Guided walks in Shrewsbury

Ninety minutes and eight hundred years, on foot.

Bellstone Walks takes eighteen people at a time through the shuts, churchyards and shopfronts that most of the town walks past. Led by an archivist and two Blue Badge guides who will show you the document as well as the doorway.
Book a walkSee the route
  • Blue Badge accredited
  • Eighteen walkers maximum
  • 4,100 walkers in 2025
Fig. IThe town within the loop of the Severn, with the Shuts route marked
“I have lived here twenty-six years and Peg took us down four passages I did not know existed, one of which comes out behind my own dentist.”
Gwen Lassiter · Shuts & Passages, October

Three guides, one room up a passage

Dr Margaret Halliwell — Peg to everyone — spent nineteen years as an archivist at Shropshire Archives before she took the Blue Badge in 2011 and started walking people round the town she had been reading about. Owen Prichard joined in 2016 and takes the battle and the border walks in English or Welsh. Isla Bevan came in 2019 from an MA in public history and runs everything we do with schools. We work from two rooms above Barracks Passage, which is itself one of the stops.
The walks

Three public walks, and the prices are on the board

Every public walk is capped at eighteen so the person at the back can hear. Book ahead in August and at half-term; the rest of the year you can generally turn up.
Fig. III

The Shuts & Passages

£14
90 minutes · Saturdays 11.00 & 14.00
The passages between the streets, which is where the town keeps everything it did not want the road to see. Sixteen shuts, one churchyard three feet too high, and the narrowest legal right of way in Shropshire.
Concessions £10 · family of four £38 · meets at The Square
Book this walk
Fig. IV

Darwin's Shrewsbury

£16
2 hours · Wednesdays 14.00
From the house he was born in to the Bellstone he could not explain, by way of the school he hated and the chemist who sold him his first apparatus. Peg wrote her thesis on the school records; you get those too.
Concessions £12 · family of four £44 · meets at the Unitarian Church
Book this walk
Fig. V

1403: The Battle

£22
2½ hours · first Saturday, 10.00
The rebellion, the battlefield and the church built over the grave pit, three miles out. Owen takes this one and brings the longbow replica, which is heavier than anybody expects.
Concessions £18 · minibus to Battlefield included · meets at The Square
Book this walk
Private walks for up to twenty are £180 on any route and any date we are free. School half-days are £240 for up to thirty-two, two guides included.
© WaymarkHomeThe CompanyThe Walks