Landscape & geology

With its steep-sided valleys, extensive woodland cover and numerous tributary streams flowing down to the River Severn, the Ironbridge Gorge is a very striking and beautiful landscape. Its at this point that the wide, meandering course of the river is locked on to a straighter path by the narrowness of the gorge.

It is the combination of water and wooded slopes that gives the area its distinctive character, but this is a landscape, in fact, of great variety, with grassland, pockets of heathland, and conifer and native broadleaf woodland spread along the entire length of this stretch of the Severn Valley.

This in turn has been heavily influenced by the very rich geology of the area, exposed some 15,000 years ago by the rapid erosion of the gorge by glacial meltwater.