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Title: The Holyhead Road, Vol 2 - The Mail-coach road to Dublin
Author: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Language: English
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THE HOLYHEAD ROAD
[Illustration: EARLY DAYS ON THE LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM RAILWAY.]
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: THE MAIL-COACH ROAD TO DUBLIN
By CHARLES G. HARPER
Author of “_The Brighton Road_,” “_The Portsmouth Road_,” “_The Dover
Road_,” “_The Bath Road_,” “_The Exeter Road_,” “_The Great North
Road_,” and “_The Norwich Road_”
[Illustration]
_Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time Prints and Pictures_
_Vol. II. BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD_
LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL
LTD. 1902
[_All rights reserved_]
PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD.
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SEPARATE PLATES
PAGE
EARLY DAYS ON THE LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM RAILWAY. _Frontispiece_
BULL RING. (_From a Print after David Cox_) 5
OLD BIRMINGHAM COACHING BILL. 13
DUDLEY. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 31
HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1797. (_After
Rowlandson_) 47
HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1826. (_From an
Old Print_) 51
HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1860. (_From a
Contemporary Photograph_) 55
SHIFFNAL. 67
THE COUNCIL HOUSE. 141
THE HONOURABLE THOMAS KENYON. (_From an Old Print_) 153
THE VALE OF LLANGOLLEN. 177
LLANGOLLEN. 183
LLANGOLLEN. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R. A._) 187
VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 207
CERNIOGE. 227
THE SWALLOW FALLS. (_From an Old Print_) 247
LLYN OGWEN AND TRIFAEN MOUNTAIN. 255
PENMAENMAWR. (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 275
THE OLD LANDING-PLACE ON THE ANGLESEY SHORE. 283
ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
Vignette: Prince Rupert _Title Page_
List of Illustrations: The Black Country vii
The Holyhead Road 1
The “Hen and Chickens,” 1830 18
The “Old Royal” 24
Wednesbury 37
Old Hill, Tettenhall 59
The Sabbath-breaking Seamstress 60
Snedshill Furnaces 71
Haygate Inn 76
The Wrekin 79
The “Old Wall” 84
Wroxeter Church 85
Atcham Bridge 91
Lord Hill’s Monument 92
The English Bridge 97
Wyle Cop and the “Lion” 107
The “Lion” Yard 132
The Market-Place, Shrewsbury 138
Shelton Oak 144
The Breidden Hills 147
Queen’s Head 156
Offa’s Dyke 176
The Ladies of Llangollen. (_From an Old Print_) 198
Plas Newydd 203
Owain Glyndwr’s Mount 211
Cerrig-y-Druidion 224
The Waterloo Bridge 232
The Old Church, Bettws-y-Coed 234
Sign of the “Royal Oak” 238
Pont-y-Pair 245
Cyfyng Falls 250
Capel Curig 252
The Falls of Ogwen 257
Nant Ffrancon. (_After David Cox_) 258
Nant Ffrancon 260
Penrhyn Castle 263
Lonisaf Toll-House 264
The Penrhyn Arms 266
Penrhyn Castle and Snowdonia, from Beaumaris.
(_After David Cox_) 278
Deserted Stables, Menai Village 290
The Menai Bridge and the Isle of Benglas 291
The Anglesey Column 296
The Britannia Bridge 299
Near Mona Inn 303
Llangristiolus 304
Caer Ceiliog 306
The South Stack. (_After T. Creswick, R.A._) 323
Holyhead Mountain 325
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD
BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD
MILES
Birmingham (General Post Office) 109¼
Hockley 110½
Soho 111¼
Handsworth 111¾
West Bromwich 114½
Hilltop 116
Wednesbury 117¼
Moxley 118½
Bilston 119½
Wolverhampton 122¼
Chapel Ash 122¾
Tettenhall 124
The Wergs 125¼
Boningale 129½
Whiston Cross 130¼
Shiffnal 134¼
Prior’s Lee 137½
Ketley 139
Ketley Railway Station 139½
(Junction of Watling Street with Holyhead Road.)
