The front cover of the first edition of Old Shropshire Life (1904) features the loggerheads, as you’d expect, even though these are the Salop loggerheads and not the Shropshire County ones. They are not ‘langued’ either.
The book was written by the ‘minor author’ Lady Catherine Milnes Gaskell, who lived with her family at the grand house of Wenlock Abbey. They were one of the county’s leading families in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Catherine was something of a beauty, being sketched by the artist Dante Rossetti, but it was literature that inspired her. She wrote novels as well as profiles of the county and her life. Major novelists including Henry James and Thomas Hardy were frequently invited to stay.
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