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Historical Geography of the Shropshire-Montgomeryshire Borderland. The border country between England and Wales, like all borders in nature, is characterized by a mingling of two sets of influences. The region under consideration in this essay is part of the transition or intermediate belt between the hill-country of central Wales and the western English plain. In this zone have grown up old market towns, exchanging the products of hill and plain, of stock-raisers and corn-growers. All through historic time two forces have been at work a tendency towards the fixation of the boundary, and a natural disregard of this by movements of men and their changing cultures. For the last four hundred years the boundary has been fixed, but it has only administrative significance while the borderland has increasingly taken its place as an intermediate zone between hills and plain, and deserves recognition as a definite "geographical region." The county of Montgomery comprises, roughly speaking, the upper Severn valley and its many tributary valleys, together with part of the Dovey basin on the west. This extension of the county over the low divide indicates the dominant power of the larger Severn valley. The Severn itself, rising in Plynlymon Fawr, falls very rapidly in a south-easterly direction, until, at Llanidloes, it is but 550ft. above sea level. The gap from this area, leading south into Radnorshire, is an important line along which Severn valley influences have diffused. From Llanidloes the river follows a narrow valley to 3n Essay on the By E. ESTYN EVANS, B.A.