Five members of our group had a wonderful weekend (22nd - 24th Feb) in Shropshire looking at rocks and structures, which contrasted with those in the Pennines. The weather was snowy, wet and windy, but the sun came out sometimes and gave us excellent views. We stayed at Bridges Youth Hostel, near Church Stretton, so were able to study Silurian and Ordovician rocks in the South Shropshire Hills.

The Mortimer Trail, south of Ludlow, had good trilobites in folded Silurian siltstones while the Teme Trail, along the river in Ludlow, showed us the nose of the Ludlow anticline and limestone features. We explored the Stiperstones quartzite, the mineralisation of the Shelve inlier and the Corndon Hill intrusion, and then went to the Secret Hills exhibition in Craven Arms, which has a very good geological history of South Shropshire and its glaciation.

Gordon Hillier of the Shropshire Geological Society took us around north-west Shropshire for a day, to see Triassic sandstones in large dune beds, limestones with load casts at Llanymynach and a mystifying Millstone Grit replaced with chert near Oswestry. We were delighted to be shown slides of the whole area before we went out to see Gordon's sites and interested in an area of Carboniferous rocks that were so different from our own.

Many thanks to the group members who worked hard to ensure that it was a successful trip.

We have been asked to visit Beaumont Park and Deans Wood, near Netherton, to have a look at the geology of these interesting, but different, sites. In the future we should be able to take groups around both areas and it would be nice to produce a geological trail for that area.

Further information will follow if these preliminary visits go well.