Outside the Horseshoe Inn at Bridges, the little East Onny River trickling past, its clear pools starred with water crowsfoot, and the long, low, white building bathed in westering spring sunlight, I sat at a table with a pint of hoppy Shropshire beer and tuned in to the conversation of a young couple a few yards away.

They were running through the sights they'd seen in the course of their day, were so excited, jaunty and enthused in their descriptions and responses it came over almost as song; and told me I could be nowhere other than in the west Shropshire hill country that's one of the supreme delights of the British landscape.

An area relatively little-known and resistant to the depredations and vamping changes of mass tourism, the poet A.E. Housman's description of it as 'quietest... under the sun' is still recognisable and authentic.

This is a region defined by its mood - one, in the words of D.H. Lawrence, 'where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers'. Here are the settings for Housman's doom-laden ditties from A Shropshire Lad . The gothic sufferings of the characters in Mary Webb's novels take place against an elemental backdrop of shattered quartzite tors along the crest of the Stiperstones, a set of jagged rocks.

From the Ironbridge Gorge, through Much Wenlock, Church Stretton and tiny hidden villages west of the Long Mynd all the way down to Bishop's Castle and Clun, few parts of Britain feel older, more settled and redolent, than these wild and shapely miniature mountains with their wave-like bounding scarps and exquisite intersecting valleys.

At sunset on a snowy January day, a haze across the Severn plain obscuring all sense of scale, I saw Caer Caradog, Ragleth Hill, the Lawley, the Wrekin from the top of the Stiperstones. They could have been the Mamores, could have been any wild place in the Scottish Highlands, so captivating is the drama of this landscape. Disregard your Country Life lists, with all their class and property bias. Anyone with a scrap of aesthetic sense would acknowledge that Shropshire is the loveliest of English counties, and the Shropshire hills the finest part of it.

To enjoy them at their best, come here in spring and make your way to Much Wenlock, 10 miles south of Shrewsbury. This small, half-timbered, red-brick, lobelia-hung, narrow-streeted and tea-shopped town with its Elizabethan guildhall, entirely at ease in its own antiquity, unbuffed and uninterpreted, is a comfortable sort of place where the soft burr of the Welsh Marches is the inflection on the street.

Walk down a dingle from the parish church and you come across one of the great monastic ruins in Britain. Best preserved of all its Cluniac houses, St Milburga's priory is vast in its groundplan, majestic in its remnant Early English and Norman architecture, peerless in the sweet, gardened intimacy of its surroundings. In the court beyond the cloisters is a Norman lavatorium (multiple-use washing facility is how the Health and Safety Executive might describe it), its sides decorated with carved panels. Ravishing in the simple beauty of their design, they show Christ walking on water alongside his apostles' boat, and again, holding one of them by the hand.

Ravishing, too, in its geological simplicity is Wenlock Edge, an unbroken reef of limestone like a great roller stilled in mid-ocean, which stretches for 16 miles from here down to the village of Craven Arms. Oak woods the length of its north-western scarp are smoked with bluebells and loud with the laughter of green woodpeckers in April.

The best of the Guardian's Country Diarists, Paul Evans, writes about these woods each week, the quality of his miniaturist's prose matching that of the landscape. I imagine him at the Wenlock Edge Inn, looking out to the 'blue, remembered hills' of Wales, notebook in hand, absorbed like some latter-day Scholar Gipsy.

These hills have that rapturous sense about them. Visitors come to own them in their hearts. In front of Elizabethan Wilderhope Manor - now the John Cadbury Memorial Youth Hostel - at the top of Hope Dale beneath Wenlock Edge is a bench inscribed by the 'East Birmingham Rambling and Social Club in celebration of their Golden Jubilee'.

Pheasants call from the woods, the mew of a buzzard cuts through the birdsong, lambs play. I visit briefly the Shropshire Hills Discovery Centre at Craven Arms, experiencing glee and motion sickness in equal measure on its simulated balloon ride; pass quickly through Church Stretton, pausing to giggle at the incongruity of a Sheelagh-na-Gig carved above the north doorway of the Early English church in this most properly Victorian of towns; and climb up above the Cardingmill Valley on to the Long Mynd.

Here on this broad heather plateau you start to appreciate the borderland resonances, the spaciousness, the long dimensions of history. Every grid square on the map hereabouts seems decorated with antique script. The road across the moor rounds Robin Hood's Butts, passes a tumulus, and as it drops down to the East Onny Valley looks across to a fort and a castle ring. Beyond the hamlet of Bridges is the Stiperstones ridge, its summit rocks known as the Devil's Chair. Let Mary Webb give you the mood:

'On the highest point of the bare opposite ridge, now curtained in driving storm-cloud, towered in gigantic aloofness a mass of quartzite blackened and hardened by uncountable ages... Flat, white stones lay about... like tombstones with no name, no date, no word of hope, fit for the nameless, dateless dead, beasts and men, who had gone into the silence of annihilation.'

If you think that overwrought and melodramatic, pick up on the associated folklore. Shropshire's own version of the European folk-tale motif of the Wild Hunt is led in its incarnation here by an eleventh-century Mercian thane who has transmuted into Wild Edric. With his scaly-tailed demon band - to view which is to die - he shrieks, howls and swoops over the Stiperstones to signify impending war. (And if you're inclined to the cosmopolitan scoff, you might like to reflect on the extent to which suave Bruce Chatwin plagiarised Mary Webb in On the Black Hill .)

The sun sinking fast, I hurried on to the next hill ridge west, that of Stapeley and Corndon, the latter summit lapped in by a salient of Wales. On the heath saddle between the two, at Mitchell's Fold, is a Bronze Age stone circle of 15 uprights, the largest of them the height of a tall man.

A story is told about the stones: in bad times long ago, people were hungry. All they had was a fairy cow who came night and morning to be milked, gave enough for all so long as everyone only took one pail - on that the story is quite clear. But a witch came and milked the cow into a sieve until the animal ran dry, went away and was never seen again.

You scarcely need a working knowledge of the role of the cow in Celtic mythology to deconstruct this story. Shadows of the old gods are here. As Alan Garner wrote of a similar Cheshire folk tale: 'It is in its present manifestation a Celtic cosmos, not an English one. It is old, and it is alive.'

And when you stand at sunset in this stone circle, the ridges of Pumlumon, Cadair Idris, Aran and Berwyn in deepest Wales rising from violet shadow into crystal air along the horizon to the west, you gain a sense both of meaning and magic that is curiously, gloriously of its Shropshire place.

More information

For information and places to stay, visit www.shropshiretourism.info and www.shropshire-cc.gov.uk/discover.nsf