Ellesmere

Ellesmere isn't a town with a large hotel stock, so where you stay comes down mostly to whether you want to be within walking distance of the shops and canal, or happier with a short drive in exchange for more space and quiet. The Ellesmere Hotel, right in the centre, is the obvious pick if you want to step out of your room straight onto the high street and down to The Mere, with rooms that are comfortable and unfussy rather than luxurious.

Just outside town, a handful of farm-based bed and breakfasts — places like Mereside Farm — offer a quieter, more rural stay with proper breakfasts and easy parking, usually a five-to-ten-minute drive from the centre, and they suit couples and walkers looking for a base rather than a destination in themselves. For a more indulgent stay, country house hotels within half an hour's drive, including Rowton Castle towards Shrewsbury, provide the kind of grand, gardens-and-four-poster-beds experience that suits an anniversary or a small wedding party, at a noticeably higher price point than anything in Ellesmere itself.

Expect to pay roughly £70–£100 a night for a straightforward double in town, £80–£120 for a farm B&B with breakfast, and upwards of £150 for a country house hotel room. Because choice is limited rather than because demand is overwhelming, it's worth booking a few weeks ahead for a summer weekend, and further out still if you have your eye on a specific lakeside or canal-view room — there simply aren't many of them to go around.

Ellesmere rewards people who like to potter — a morning on the water, an afternoon walking between meres, and an evening in a pub that has been serving the same room for three hundred years.

• The Mere and Cremorne Gardens — the town's centrepiece: a circular lakeside walk of around a mile and a half through parkland and mature woodland, with Cremorne Gardens providing formal borders, a small beach, a children's play area and the start of a sculpture trail dotted through the grounds.
• Boating on The Mere — rowing boats, canoes, kayaks and paddleboards can be hired from the boathouse by the water, or you can take a more sedate turn around the lake aboard the Lady Katherine steam launch, one of the few working steamboats still operating on an English lake.
• The Llangollen Canal towpath — Ellesmere is the practical halfway point of one of Britain's best-loved canal cruising routes, running from Llangollen and the vertigo-inducing Pontcysyllte Aqueduct down to Whitchurch and beyond; the towpath through town makes for an easy, flat walk or cycle in either direction, past moored narrowboats and the old canal warehouses.
• Colemere Country Park — a smaller, wilder mere about three miles from town, circled by a woodland path and designated a Local Nature Reserve and RAMSAR wetland site for its breeding birds and dragonflies; markedly quieter than The Mere itself.
• Whittington Castle — a genuinely atmospheric ruined moated castle around six miles north-west, one of the few in England still owned by the community that looks after it, with a working café in the gatehouse and open grounds that rarely feel crowded.
• Chirk Castle (National Trust) — a 700-year-old Marcher fortress just across the Welsh border, complete with medieval towers, opulent state rooms and formal gardens with clipped yew hedges; roughly a twenty-minute drive from Ellesmere.
• Ellesmere's old town — the streets around Church Street and the Cross are worth simply walking, taking in the Georgian shopfronts, the parish church of St Mary's on its raised churchyard above the lake, and the surviving fragments of the town's own vanished castle mound.
• Oteley Gardens — the private gardens of Oteley Hall on the far side of The Mere open to visitors on selected days each year, with ten acres including a walled garden, a boathouse and long views back across the water to the town.
• Fishing on the meres — several of the meres, including The Mere itself, hold day-ticket coarse fishing for bream, pike and tench, a longstanding local pastime that draws anglers from well beyond Shropshire.

Ellesmere punches well above its size for somewhere so small. The Boathouse, right on the water at Mereside, is the obvious destination for a meal with a view, serving modern British food to a room that looks straight out across The Mere. In town, the pub scene ranges from the Black Lion, a genuinely old coaching inn on the high street, to smaller, more characterful spots including one tucked into a brick-vaulted cellar beneath the old Town Hall — the kind of find that rewards a wander rather than a booking.

The town still holds a proper street market, a tradition going back to its medieval charter, alongside a clutch of independent butchers, bakers and a farm shop and café on the outskirts serving produce grown within a few miles. For coffee and cake between walks, the kiosk by Cremorne Gardens is the easy stop, while the canal basin and wharf area has a small run of cafés that catch the passing boating trade through the summer months.

Camping around Ellesmere means gentle, low-lying Shropshire farmland rather than dramatic hill country — flat to softly rolling fields, hedgerows, and water never far away, whether that's the meres themselves or the Llangollen Canal threading past on its embankment. It's an easy, forgiving landscape to pitch a tent in, with none of the exposure or weather extremes you'd get camping higher up in Wales or the Lake District, though the ground can turn heavy after wet spells given the clay-rich soil that helped form the meres in the first place.

The best-known site is Colemere Caravan Park, a small five-acre spot right on the edge of Colemere itself, a few minutes' drive from town, with grass pitches for tents and tourers alongside camping pods, a shepherd's hut and a yurt for those who'd rather not rely purely on canvas — plus a pondside hot tub for hire, which is a nice touch after a day's walking. It's an adults-only site, so families will need to look slightly further afield; Fernwood Caravan Park, set across sixty-odd acres of woodland and open countryside nearby, is one alternative with a broader mix of pitches. Both give easy access to the meres, the canal towpath and Ellesmere town itself without needing to drive far each day.

As with anywhere in England, wild camping on the meres, the canal towpath or the surrounding farmland is illegal without the landowner's explicit permission — this is private land throughout, unlike the more permissive access rules in parts of Scotland, and the meres in particular are protected wildlife sites where informal camping would cause real disturbance. Stick to licensed sites and you'll have no trouble finding a pitch, even in peak season, since this corner of Shropshire draws far fewer visitors than the Peak District or Lake District.

May to September is the reliable camping window, with long evenings ideal for a walk around The Mere after the day-trippers have gone home, and the canal at its busiest and most sociable with passing narrowboats. Glamping options — pods, yurts and shepherd's huts — have grown steadily at sites like Colemere, giving a warmer, more weatherproof alternative for anyone new to camping or visiting outside the height of summer, and they tend to book up faster than standard pitches given how few there are.