The Wrekin is the isolated, distinctively shaped hill that dominates the flat Shropshire plain east of Shrewsbury, visible from a great distance in most directions across the surrounding low countryside, and it has attracted the county's best-known origin legend as a direct result of that striking visual isolation. In the story, a giant with a grudge against Shrewsbury set out to dam the River Severn and flood the town entirely, carrying a great spadeful of earth across country for exactly that destructive purpose.
Losing his way, or in some versions meeting a clever cobbler who tricked him into believing Shrewsbury was much further off than it really was, the giant gave up on his plan and dumped his load where he stood, the earth from his spade forming the hill known today as the Wrekin.
In other versions of the same story, a companion giant is scraping mud from his boots at the very same time, and the resulting smaller heap of scraped-off dirt forms the nearby Ercall hill standing beside it. The legend belongs to a very widespread British folklore type in which giants are routinely blamed for the presence of unusual or unexplained hills across the landscape, and the Wrekin's genuinely striking isolation from the surrounding low ground has clearly made it an obvious candidate for exactly this kind of explanatory myth for a very long time indeed.
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