DISCOVER Much Wenlock
Think the modern Olympics started in Athens? You have to visit the green hills of Shropshire to discover where the starting pistol was actually fired.
INTHE FINAL week of July, the world will stop what it’s doing to watch fastest, strongest, leapiest and most skilful athletes on the planet compete in the 2024 Summer Olympic Games. France’s biggest venues will be packed out with those lucky enough to get tickets, while more than three billion people will see the action from their homes.
As the globe prepares itself for the ultimate in sporting occasions, a rural town in Shropshire will be staging an event of its own. There won’t be stadiums full of people, just a small group gathered by a running track. Instead of the Eiffel Tower, small wooded hills and a cricket pitch will form the backdrop. And the infrastructure will consist of a few small tents where volunteers diligently jot down each result.
This joyful, yet modest affair is the Wenlock Olympian Games, held annually in the town of Much Wenlock. It feels like what it is – a fun community event – yet two things may surprise you about it. The first is that it pre-dates its much larger counterpart by almost 50 years. And the second is that it might actually be the reason the modern Olympic Games exists in the first place.
So how could this small town, whose entire population can fit inside the Stade de France 27 times over, have inspired one of the biggest sporting events the world has ever seen?
Mac Bardsley, a Trustee for the Wenlock Olympian Committee, has agreed to show me by leading me along the Olympian Trail that runs through the town – where bronze medalshaped markers indicate key points in the story. We’ll then venture into the wooded hills that form the town’s pleasant backdrop to complete a 6½-mile loop.
We start at the town’s museum, which devotes plenty of its floorspace to Much Wenlock’s role in the creation of the modern Olympics. We then explore the cluster of bustling streets in the town centre that broaden and narrow as they thread their way between the historic – often timber-framed – building
