Full of restaurants with fantastic tasting menus and other more modest lip-smacking eateries and pubs, a visit to the market town of Ludlow is a feast for the senses for foodies! On this walking tour, I’ll show you the gastronomic delights and historical sites of Ludlow, the slow food capital of England.

Starting in front of Ludlow Castle, you’ll be guided around the town, down Broad Street, through the Whitcliffe Common Nature Reserve and over the Dinham Bridge before arriving back at the castle. Along the way, I’ll show you some of the town’s more than 500 listed buildings of special historical interest – more than any other town of equivalent size. You’ll also hear fascinating tidbits about Ludlow and find out if poet John Betjeman was correct when he described it as “probably the loveliest town in England.”

On this 90-minute walk around the town, you’ll have the opportunity to:

• Find out how the castle’s massive outer bailey was used to muster troops for the Norman invasion of Ireland
• See Ludlow Assembly Rooms where the great and the good of Georgian and early Victorian society came to party
• Peruse Ludlow Market’s superb range of local produce
• Take in the massive cathedral-sized wool church of St Laurence’s with its famous carillon playing at 4-hour intervals
• Pass by sumptuously decorated historical inns, shops and houses, including the Feathers Hotel which was once described as the “prodigy of timber framed buildings”
• Walk through the fortified gatehouse of Broad Gate, built to keep out the marauding Welsh
• Go over the medieval stone Ludlow Bridge, built in the early 1400s, which was a site of early confrontation in the Wars of the Roses
• Discover Whitcliffe Common, a site of Special Scientific Interest with 415-million-year-old rock formations and early fossils, on a stroll along the Bread Walk, its riverside promenade
• Take delight in the River Teme, a fast-flowing river which skirts the town
• Hear about how Lucien Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon, was confined to Dinham House during the Napoleonic Wars

By the end of the tour, you’ll have the answers to questions like:

• Who was the first husband of Catherine of Aragon?
• What is a Burnt Cornflake?
• Where did Robin Hood lose an arrow?
• When did Ludlow become the capital of Wales?
• How did Ludlow get its name?

So come and join me on this stroll around Ludlow and Whitcliffe Common and discover its historical and culinary delights!