The Gaskell Arms Hotel

17th Century coaching inn offering 16 en-suite accommodation rooms, restaurant bar meals, Sunday lunches, private parking, guest ales, private beer garden.

Main roads are now as important as they were before the 19th Central railway expansion and as they were in 1790 when the Gaskell Arms was given is present frontal appearance.  Once again this Hotel has become a focal point in the Borough of Wenlock.  The bow windows with their leaden domes have offered a stately greeting to visitors since the days of the French Revolution.

Since those Georgian days there have been many changes.  The four-horse coach (itself a novelty in the 17th Century) disappeared as the railway spread and until 1860 when the railway first came to Much Wenlock the Gaskell Arms retained importance as a Coaching Inn.

Local historians say that the site was occupied in the Tudor rimes and earlier by a Rindleford Hall.  Some of the Hotels internal timbering (which were obscured with 18th Century plaster until the 1960 renovation revealed them) and limestone footings may contain vestiges of this Medieval Hall.  Almost certainly if faced a ford, as the stream, which provided the main water supply for the Priory still runs beneath the road.  The external brickwork was in its time a major modernisation in the late 1700s.

The Gaskell Arms, as part of the Much Wenlock estate, was owned by the Williams-Wynn family from about 1630 to 1861, and, as was the fashion the hostelry was named the “Wynnstay Arms”, upon the change of ownership the crossed foxes of the welsh borderland disappeared from the inn sign and the heraldry of the Yorkshire Milnes-Gaskell family appeared instead.

Under the Milnes-Gaskell inspiration the town, from being merely picturesque became and archaeologists delight.  Also the town retained a lively market, being consciously the head of a Borough of 35 square miles.

The past is not forgotten;  the local Wheatland Hunt still meets at “The Gaskell” and,   stabling has been turned into guest accommodation

The Gaskell Arms is now in the ownership of the Sheldon Family, and has been for the past 30 years, who have carried out extensive modifications so as to shown the best architectural features of the past allied with modern comforts for all clients to enjoy.

Wi-fi access available.