Region
Shropshire
The northern edge of the border perry and cider country, where the Clee Hills and Corvedale carry an orchard tradition continuous with Herefordshire’s and a strong local variety conservation effort.
Also written the Marches.
- Country
- England
- Parent region
- None — a top-level region
- Classification in use
- Long Ashton classification
- Protected designations
- None applying here
Described in full
- Shape
- A schematic outline of Wales, the English south-west peninsula and the west Midlands, separated by the Bristol Channel and the Severn estuary. Three small outlined areas sit on the Welsh border and the lower Severn; a soft unbordered wash spreads across the peninsula beneath them.
- The key, and why it matters
- A solid outline means a name with a boundary in law. A soft wash with no edge means a cultural region that has never been defined by anything. Drawing both the same way would give one of them a precision it does not have.
- The protected names
- Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire each hold protected names for both cider and perry, and each is a county with an administrative boundary that the specification refers to.
- The West Country
- Drawn as a wash across Somerset, Devon and the ground east of them. It is the phrase the tradition uses about itself and it protects nothing: there is no register entry, no boundary and no specification behind it.
- Wales
- Traditional Welsh Cider and Traditional Welsh Perry are protected names covering the whole country rather than a county, which is a different shape of protection again and is why Wales is not subdivided here.
- What is not shown
- Kent, Sussex, East Anglia, Yorkshire and Shropshire all have cider, and none of it is on this map. The map is about the concentration, not the distribution.
- Precision
- Every shape here is indicative. The coastline is simplified to the point of being diagrammatic and the county outlines are approximate. Nothing on this figure should be measured off, and where an exact boundary matters the specification is the authority.
Climate and land
The first thing to know about a cider region, because it sets what the fruit can be. Ripening date, the acid that survives to the press and the sugar that reaches the vat are all decided here, and they are what makes one tradition's answers wrong for another's fruit.
Shropshire lies inland in the Welsh border rain shadow, with a drier and more continental climate than the counties west of it and colder winters than Herefordshire to the south. The orchard country is in the south of the county — Corvedale, the Clee Hills fringe and the Teme valley — where valley shelter and south-facing slopes compensate for the northern latitude. Elevation is the limiting factor: above roughly two hundred metres the season shortens quickly, late cider fruit fails to ripen reliably, and frost at blossom becomes a persistent risk in the valley bottoms below the hills. Rainfall is moderate and disease pressure lower than in the west, so fruit hangs well and skins stay sound. In practice the county grows the same fruit as northern Herefordshire, a fortnight later and with a little less certainty at the late end of the season.
Soils
Old Red Sandstone and associated loams in the south of the county give the same warm, free-draining orchard ground found across the border in Herefordshire; the heavier northern plain soils are colder and less suited to fruit.
The orchards
How the fruit is actually grown here — tree form, planting, what else the ground is used for, and who owns it.
- Standard orchards on vigorous stock, grazed beneath, are the historic form and remain the dominant surviving type in the southern hills.
- Perry pear standards occur throughout the south of the county, marking the northern edge of the three-counties perry pear belt.
- Orchard holdings are small and attached to mixed farms; the county has no large commercial cider orchard sector of its own.
- Variety conservation is unusually active here through border cultivar networks, which have identified and propagated a number of apples known only from the Marches.
- Modern replanting is small-scale and often uses locally sourced grafts rather than nursery standards.
The words used here
Each of these names something the tradition does. They are given in the local language because that is the form a reader will meet them in — on a label, on a cider-house door, or in a conversation about how the cider is poured.
| Term | Language | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| the Marches | — | The English–Welsh border country. As a fruit term it denotes a continuous orchard and cultivar region that pays no attention to the national boundary running through it. |
| grafting | — | Joining a scion of a chosen cultivar to a rootstock. Every named cider apple and perry pear is maintained this way, because seed does not come true — which is why variety conservation is a practical craft rather than a matter of seed banking. |
| standard | — | A full-size tree on vigorous rootstock with a high, clear trunk, planted at wide spacing and grazed beneath. |
| perry | — | The fermented drink of perry pears. The southern Shropshire hills mark the northern limit of the pear belt that makes it possible. |
History
How cider making here came to take the shape it has.
- Shropshire’s orchards belong to the Marches tradition that runs from Monmouthshire through Herefordshire into the county’s southern hills, and cider and perry were made here on the same household and farm-labour basis as further south.
- The county was never a centre of commercial production, and its fruit historically supplied local farm making or was sold into the Herefordshire trade.
- Twentieth-century orchard loss was heavy, and the county’s surviving standard orchards are concentrated in less intensively farmed hill country.
