Shropshire is a historic county on the Welsh border, its name derived from Scrobbesbyrig, the Saxon name for Shrewsbury meaning a town built on a wooded hill. It is bounded by Flintshire and Cheshire to the north, Staffordshire and Worcestershire to the east, Herefordshire and Radnorshire to the south, and Montgomeryshire and Denbighshire to the west, extending some thirty-eight miles in length and containing 890,000 acres divided into fourteen hundreds, with sixteen market towns and a population of nearly 114,000. The fertile north and east produced abundant wheat and barley, while the more mountainous south and west offered good pasture for sheep and cattle if less arable land.
Beneath the surface, Shropshire held mines of lead, copper, iron and coal, and the county was already, in the eighteenth century, at the forefront of industrial change: the Ironbridge Gorge along the Severn near Coalbrookdale, where Abraham Darby had pioneered smelting iron with coke rather than charcoal earlier in the century, was fast becoming one of the most important industrial sites in the world, and would shortly give its name to the first iron bridge ever built, erected across the Severn in 1779. A local bituminous rock found over the coal seams was processed into a pitch-like substance used for caulking ships, an ingenious early exploitation of the county's mineral wealth.
Shrewsbury, the county town, encircled by a loop of the Severn, retained its castle and abbey among its notable antiquities, while Ludlow Castle at the meeting of the Teme and Corve served for centuries as the seat of the Council of Wales and the Marches, governing the whole borderland from its walls. The Wrekin, rising abruptly from the plain east of Shrewsbury, and the wild uplands of the Stiperstones and Clee Hills gave the county's western half a dramatic, hilly character quite unlike its fertile eastern lowlands, a contrast that has remained one of Shropshire's defining features.