Wellington (“Cock”) 140½
Haygate 141½
Burcot Toll-House 143
Norton 146½
Tern Bridge 147½
(Cross River Tern.)
Atcham 148¼
(Cross River Severn.)
Shrewsbury (Abbey Foregate) 151¼
(Cross River Severn.)
Shrewsbury (Market House) 152
Shrewsbury (Welsh Bridge and Frankwell) 152¼
(Cross River Severn.)
Shelton Oak 154
Bicton 154½
Montford Bridge 156¾
(Cross River Severn.)
Nesscliff 160½
West Felton 165¼
Queen’s Head 166¼
Oswestry 170
Gobowen 172¾
Chirk 175
(Cross River Ceiriog.)
Whitehurst Toll-House 177
Vron Cysylltan 179¾
Llangollen 182½
Berwyn Railway Station 184¼
Glyndyfrdwy 188
Carrog 189
Corwen 192½
(Cross River Dee.)
Maerdy Post Office 196
Pont-y-Glyn 197¾
Tynant 198¼
Cerrig-y-Druidion 202
Glasfryn 204½
Cernioge 205¾
Pentre Voelas 207¾
Bettws-y-Coed 214½
(Cross River Conway)
Swallow Falls 216
Cyfyng Falls 218½
Tan-y-Bwlch 219
Capel Curig 220
Llyn Ogwen 224
Ogwen Falls} 225
Pass of Nant Ffrancon}
Tyn-y-Maes 228
Bethesda 229¼
Llandegai 232¾
Bangor (Cathedral) 234½
Upper Bangor 236
Menai Bridge 237
(Cross Menai Straits)
Menai Village 237¼
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerchwyrndrobwlltysiliogogogoch 239¼
Gaerwen 242½
Pentre Berw (Holland Arms) 243
Llangristiolus 245½
Mona 247½
Gwalchmai 249¾
Bryngwran 252½
Caer Ceiliog 255
Valley 256
Stanley Sands 256¼
(Cross Stanley Sands Viaduct to Holy Island)
Holyhead (Admiralty Pier) 260½
THE OLD ROAD FROM MENAI VILLAGE TO HOLYHEAD
MILES
Menai Village 237¼
Braint 239½
Ceint 242½
Llangefni 244¾
Bodffordd 247
Gwyndû and Glanyrafon 249¾
Llynfaes 250¼
Trefor 251¼
Bodedern 254
Llanyngenedl 255¼
Valley and Four-Mile Bridge 258¼
Trearddur Bay 261½
(Cross Causeway over Straits to
Holy Island)
Holyhead 263½
[Illustration: The Holyhead Road]
BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD
I
There are said to be no fewer than a hundred and forty different ways of
spelling the name of Birmingham, all duly vouched for by old usage; but
it is not proposed in these pages to recount them, or to follow the
arguments of those who have contended for its derivation from
“Bromwicham.” It is singular that in the first mention we have of the
place, in Domesday Book, it is spelt “Bermingham,” almost exactly as it
is to-day, and this lends much authority to the view that we get the
place-name from an ancient Saxon tribe or family of Beormingas.
When the original Beormingas, the Sons of Beorm (whoever he may have
been), settled here, in the dim Saxon past, they founded better than
they knew; but they chose a hill-top, a place where no river runs,
unless we choose thus to dignify the little stream called the Rea. This
lack of watercourses mattered nothing at all to mediæval Birmingham, but
when, in spite of all disabilities, the place rose into commercial
importance, the want began to be severely felt, and herculean have been
the efforts in modern times to effect a proper water-supply.
