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It was no good impression as they clearly marked how much fighting was invested for just a few kilometres of “progress”. It also helped me to understand the depressing feeling I had when passing this area. It was the same feeling that I get in the Normandy areas of D-day: these are devastated areas that still breath the despair of mass slaughtering during Europe´s “great” wars of the 20th century.
The Property Ladder:
Very early January 2016. I just had spent half an hour in the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. This is a typical church for the area, at least from the outside. I wouldn´t have visited it if I had not to kill time whilst waiting for my wife and daughter doing some shopping. Once inside I didn´t regret their shopping anymore. All windows were filled with very colourful stained glass. Many of them with detailed figurative scenes in various styles, some of them resembling comic strips. As I found out they dated from the 14th to the 19th centuries, and were brought to St Mary's from elsewhere, much of it from Europe, in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is said that "no other church in the country has a collection to equal it”.
This was a real surprise. I mean, it is no wonder to find treasures of English and Welsh culture in the midlands, but I never expected something covering large parts of central Europe here. It turned out that some guys from the priory collected the stained glass from churches in Holland, Belgium, France and Germany that were either abandoned or replaced by new windows.
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