the 1st Lord Berwick but Lythwood Hall fell into disrepair under the squireship of the Hulton-Harrop family in the 1890s. It was later split into multi-ownership units. Bayston Hill was established as a new ecclesiastical parish with the building of Christ Church in 1843 as an amalgamation of sections from the parishes of St. Julian's Shrewsbury, Meole Brace and nearby Condover. The church was built to serve the local miners, quarrymen and railway navvies. The ecclesiastical parish is part of the Diocese of Lichfield. Modern history Although the Shrewsbury and Hereford Railway (now the Welsh Marches Line), runs straight past the village, Bayston Hill has never had its own railway station. The 1920s novels House in Dormer Forest and Seven for a Secret were written at Spring Cottage, Lyth Hill by romantic novelist Mary Webb, who lived near the village on and off for ten years, alternating between Spring Cottage and her London home, until her death in 1927. The action in her most famous novel Precious Bane took place around the nearby Bomere Pool, that she called Sarn Mere. The oldest known ghost in Shropshire, a dead Roman soldier, is also reputed to haunt Bomere Pool, the site of a Roman army camp and its associated civilian settlement. A further literary connection can be found in the Brother Cadfael medieval detective novels of Ellis Peters, with much of the action in several stories taking place within the traditional forest, lanes and footpaths in and around Bayston Hill, or between the village and other surrounding medieval settlements. The village became a civil parish in the reorganisation of 1967. The original 1843 Christ Church church building still stands. A modern successor church was built on a more central site for the newer housing estates in the early 1980s. In 2001 an application to further extend the Bayston Hill quarry was turned down, after a detailed survey identified six previously unknown historical sites of archaeological importance that would be destroyed by the proposed extension. These included sections of at least one or possibly two AD 43–450 Roman roads, two 1066–1547 medieval or mid 16th century post-medieval roads or trackways, a group of cropmarks suggesting historical earthworks or buildings, and a group of three medieval parish boundary stones. In August 2003, the section of the A5 road at Bayston Hill was closed, after a large black cat was claimed to have been sighted