Paradise lost: Rediscovering a forgotten pleasure garden at Attingham Park

Today, Attingham Park and its estate are cared for by the National Trust, but this landscape – which is located at Atcham, between Telford and Shrewsbury – has been shaped by over 4,000 years of human activity. Nestled within a fertile valley in which the River Severn and its tributary, the Tern, converge, its rich, productive soils have long been attractive for farming and settlement, and still bear traces of Bronze Age occupation and Iron Age field systems. The estate also contains a significant portion of the remains of Viroconium Cornoviorum (Roman Wroxeter, a regional capital and one of the largest urban centres in Britannia), while a major recent geophysical survey revealed contemp