Memories of Harley
Perhaps the memoires of Mrs Hilda Preece, one-time infant teacher and a long-time resident of Harley will convey the flavour of this village more vividly than these bare historical facts.

In the last years of the 20th Century, not long before her death, Mrs Preece was prevailed upon by her neighbours to record her memories of a long life in Harley through the early part of the century. Her book, A Shropshire Village of Yesteryear, contains lovely recollections as well as beautiful illustrations by Pat Seabrook, another former villager.

“Old Harley”, writes Mrs Preece, “was agricultural. There were five farms and a few smallholdings. The latter were cottages with a few fields, some quite a distance away. Nearly all the cottages were ‘tied’, housing the men who worked on the farms. There were two small shops, one being the post office, at the Shrewsbury entrance to the village and the other Old Timbers (now, Church Cottage).

There was a windmill, Harley Towers, and a watermill no longer being used seventy years ago. The windmill, oasthouse and other buildings were attached to what is now Harley Court….There were two parish cottages, given to the poor of the parish many years before. A small rent was paid to the church. The blacksmith had his smithy opposite the school.

We had to learn the poem “The Village Blacksmith” but our blacksmith was very unlike Goldsmith’s. He was small and wiry, but strong. When in the school yard we could hear the fire roaring and the clink of his hammer as he hammered out the horseshoes. Sometimes he would have a fire outside his shop when he was hooping the great wagon wheels. How deftly he worked.

Silence now reigns supreme at the old school and the blacksmith’s shop. And the children who played in the schoolyard and watched the patient horses waiting to be shod are scattered, some passed on. In the balcksmith’s garden, Emily’s holly is bright with its many red berries. She had a piece of holly in the house one Christtmas and stuck it in the ground later. Emily passed on many years ago but the holly tree she planted still stands in the garden with its gnarled pear tree.”

There still remains some of that tranquility about Harley: the holly tree is still here and the voices of children – real ones as well as the ghosts of the past – are still heard.