Peg leads the Shuts & Passages and Darwin’s Shrewsbury walks and takes most of the private bookings. She is the one who will stop mid-sentence to correct something she said on the same corner last month because a new deposit came into the archive; several regulars come back annually specifically to hear what has changed. Owen Prichard qualified Blue Badge in 2016 after a decade teaching history in Welshpool, and he leads 1403: The Battle and everything that touches the border, in English or in Welsh on request — he is the only guide in the county who will do the Welsh Bridge walk in the language the bridge is named after. He also carries the longbow replica, which weighs eleven pounds and has ended more arguments about medieval archery than any lecture could. Isla Bevan joined in 2019 with an MA in public history from Birmingham and now runs the schools programme, the Ghost Signs & Shopfronts walk and, quietly, the whole diary. If you email us, Isla replies, usually the same day and usually with more detail than you asked for. Between the three of us we walked 4,100 people round the town in 2025 and took nineteen school groups out, and we cap every public walk at eighteen because the eighteenth person can still hear and the twenty-fourth cannot.

A new walk takes about four months. It starts with a question rather than a route — why is that churchyard higher than the street, who paid for the shopfront, what happened to the people who lived up this passage — and the route is whatever answers it in ninety minutes of walking. Peg spends two days a month in the county record office and that time is costed into every ticket, which is why the walks are not the same in November as they were in March. In 2024 a bundle of nineteenth-century rate books came in and changed three of the stops on the Shuts walk; in 2025 a photograph turned up of Barracks Passage before the 1936 widening and it now gets held up in front of the passage itself. We do not write a script and then perform it for fourteen years. Where we are not certain, we say we are not certain, and where two sources disagree we tell you both and let you pick — which sounds like a small thing until you have been on a tour where a guide states as fact something that was made up in 1974 for a guidebook.

The Bellstone is a lump of grey volcanic rock about the size of a small car, sitting in a courtyard off Barracks Passage behind what used to be the Bellstone Inn. It has no business being there: the nearest rock of that type is in Cumbria, a hundred and thirty miles north. In the 1820s a boy at Shrewsbury School was shown it by the town clerk and told, as everyone was then told, that it had always been there. He wrote later that being unable to explain that stone was the beginning of his interest in how the surface of the earth got to be the shape it is, and that the answer — that a glacier carried it — was the first thing he learned that the whole town had been wrong about. The boy was Charles Darwin. The stone is still there, it is free to look at, and it is stop four on the Darwin walk. We took the name because a company built on archives ought to be named after the object that proves the received version can be wrong.