Condover

In the Anglo-Saxon era between 613 and 1017 the village was the principal settlement in the Hundred of Condover, an administrative area that was large enough to sustain about 100 households. By the 11th century Condover was a royal manor of King Edward the Confessor. It formed a significant part of the great royal forest known as the Long Forest, which stretched almost the full length of South Shropshire.

The Domesday Book of 1086 records it as Conendovre, and the Norman manor house is believed to have stood on the site now occupied by Church House, a short distance north west of the Church. It would also appear that there was a mill on the Cound Brook in the village which produced a good annual income. At the time of the Domesday census, Condover was held by Roger de Montgomerie, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, who had been granted seven-eighths of Shropshire by his cousin William I in 1071. The revenues of the manor were later forfeited by Robert de Bellême, Earl Roger's heir, and returned to Royal hands under Henry I. As with other royal manors, the affairs of Condover were managed by the local Shire reeve or sheriff, whose duty it was to keep the King's forest and manor well stocked and maintained.

In 1226, Henry III visited Shrewsbury to meet his brother-in-law, Prince Llewellyn ap Gruffydd of Wales. Henry offered Condover to Llewellyn as a goodwill gesture, but sustained wars and skirmishes between England and Wales throughout the 13th century ensured that stable tenure of Condover manor and Hundred did not settle for nearly 300 years.

Condover hall from the front driveway

The Royal manor passed in and out of Crown tenure until, in 1586, Elizabeth I finally made a charter grant of the Condover manor lands to Chief Justice Thomas Owen, a Member of Parliament and Recorder of Shrewsbury. Owen began the building of the current Condover Hall but died before its completion. The hall remained in the Owen family and its descendants for over 300 years. John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870–72 describes Condover:

"CONDOVER, a village, a parish, a sub-district, and a hundred, in Salop. The village stands on an affluent of the river Severn, adjacent to the Shrewsbury and Hereford Railway, 4½ miles S of Shrewsbury; and has a station on the railway, and a post office under Shrewsbury. The parish includes also the villages of Chatford and Dorrington. Acres, 7,422. Real property, £14,431. Pop., 1,871. Houses, 376. The property is subdivided. Condover House is the seat of E. W. S. Owen, Esq.; and was built, about 1590, by Chief Justice Owen. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Lichfield. Value, £258.* Patron, R. Cholmondely, Esq. The church is chiefly Norman; contains monuments of the Owens, one of them by Roubiliac; and is good. The p. curacy of Dorrington is a separate benefice. Charities, £66. -The sub-district is in Atcham district; and contains fourteen parishes. Acres, 37, 057. Pop., 6, 063. Houses, 1, 157. -The hundred includes most of the sub-district; extends considerably beyond it; and is cut into the divisions of Condover and Cound. Acres, 25,630 and 19,684. Pop. of the whole, 6,551. Houses, 1,261."

Page 112 of Magna Carta Ancestry by Douglas Richardson and Kimball Everingham records that Anne Owen, daughter of Roger Owen esq and The Honourable Alice of Condover Hall, married Sir St John Booth of Dunham-Massey, Cheshire, in 1662 and they had a son named Thomas in 1663.

In 1930 GWR 4900 Class steam locomotive No. 4915 was built and named Condover Hall. It was in regular service until British Railways withdrew it 1965. In the 1980s Hornby Railways produced an electric model of the engine.

RAF Condover was opened in August 1942 and was used variously as a fighter, bomber and a training base during the Second World War, closing in June 1945.[5] Many of the original buildings including the control tower still stand although most of the three concrete runways have been removed. RAF Condover now forms a major part of Berriewood Farm and Condover Industrial Estate. Condover Hall was commandeered as the station's officers' mess during the station's operational years.

Between the latter years of the war and the autumn of 1947 Condover was the site of a Prisoner of War (POW) camp for German airmen, who were employed as farm labourers in the local area. The prisoners were housed in the former WAAF accommodation huts at RAF Condover. Several of the POWs settled permanently in the Shrewsbury area and married local women.

The Elizabethan manor house in Condover, Condover Hall, was sold to and operated by the RNIB as the residential Condover Hall School for the Blind until 2005.[6] Sold to the private Priory Educational Group, the hall later became home to Condover Horizon School for autistic children. The Priory Group closed the school and college in mid-2009 and the property was again offered for sale.

In 2011 JCA Adventure bought the house, and it now hosts children's residential adventure holidays.

The lanes, footpaths and woodlands around Condover and Bomere Pool featured in several of the medieval detective novels about Brother Cadfael by novelist Ellis Peters.

In 1988 the BBC filmed a three-part documentary about the RNIB residential school at Condover Hall, and the children were filmed extensively in and around the village.

Condover originally formed a principal part of the ancient Hundred of Condover.

There are 12 parish councillors representing Condover, which is a warded parish:

• Condover Ward is represented by five parish councillors
• Dorrington Ward is represented by four parish councillors
• Ryton Ward is represented by one parish councillor
• Stapleton Ward is represented by two parish councillors

The parish, along with a number of others to its south, is part of the Burnell electoral division, which returns one councillor to Shropshire Council.

The parish is part of the Shrewsbury and Atcham parliamentary constituency, and the Member of Parliament since 2005 is Daniel Kawczynski of the Conservative Party.

In the 1801 census Condover's total population was 1,251. In 1901 it was 1,658 and by 1971 the population had fallen to 1,488.

The population of the Condover parish was estimated as 1,972 for 2008, of which an estimated 659 lived in the village of Condover itself.[2]

The village of Condover is in a low-lying area, towards the southern end of the Shropshire-Severn plain. The gently undulating land in the vicinity is bisected by Cound Brook, an important local tributary of the River Severn, which rises in the Stretton Hills some seven miles to the south west.

Condover stands in the lee of an outcropping spur, consisting of a Pre-Cambrian limestone and sandstone sedimentary rock extension of the Longmyndian range, intruding into the Shropshire-Severn plain with major appearances at Longden, Lyth Hill, Bayston Hill, and Sharpstone Hill. North of the River Severn it does not outcrop again until it appears east of Shrewsbury as Haughmond Hill. The sediments were laid down under a vast warm ocean, surrounded by many volcanoes that were ground down by later Ice Age glaciers which provided the fertile soil that contributed to Condover becoming a successful farming community throughout medieval times.[8] There are still several active geological fault lines underlying the area and on 2 April 1990 Condover experienced an earthquake, measuring 5.4 on the Richter Scale, centred on Bishop's Castle on the Welsh border.

There are many small sand and gravel quarries located around the village, although the area is still very rural. In one of the many gravel bog sink holes near Bomere Pool the bones of a woolly mammoth were discovered in 1986. The skeleton is one of the most complete mammoth skeletons ever to be found in the UK and has been dated at 14,000 years old, later than the animals had been previously thought to survive in Europe.[9] There is a model of the Condover mammoth skeleton at the Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre in Craven Arms, along with a reconstruction of how it might have lived. Next to Bomere Pool is a secluded traditional forest of about 125 acres (51 ha), woodland that once formed part of Bayston Hill and Condover royal forest.

Minsterley Motors route 435 (Shrewsbury-Ludlow) runs through and calls at the village.[10]

Regional Cycle Route 32/33 passes through the village, on its way from Betton Strange to Great Ryton.

The village has its own primary school, Condover Primary School, a Church of England co-educational school with 109 pupils aged 5–11.

There is no secondary school in the village; children over the age of eleven travel by bus to a range of secondary schools in nearby Meole Brace, Shrewsbury or Church Stretton and the sixth-form college in Shrewsbury.