Bouldon is a
hamlet in Shropshire, England. It lies in the
civil parish of
Diddlebury.
The hamlet comprises approximately 14 houses, a number of agricultural buildings and a
public house named the "Tally Ho".
It is 8.5 miles (13.7 km) by road northeast of the
market town of
Ludlow.
Bouldon used to be a more populous place, as was this rural area of Shropshire generally, and was a place to stop en route between Ludlow and
Bridgnorth. The route from Bouldon to Ludlow was a
turnpike road between 1794 and 1873.
Yhe main road between the towns of Ludlow and Bridgnorth no longer passes through the hamlet; it today takes a route to the east of
Brown Clee Hill instead.
Bouldon Mill is Grade II Listed former
mill building in the hamlet, now a residence/therapy centre, which still has the
Coalbrookdale iron-cast
water wheel (using the flow of the Pye Brook) and inside workings. The stone building was built in 1790 but there was a timber mill beforehand built in 1611. It may have operated as a mill as late as the 1930s.
There is also a house on the site where a small church, built from
corrugated iron, used to be. This small church, or chapel, was called All Saints and was erected by the rector of the
Church of England's Holdgate parish (which Bouldon was part of until 1921) in 1873. It was demolished in the 1980s, having become dilapidated.
Bouldon had a
charcoal-fuelled
ironworks of its own in the 17th and 18th centuries, producing
pig iron. It was important during the
English Civil War. On 28 September 1643,
Charles Iauthorised payment of £965 10s. to the iron master, Francis Walker, for manufacture of artillery and ammunition delivered to the
Royalist forces at
Shrewsbury,
Bridgnorth and
Worcester. It closed around 1795 and only a tree covered
slag heap remains.
From the late 11th century to 1884, Bouldon was a detached part of
Holdgate parish. Its transfer to Diddlebury parish was effectively a return to the situation prior to the change in the 11th century. (Bouldon was transferred to the Church of England's
ecclesiastical parish of Diddlebury, from Holdgate, only in 1921.)
The
Domesday Book of 1086 records 4 households existing at the time. Bouldon was at that time part of C
lvestan hundred, a Saxon hundred that was in the early 12th century replaced by
Munslow.
The Tally Ho Inn was first licensed in 1844. It closed in 2006, but reopened in 2012 as a locally-owned freehouse, and retains its country character and serves several local
real ales.
In Bouldon, and also in nearby
Peatonand Peatonstrand, weather-board houses were constructed in the 1950s by the Church Commissioners, who bought the Holder Estate in 1942. Of the four in Bouldon, two are currently derelict. The ones in Bouldon are named Cedarwood Houses.