Little but scattered mention is heard of Birmingham and its smiths
before the Civil War, but when that struggle broke out, they were heard
of to some purpose. Its 4000 inhabitants in 1643 were Puritans to a man,
and warlike. They furnished 15,000 sword-blades for Cromwell’s troops,
and at a convenient opportunity waylaid the King’s carriage and seized
it, his furniture, and his plate. For these enormities Prince Rupert
came later from Daventry and punished them severely in a battle on Camp
Hill, overlooking the town. Many Birmingham men were slain that day, and
eighty houses burnt; the whole affair piteously related in a tract of
that time called “The Bloody Prince; or, a Declaration of the Most
Cruell Practises of Prince Rupert and the rest of the Cavaliers, in
fighting against God and the true Ministers of his Church.” A woodcut
intended to portray that sanguinary Prince appears on the cover, with
Birmingham flaming furiously in the background; Daventry in the rear.
The rest of the Cavaliers appear to be manœuvring somewhere else; at any
rate, Rupert is alone, on horseback, with a mild expression of
countenance and a big pistol.
Twenty-two years later the Plague depopulated the town, but in another
twenty-three years it had grown to double its former size, and by 1791
numbered between 70,000 and 80,000. Yet it had no Parliamentary
representation until 1832.
That Birmingham is seated on a hill is not so evident to railway
travellers, but he who comes to it by road is well advised of the fact
at Bull Ring, where the hilly entrance confronts him. Bull Ring is old
Birmingham of a hundred years and more ago; the nucleus of the town, and
little altered since David Cox drew his picture of the market there. The
market remains, but there has come about since his day an extraordinary
popular appreciation of the beauty of flowers, so that, instead of the
fowls pictured largely in his view, the crowded stalls are radiant with
blooms of every sort; cut flowers, and growing plants.
Here stands, as ever, St. Martin’s, the mother-church of Birmingham,
where the ancient manorial lords of the place lie; those de Berminghams
whose last representative was choused out of his rights in 1545. Here is
that statue of Nelson for whose proper cleansing a patriotic tradesman
left by will sixpence a week; and here occurred the Wesley riots of 1742
and the Chartist Riot of 1839. When Charles Wesley sought to preach, the
people set the church bells a-ringing to drown his voice, and then began
to pelt him with dirt and turnips; but the political riot was a much
more serious affair, resulting in the pillaging of shops and houses, and
immense damage.
II
In Birmingham, close upon four hundred years ago, Leland found but one
street, yet that street was full of smiths, making knives and “all
manner of cuttinge tooles, and many loriners that make bittes, and a
great many naylors. Soe that a great part of the towne is maintained by
smithes, who have their iron and sea-cole out of Staffordshire.”
Not only has Birmingham grown out of all knowledge since that time, but
it has largely changed its trades. Sheffield has taken away the pick of
the cutlery trade, and that of the loriners has its chief seat at
Walsall; but Birmingham now makes everything, from a monster engine to a
pin’s head, and in the murderous art of manufacturing fire-arms is
pre-eminent.
“She is,” observed an enthusiastic writer, “in the truest sense the
benefactress of the universal man, from the crowned head to the savage
of the wilderness.” To the crowned heads, for example—or to their
governments—Birmingham supplies stands of arms and ammunition; and to
the savage, guns warranted to hurt no one but he who uses them.
Civilisation is thus heavily indebted to Birmingham, and religion too;
for if the heathen, who “in his blindness bows down to wood and stone,”
is no longer restricted to those two materials, by reason of Birmingham
industriously supplying little tin and brass gods by wholesale, and at
extremely low prices, to Africa or India, yet on Sundays the godly folks
of her hundred churches and chapels liberally subscribe to missionary
funds for spreading Christianity in strange lands, and thus help to
discredit the heathen Vishnus, Sivas, Hanumans, and assorted
Mumbo-Jumbos they export.
