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SHREWSBURY , the county town of Shropshire, sits in a narrow loop of the River Severn, a three-hundred-yard spit of land being all that keeps the town centre from becoming an island. It would be difficult to design a better defensive site, and fortifications were first built on this narrow neck in the fifth century, after the departure of the Roman legions from the nearby garrison town of Viroconium. The Normans were swift to realize the strategic potential of the site, too, building the first stone castle, which was expanded and strengthened by Edward I in the late thirteenth century. The eighteenth century saw the town evolve as a staging post on the busy London to Holyhead route. This traffic withered with the arrival of the railways, but by then the town had become the host of a lively social season, patronized by the sort of people who could afford to send their offspring to the famous Shrewsbury School. The top-notch gatherings are, however, long gone and nowadays Shrewsbury is an easy-going, middling market town, albeit with several especially fine Tudor and Jacobean streetscapes.