History of Ludlow

llers by stagecoach and mail coach. The Angel on Broad Street was one such notable coaching inn, where several passenger and mail coaches departed and arrived on a regular basis every week, including the Aurora coach which departed for London (taking 27 hours in 1822). The Angel was the last coaching inn in Ludlow to have such coach traffic, following the arrival of the railways in 1852. The Angel ceased trading in the early 1990s. A surviving medieval coaching inn today is the 15th century Bull Hotel on the Bull Ring. Several other pubs and hotels in the town have historic pedigree, including the Rose and Crown where allegedly a pub has existed since 1102.

In 1802, Horatio Nelson was awarded the freedom of the borough and stayed at The Angel coaching inn on Broad Street, together with his mistress Emma and her husband Sir William Hamilton. The honour was presented to him in a room at the inn, later to be known as the Nelson Room, and he addressed the crowds from one of the bay windows on the first floor. Also during the Napoleonic Wars, Lucien Bonaparte, younger brother of the French Emperor, and his family were imprisoned at Dinham House in 1811.

In 1832 Dr Thomas Lloyd, the Ludlow doctor and amateur geologist, met Roderick Murchison at Ludford Corner to study the rocks exposed along the River Teme and on Whitcliffe, advancing Murchison's theory for a Silurian System that he was to publish in 1839. Immediately above the topmost layer of the marine rock sequence forming Murchison's Silurian period was a thin layer of dark sand containing numerous remains of early fish, especially their scales, along with plant debris, spores and microscopic mites. In contrast to the underlying sediments of the Ludlow Series which were deposited in a shallow warm sea some 400 million years ago, the Ludlow Bone Bed represents terrestrial (land) conditions and thus a fundamental change in the