[Illustration: BULL RING. _From a Print after David Cox._]
“Birmingham,” said Burke, a hundred years ago, “is the toyshop of
Europe.” Fancy articles in steel and paste; buckles, sword-hilts,
buttons, and a thousand other trifles were made, for home or export;
among them the sham, or “Brummagem” jewellery, and the base coin that
long cast a slur upon the town. Things coming from Birmingham were in
those times rightly suspect. One of its industries was the making of
“silver” buckles of a villainous kind of cheap white metal, called from
its nature “soft tommy.” A tale is told of the owner of the factory
where this precious stuff was made up, going through one of the
workshops and hearing a workman cursing the man who would chance to wear
the pair of buckles he was making.
“Why,” asked the astonished employer, “do you do that?”
“Well,” replied the workman, “whoever wears these buckles is bound to
curse the man that made them, and so I thought I would be the first.”
Those were the days when it was said that if you gave a guinea and a
copper kettle to a Birmingham manufacturing jeweller he would turn you
out a hundred guineas’ worth of jewellery!
Things are very different now. The trades of Birmingham seem almost
countless in their number; many of them conducted on a scale large
enough for each one to suffice a small township of workers.
Brass-founding, tube-making, gun-smithing, pin-making, wire-drawing,
screw-turning, gold-smithing, electro-plating, tinplate working, coining
(in the legitimate kind), steel pen-making—these are but a few of the
countless industries to whose skirts clings for livelihood a population
of half a million.
When Mr. Pickwick visited Birmingham, he repaired to the “Old Royal”
hotel. Where is the “Old Royal” now? Ask of the winds—nay, consult the
histories of Birmingham, and you shall learn. But if the old hotel and
many of its fellows be gone, at least the description of the entrance to
the town holds good, and “the dingy hue of every object visible, the
murky atmosphere, the paths of cinders and brick-dust” are phrases that
awake echoes of recollection in the breasts of those who know the town
of old: but “the dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling
chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around,” is not so
descriptive of the Birmingham of to-day. For fully realising that
picture, and the added touches of the “deep red glow of furnace fires,
the glare of distant lights, the ponderous wagons laden with clashing
rods of iron, or piled with heavy goods,” one must journey to Dudley,
where such things may be seen and heard in a hellish crescendo:
Birmingham has largely put those things in the background. In Mr.
Pickwick’s time “the hum of labour resounded from every house, lights
gleamed from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the
whirr of wheels and noise of machinery shook the trembling walls, and
the din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead, heavy clanking
of engines was the harsh music that arose from every quarter”; but most
of these things are nowadays decently hid in purlieus remote, or masked
from the chief streets by the towering modern buildings of hotels,
banks, assurance offices, and all the hundred-and-one parasitical things
of a limited liability age, that fasten like vermin on the producing
body.
Birmingham became a City on January 11th, 1889. It is a City of two fine
streets, surrounded by many miles of formless, featureless, dull and
commonplace (or, at their worst, hideous and squalid) houses, workshops,
and factories of every size and description. New Street was only new at
a period over a century ago. Corporation Street was formed in 1871 by
boldly cutting through a mass of slums. In those two thoroughfares, and
the open space by the Town Hall to which they both lead, is included
almost everything of architectural note. In their course are to be found
the best and most attractive shops, and the principal banks and
commercial offices. The rest is merely of a local and provincial
character.
The geographical, municipal, and political centre is, of course, that
spot where the Town Hall stands, a grim and massive building in the
Corinthian style, with that air of age and permanency about its
rusticated basement, as though when the Anglo-Saxons came they had found
it here, the relic of an ancient civilisation. But the Town Hall can lay
no claim to antiquity, built as it was in 1832. Around it, in an open
space of a singularly irregular shape, are the General Post Office, the
Art Gallery, the great Free Library, and other municipal buildings
proper to a city so rich and prosperous; and, scattered about the
pavements, a miscellaneous collection of statues, facing towards New
Street Station, as though they formed some kind of deputation assembled
there to welcome visitors. It is a very oddly assorted crowd, captained
by Queen Victoria, and formed of such varied items as Joseph Priestley
(who with his burning glass looks as though he were critically examining
a bad coin), Peel, John Skirrow, Wright, George Dawson, James Watt, and
Sir Josiah Mason. In the little corner called Chamberlain Square the
curious will find a monument to the energy and enterprise (the
“pushfulness” as those who love him not might call it) of Joseph
Chamberlain, without whose work and initiative Birmingham would not own,
as it does to-day, its gas, water, and tramways, and could not show such
evidences of progress in new and handsome streets and model government.
