Woore

Woore is a village and civil parish in the north of the English county of Shropshire. It had a population of 1,411 in the 2001 census. The name means "boundary" in ancient Celtic and this fits nicely with the fact that it is on the boundary with both the counties of Cheshire and Staffordshire. The parish is the most northerly in Shropshire.

The civil parish includes several other hamlets and villages including Gravenhunger, Dorrington, Pipe Gate and Ireland's Cross. The Parish Council has 10 elected members, and normally meets monthly.

The nearest significant towns to Woore are Market Drayton, Whitchurch, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Nantwich and Crewe - Crewe Alexandra's football ground is 15 minutes away by road. The A51 and A525 roads run through the village. The only road links between Woore and the rest of Shropshire pass through adjoining counties. The village is also the farthest place in Shropshire from the centre of the county near Condover.

The village was served by the North Staffordshire Railway's Stoke to Market Drayton Line, with a railway station at Pipe Gate (for Woore). Services opened in 1870, but reduced to two trains per day from the mid-1920s. Express Dairies had a creamery with private siding access to Pipe Gate, allowing its preferred transport partner the Great Western Railway to provide milk trains to the facility, for onward scheduling to London via Market Drayton. Passenger services ceased from 1956, and the line was lifted in 1966 after the closure of the creamery, following review under the Beeching Axe.

Today it is mostly residential with a number of small shops, centralised around the Post Office and general stores on the village square. Three public houses service the village, along with one modern red brick primary school and two churches, the smaller of Methodist denomination, popularly known as "the Chapel on the corner", and the larger St. Leonard's church.

St. Leonard's church was constructed in 1832, to serve what were then five townships of the Shropshire portion of the ancient parish of Mucklestone in Staffordshire, and is of an unconventional white plaster design, recently (2011) re-painted. Its bell tower has not been safe to regularly ring in since the late 1980s, with the bells now replaced by a timed recording. The churchyard contains a war grave of a British soldier of World War I.

The village had a National Hunt racecourse until 1963.

Locomotive engineer William Bridges Adams, inventor of the Adams axle, was born at Woore in 1797 and brought up there.

TV funnyman Nick Hancock lives in a £1.1m mansion in Woore.

Bridgemere Garden World is to the north of Woore, just over the border in Cheshire.