistoric cairns and walls, juxtaposed with brutal industrial ruins which loom ominously above the manmade craters of abandoned quarries.

Rising abruptly 1,750 feet from the otherwise gently rolling countryside of the English Midlands, Titterstone Clee Hill is one of the steep-sided Shropshire Hills.

Towards the summit of this sheep-cropped mount, an angular assortment of out-of-place industrial ruins contrast starkly with the bucolic valley below. These weirldy brutal concrete and brick structures are relics of more than a century of quarrying and processing stone on the hill.

Titterstone Clee’s dark “dhu stone,” a carboniferous dolerite, named after the Welsh word for black (dhu), provided an important source of construction material during the 19th and 20th centuries and was used to build the docks of Cardiff.

Above the crumbling concrete ruins, the remains of much earlier human activity crowns the summit. A late Bronze or early Iron Age defensive hill fort, partly destroyed by later quarrying activity is still discernible, it’s lengthy banks and ditches being of a type suggesting a fifth to eighth century BC construction.

Human activity continues to shape the hill today, with high-tech meteorological and aerospace monitoring equipment towering above the weird myriad of ruins and relics, adding to the somewhat fantastical, post-cataclysmic vibe of this peculiar pockmarked hilltop.