It is a far cry from the Red Radical days of Birmingham’s great Mayor in
1874 to those of the Colonial Secretary, a pillar of the Empire and the
darling of Duchesses. Perhaps no other man has, politically, travelled
so far, estranged so many friends, or made such strangely alien
alliances, with the result that his sheaf has been exalted over his
brethren these years past. Hence the extreme bitterness of the hatred
his name arouses in certain circles.
The memorial to his work on the comparatively small stage of Birmingham,
before he trod the boards of Westminster, takes the form of a Gothic
canopied fountain, with a profile portrait medallion, whereon one may
trace in the aggressive, sharp-pointed nose a striking likeness to
William Pitt, and that suggestion of the crafty fox the venomous
caricaturists of a later day have seized and used to such advantage.
III
Sir William Dugdale, in his diary, under date of July 16th, 1679,
mentions the first Birmingham coach we have any notice of. He says, “I
came out of London by the stage-coach of Bermicham to Banbury.” That is
all we learn of specifically Birmingham coaches until 1731, when
Rothwell’s began to ply to London in two days and a half, according to
the old coaching bill still preserved.
Afterwards came the Flying Coach of 1742, followed in 1758 by an
“improved Birmingham Coach,” with the legend “Friction Annihilated”
prominent on the axle-boxes. This the _Annual Register_ declared to be
“perhaps the most useful invention in mechanics this age has produced.”
Much virtue lingered in that “perhaps,” for nothing more was heard of
that wonderful device.
In 1812 the Post Office established a Birmingham Mail, and great was the
local rejoicing on May 26th, when, attended by eight mail-guards in full
uniform, adorned with blue ribbons, it paraded the streets. After two
hours’ procession, when coachman and guards were feasted with wine,
biscuits, and sandwiches, the Mail set out for London from the “Swan”
Hotel, amid the ringing of St. Martin’s bells and the cheering of the
assembled thousands.
Eight years later it was estimated that Birmingham owned eighty-four
coaches. Forty of these were daily, and most plied on bye-roads.
[Illustration: OLD BIRMINGHAM COACHING BILL.]
BIRMINGHAM
STAGE-COACH,
In Two _Days_ and a half; begins _May_ the 24th,
1731.
SETS out from the _Swan-Inn_ in _Birmingham_,
every _Monday_ at six a Clock in the Morning,
through _Warwick_, _Banbury_ and _Alesbury_,
to the _Red Lion Inn_ in _Aldersgate street_,
_London_, every _Wednesday_ Morning: And returns
from the said _Red Lion Inn_ every _Thursday_
Morning at five a Clock the same Way to the
_Swan-Inn_ in _Birmingham_ every _Saturday_, at
21 Shillings each Passenger, and 18 Shillings
from _Warwick_, who has liberty to carry 14
Pounds in Weight, and all above to _pay One
Penny a Pound_.
Perform d (if God permit)
By Nicholas Rothwell.
