Bomere Pool

Vast tracts of Shropshire were covered with ice sheets during the last Ice Age about 18,000 years ago. When the ice sheets retreated large ice blocks were left isolated, often surrounded and covered by the moraine, gravels and clays left behind by the glaciers. When this glacial ice eventually melted sediments collapsed into holes or depressions referred to as 'Kettle Holes'. These holes had no means of drainage and would either turn into steep sided lakes, usually referred to as Meres in Shropshire or, if the lake completely filled with clay and peat, became a moss bog. Bomere Pool is a particularly fine example of a kettle hole mere.[2]

Bomere Pool has been utilised by humans for thousands of years. There is the archaeological mounded remains of a suspected Iron Age settlement at the south east corner of the mere. Two thousand years ago there was a substantial Roman army camp and an associated civilian settlement on the pool side.[3] Shropshire's oldest ghost of a Roman soldier seeking his lover who was lost in a sudden flood has been sighted on Easter Day, in the years when Easter falls on the same day as it did the year he died.

The 1920s romantic novelist Mary Webb located the action of her most famous novel Precious Bane around Bomere Pool, which she called Sarn Mere in the book. Webb wrote the book while living in Spring Cottage on Lyth Hill near Bayston Hill and at her London home.[4] The travel writer SPB Mais wrote of being taken to the Bomere to see Webb’s setting for Sarn in the 1930s.[5]

Bomere Pool also featured in several of the medieval detective novels about Brother Cadfael by novelist Ellis Peters.

Between the 1960s and 1980s the pool was a popular destination for local residents who visited on hot summer days with their young children to splash about in the water and eat meals nearby from a small cafe and ice cream stall. A free squash court built by a local farmer and a public house were also open to the public.

In 1986 a woman out for a walk discovered the bones of a woolly mammoth and three juvenile mammoths in an associated nearby moss and gravel bog sink hole.[6]