- From the 1990s, border cultivar identification work located and propagated apples that had survived in hedgerows and neglected orchards, several of which had no published description before that work.
- The current sector is small: a handful of farm and craft producers making cider and perry from local fruit, mostly for regional sale.
Culture
What the drink is for here, and the occasions and rooms it belongs to. This is not decoration around the cider — in several of these places it is the part that decides how the cider is made.
- Cider and perry are sold through farm gates, local pubs and regional food markets rather than through national distribution.
- The county participates in the border and three-counties competition circuit and shares its judging categories and vocabulary.
- Orchard events focus heavily on identification: bringing unknown fruit to be named is a normal part of an apple day here in a way it is not everywhere.
- Perry has a modest but real presence, and the county’s makers treat it as a separate drink with its own methods rather than as a pear-flavoured cider.
About Shropshire
Shropshire is the northern end of a fruit region that does not stop at any county line. The orchard country of Corvedale, the Clee Hills and the Teme runs continuously into northern Herefordshire and across into Wales, and the fruit, the practice and the vocabulary are the same on both sides of the border and both sides of the county boundary. Treating it as a separate tradition would be tidier and less accurate.
What the county does have is an edge. Its higher ground and shorter season put real limits on how late a cider variety can be grown here, and the difference between a valley site in Corvedale and an exposed site a hundred metres above it is the difference between reliable ripening and an unreliable crop. That marginality shaped what was planted and where.
It is also a place where cultivar conservation has been unusually productive. Because the county’s orchards were small, dispersed and often left rather than grubbed, hedgerows and abandoned plots held surviving trees of varieties that no nursery listed. Systematic identification work since the 1990s has recovered and propagated a number of these, some documented for the first time in that process — a reminder that pomological knowledge here is still being added to, not simply inherited.
The scale of production is small and likely to stay so. Shropshire’s significance is as the northern boundary of the border perry and cider belt, and as evidence that the three counties are a fruit region rather than an administrative one.
How fruit is classified here
Every classification statement on CiderHQ names its system, because the schemes disagree in good faith and none of them is universal.
The fruit grown here
Cultivars recorded as grown in this region, historically or currently. Each card says what the fruit is.
Perry pear
Blakeney Red
The most widely planted perry pear of the Three Counties, taking its name from the Gloucestershire village of Blakeney and grown for perry, for canning and, during the First World War, for dye.
Cider apple
Dabinett
The most widely planted English cider apple: a small, late-ripening bittersweet whose soft, full tannin ferments into a cider that needs almost nothing added to it.
Cider apple
Michelin
A Norman bittersweet raised near Yvetot in the 1870s that became, in England rather than in France, one of the most widely planted cider apples in the world.
Cider apple
Yarlington Mill
A vigorous Somerset bittersweet, conical and red-striped, giving a cider with more aromatic lift than most of its class and a reputation for fruitiness that the tannin figures do not explain.
Cider apple
Brown Snout
A Herefordshire mild bittersweet named for the russet patch at its eye, valued for compact growth and regular cropping rather than for concentration.
Cider apple
Foxwhelp
The oldest named English cider apple still grown, a Herefordshire bittersharp of extraordinary acidity whose identity has fractured into a family of sports, seedlings and impostors.
Perry pear
Moorcroft
An early Malvern-country perry pear, known as Malvern Hills as often as by its own name, and at the centre of one of the sharpest identity disputes in perry.
Perry pear
Thorn
One of the oldest named English perry pears, recorded in the seventeenth century and still valued for a quick, light perry that is ready before most others.
What is made here
Styles this region is where they come from, or where they are characteristically made.
Dry cider
Cider fermented out or finished so that little fermentable sugar remains, leaving acid, tannin and alcohol to carry the palate.
Perry
The fermented drink of pears, a tradition parallel to cider rather than derived from it, in which unfermentable sorbitol leaves a sweetness the maker never chose.
Bottle-conditioned perry
Perry that completes its fermentation in the sealed bottle, generating carbonation and lees character while the fruit’s sorbitol keeps a sweetness the yeast cannot remove.
Medium cider
Cider carrying enough residual or added sugar to be perceptible without dominating, the commonest sweetness level in British retail.
Still perry
Perry without carbonation, in which the fruit’s sorbitol sweetness and its texture carry a drink that has no bubble to lean on.
Three Counties cider
The shared cider and perry tradition of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, defined by a common fruit inventory and by the perry pear orchards that survive nowhere else in comparable numbers.