_The_ Weekly Waggon _sets out every Tuesday
from the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham, to the_
Red Lion Inn _aforesaid, every Saturday, and
returns from the said Inn every Monday, to
the Nagg’s-Head in Birmingham every
Thursday._
_Note. By the said_ Nicholas Rothwell _of_
Warwick, _all Persons may be furnished with
a By Coach Chariot, Chaise or Hearse, with a
Mourning Coach and able Horses, to any Part
of Great Britain, at reasonable Rates And
also Saddle Horses to be had._
* * * * *
From 1822 to 1826 Birmingham witnessed a great improvement in its
coaches. Waddell owned the two most prominent yards in the town, but had
many ardent competitors. In 1822 the “Tally-ho” was established, shortly
to be followed by the hotly competing “Independent,” “Real,” and
“Patent” Tally-hoes. Supposed to keep a pace of ten miles an hour, they
no sooner left the town behind than they started racing, to the terror
of the nervous and the delight of the sporting passengers. Annually, on
the First of May, they were spurred to superhuman and super-equine
exertions, and, we are told, covered the hundred and eight miles between
Birmingham and London “under seven hours.” How much under is not stated,
but as an even seven hours gives us fifteen miles an hour, including
stops, the pace must have been furious. Harry Tresslove, the coachman of
the “Independent Tally Ho,” always galloped the five-mile stage between
Dunchurch and the “Black Dog,” Stretton-upon-Dunsmore, in eighteen
minutes.
The existence of all stage-coaches being furiously competitive, they
could not afford to be quiet and plain, like the Mails. “Once I
remember,” says De Quincey, “being on the top of the Holyhead Mail
between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birmingham,
some ‘Tally-ho’ or ‘Highflyer,’ all flaunting with green and gold, came
up alongside of us. What a contrast with our royal simplicity of form
and colour in this plebeian wretch! The single ornament on our dark
ground of chocolate colour was the mighty shield of the Imperial arms,
but emblazoned in proportion as modest as a signet-ring bears to a seal
of office. Even this was displayed only on a single panel, whispering,
rather than proclaiming, our relations to the mighty State; whilst the
beast from Birmingham, our green-and-gold friend from false, fleeting,
perjured Brummagem, had as much writing and painting on its sprawling
flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor. For
some time this Birmingham machine ran along by our side—a piece of
familiarity that already of itself seemed to me sufficiently
Jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the horses announced a
desperate intention of leaving us behind. ‘Do you see _that_?’ I said to
the coachman. ‘I see,’ was his short answer. He was wide awake, yet he
waited longer than seemed prudent, for the horses of our audacious
opponent had a disagreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive
was loyal; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit should be full-blown
before he froze it. When that seemed right he unloosed, or, to speak by
a stronger word, he _sprang_ his unknown resources: he slipped our Royal
horses like cheetahs, or hunting-leopards, after the affrighted game.
How they could retain such a reserve of fiery power after the work they
had accomplished seemed hard to explain. But on our side, besides the
physical superiority, was a tower of moral strength, namely, the King’s
Name. Passing them without an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into
the rear with so lengthening an interval between us as proved in itself
the bitterest mockery of their presumption; whilst our guard blew back a
shattering blast of triumph that was really too painfully full of
derision.”
The “Emerald” was a fast night coach between London and Birmingham,
“driven,” says Colonel Corbet, in his book, _An Old Coachman’s Chatter_,
“by Harry Lee, whose complexion was of a very peculiar colour, almost
resembling that of a bullock’s liver—the fruit of strong potations of
‘early purl’ or ‘dog’s nose,’ taken after the exertions of the night and
before going to bed.”
The last coach put on the road between London and Birmingham, we are
told, on the same authority, was in 1837. It was a very fast day mail,
started to run to Birmingham and then on to Crewe, where it transferred
mails and passengers to the railway for Liverpool. It was horsed by
Sherman, and timed at twelve miles an hour.
Early or late in the coaching era robbery flourished. In the opening
years the coaches, as already abundantly noted, were held up by the
conventional figure of the highwayman; but, as civilisation advanced,
methods changed, and, instead of bestriding a high-mettled steed at the
cross-roads, there to await the coach, the thief, in concert with a
chosen band, booked seats, and during a long journey cut open the boot
from the inside of the vehicle, and having safely extracted the bank
parcels and other valuables, made off from the next stopping-place with
ease and complete safety. The advantages of this method were so obvious
that coaching history teems with examples of such robberies. Very often,
however, the booty was in notes, and difficult to turn to any account.
