Chaos yet beauty with mini ice-age

A big chill brought parts of Shropshire to a standstill this week - but it's not been a patch on the ferocious weather which hit the county in the early 1980s, writes Sue Austin.

As Shropshire and mid Wales shiver through the cold snap, the phrases 'I remember when' and 'this is nothing' have been ringing out as us older folk take a trip down a very icy, memory lane.

This week's extreme temperatures are nothing to those that held Shropshire in the grip of a mini ice-age back in January 1982. The county broke all records when the thermometer plunged to minus 22C and did not get above minus 11C for a couple of days, while it remained below zero for more than a week.

And the skittering of snow across the region is nothing to the drifts that fell not only in 1981/82 but again in 1985 when getting out and about was not just an inconvenience, but a major problem.

I was living and working in Shrewsbury in 1982 when the arctic blast hit on January 8 bringing snow drifts of up to 10ft and freezing temperatures.

The Friday night blizzards that began the big freeze cut electric supplies across the town and when a 'Scott of the Antarctic' type walk to find hot food proved fruitless, this newly married 21-year-old warmed up baked beans on one storage heater.

The next day we had to dig our way out of the house and a sledge proved the best way to get supplies for us and our elderly neighbours from the supermarket.

The next week temperatures fell so low that the diesel solidified in the buses, meaning a two mile-plus walk home for me on snowy pavements and in thick, freezing fog . . . not just for one journey, but for days on end.

Driving was a nightmare - if the car started. Car radiators were freezing despite the antifreeze and Sue Stanyer from Ellesmere remembers her windscreen freezing solid on the inside during a nightmare journey to Wem, her little Mini struggling in the ruts made by the lorries on the snow-covered roads.

"People still managed to struggle into work despite the snow and ice, but the journeys were horrendous and I remember crying as I was driving," she recalls.

One fellow Shropshire reporter and ski enthusiast even went as far as attaching snow chains on his tyres to get to work.

Businesses suffered too with frozen pipes - hairdresser Tracy Davies remembers getting to work only to find the salon completely out of action.

Rural communities were literally cut off for days, with villagers digging at drifts with shovels to meet the snow ploughs working in the opposite direction.

An army helicopter dropped food supplies to an elderly south Shropshire couple stranded with no electricity and dwindling rations for five days.

But despite the chaos, the weather brought beauty to the county. The wind whipped the snow drifts into stunning sculptures and huge ice flows merged, turning the the River Severn into a spectacular river of ice.

When temperatures did start to recover beautiful icicles often several feet long formed everywhere. But such was the fear that they could fall from tall buildings injuring passers-by that firefighters were brought in to knock them down safely from buildings in Shrewsbury.

Another cold snap hit Shropshire in 1985 when fellow journalist Peter Johnson struggled to work from the rural hamlet of Hope to Shrewsbury - on his motorbike.

"The drifts were as high as the hedges. I let the tyres down on my trails bike before attempting the journey, but even so it was like riding the Cresta run," he says.