Traditional draught cider
Cider dispensed from cask, bag-in-box or gravity without added gas, in the form that British cider has historically been drunk in pubs and at the farm gate.
Methods traditional here
Processes that belong to this region's practice rather than being applied to it from outside.
Prise de mousse
Bottle conditioning
Carbonating cider by letting a second fermentation finish inside the sealed bottle, so the gas is generated where it is going to stay.
Rack-and-cloth pressing
Building pomace into thin cloth-wrapped layers separated by racks, so that juice has a short path out and the stack can carry the pressure needed to force it.
Racking
Moving cider off the sediment it has thrown, which both cleans the liquid and — by taking yeast and nitrogen away with the deposit — slows what is left of the ferment.
Fermentation spontanée
Wild fermentation
Letting the microflora already present on the fruit and in the press house carry the ferment, in a succession rather than as a single organism.
Barrel ageing
Holding cider in wood — which may mean an old neutral vat used simply as a vessel, or fresh or spirit-seasoned oak used as a source of flavour, and the two are not the same operation.
Bag-in-box
A collapsing laminate bladder in a card outer, the standard farmgate and draught format, which keeps air out during dispense but lets oxygen through the film over weeks.
Replanting and orchard renewal
Replacing an orchard at the end of its life or filling its gaps as they appear, and dealing with the specific problem of planting apple where apple has already stood.
Standard orchard systems
Widely spaced, tall-trunked, long-lived fruit trees over grassland — a family of related but genuinely different systems running from the Three Counties through Normandy to the Austrian meadows.
Grazing under trees
Running livestock in an orchard so the sward becomes a second crop, with the tree protection, stock timing and food-safety rules that arrangement requires.
Protected designations that apply here
No protected designation or national definition on CiderHQ reserves a name for this area. That is a fact about the register rather than about the cider: a great deal of excellent cider is made in places no designation covers, and a designation would say nothing about how good it is.
What people ask next
Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.
- How are apples pressed for cider — The fruit is first milled to a pulp, then that pulp is squeezed — traditionally in cloth-wrapped layers under a screw or hydraulic ram, and industrially in a belt or bladder press. Whole apples cannot be pressed usefully; they must be broken first.
- How does cider ferment — Yeast consumes the sugar in apple juice and produces roughly equal masses of ethanol and carbon dioxide, along with the esters and higher alcohols that give cider much of its aroma. In a wild ferment several yeast species take turns before *Saccharomyces* finishes the job.
- What is dabinett — The most widely planted English cider apple: a late bittersweet with soft, full tannin that ferments into a cider needing very little added to it. Long Ashton measured it at 0.18 per cent acid and 0.29 per cent tannin.
- What is perry — Perry is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting the juice of pears, traditionally of specific perry pear cultivars rather than eating pears. It is to pears what cider is to apples, and has its own history in the three counties of England and in Normandy.
- How is sparkling cider made
- What is racking in cider making — Racking is siphoning cider off the sediment it has thrown into a clean vessel, leaving the lees behind. It clarifies the cider and, in traditional practice, is also used to slow a ferment by removing yeast with the lees.
Where to go next
- Cider and perry in England — The national picture this region sits inside, including how cider is legally defined there.
- All cider regions — The other traditions, each described in its own terms.
- Protected designations — What the law reserves a name for, and what it does not promise.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Marcher Apple Network · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Has rediscovered and DNA-fingerprinted a number of lost Welsh border cultivars. Cited for identity work on cultivars the national collections do not hold.
Three Counties Cider and Perry Association
TCCPA · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
National Perry Pear Centre, Hartpury · specialist organisation · passage verified 2026-08-24
Read on 2026-08-24 — and the address CiderHQ had registered, perrypears.co.uk, is no longer the Centre at all. It fails the TLS handshake over https, and over plain http it resolves to a Sedo domain-parking page: an earlier pass in this sprint recorded it as retrieved on the strength of an HTTP 200, which was wrong, and the correction is the point. The Centre publishes at nationalperrypearcentre.org.uk. It is the closest thing British perry has to an identity authority: it holds at least two examples of most known varieties, states that the DNA of most of them has been determined and is used as an aid to identification, and publishes a variety register with synonym lists. Its 121-variety register is transcribed into the perry pear records, including the nineteen names it shows being claimed by more than one variety.
Traditional Orchard Habitat Inventory and orchard loss surveys
People’s Trust for Endangered Species / Natural England · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24. The traditional orchard campaign pages were reached and confirmed, but the orchard-loss figures CiderHQ wants from this body sit in survey outputs rather than on the campaign page, and were not located in this pass.