Hauls such as that described in _Aris’s Birmingham Gazette_ of February
17th, 1823, were rare. It mentioned: “A parcel containing 600
sovereigns, directed to Messrs. Attwood and Spooner, was stolen last
week from one of the London coaches, on its way to Birmingham.” The
bankers never saw the colour of their money again.
IV
Birmingham, says De Quincey, was, under the old dynasty of stage-coaches
and post-chaises, the centre of our travelling system. He did not like
Birmingham. How many they are who do not! But, look you, he gives his
reasons, and acknowledges that circumstances, and not Birmingham wholly,
were the cause of _his_ dislike. “Noisy, gloomy and dirty” he calls the
town. “Gloomy,” because, having passed through it a hundred times, those
occasions were always and invariably (less once), days and nights of
rain. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred; what a monstrous proportion!
And even so, the hundredth was just one fleeting glimpse of sunshine, as
the Mail whirled him through; so that he—with a parting sarcasm—had not
time to see whether that sunshine was, in fact, real, or whether it
might not possibly be some gilt Brummagen counterfeit; “For you know,”
says he, “men of Birmingham, that you _can_ counterfeit—such is your
cleverness—all things in Heaven and earth, from Jove’s thunderbolts down
to a tailor’s bodkin.”
[Illustration: THE “HEN AND CHICKENS,” 1830.]
De Quincey put up, as most travellers of his time were used to do, at
the famous “Hen and Chickens”; the enormous “Hen and Chickens.” “Never
did I sleep there, but I had reason to complain that the discreet hen
did not gather her vagrant flock to roost at less variable hours. Till
two or three, I was kept waking by those who were retiring; and about
three commenced the morning functions of the porter, or of ‘boots,’ or
of ‘under-boots,’ who began their rounds for collecting the several
freights for the Highflyer, or the Tally-ho, or the Bang-up, to all
points of the compass, and too often (as must happen in such immense
establishments) blundered into my room with that appalling, ‘Now, sir,
the horses are coming out.’ So that rarely, indeed, have I happened to
_sleep_ in Birmingham.”
The old Hen in High Street, ceased very many years ago to lay golden
eggs, and her Chickens were dispersed, to be gathered under a new roof
in 1798. The first notice of the original “Hen and Chickens” appeared in
an advertisement of December 14th, 1741. In 1770, a certain “Widow
Thomas” kept it, and in 1784 one Richard Lloyd. When he died, his widow
carried on the business until the expiration of the lease in 1798. This
lady, Mrs. Sarah Lloyd, was one of those enterprising and business-like
women who—like Mrs. Ann Nelson and Mrs. Mountain—left so great a mark
upon that age. She was not content to renew her lease of the old house,
for which she had hitherto paid £100 a year rent; but, with a keen
appreciation of Birmingham improvements, purchased a plot of land in the
newly formed New Street, and, some time before the lease of the old
house expired, began to build a much larger and imposing structure,
“from the designs of James Wyatt, Esq.” It was one of the first houses
in Birmingham to be built of stone, instead of brick. To this she
removed in 1798, and named it “Lloyd’s Hotel and Hen and Chickens Inn.”
Mrs. Sarah Lloyd, who to many of her more irreverent guests typified the
old Hen, sold her business and leased the inn five years later, April
16th, 1804, to William Waddell, of the “Castle,” High Street. He was the
son of a London oil merchant, and years before had married Miss
Ibberson, daughter of the proprietor of the “George and Blue Boar,”
Holborn.
It was during Waddell’s reign that the “Hen and Chickens” saw its
greatest prosperity. His rule extended from 1804 until 1836, ending only
with his death in that year; and not only covered the best years of the
coaching era, but almost saw its close. His was the greatest figure in
Birmingham’s coaching business. In 1830 he had purchased the freehold of
the “Hen and Chickens” and about the same time bought the “Swan,” and
with his son Thomas carried on a general coaching business and
contracting for the Mails.
In 1819 thirty coaches left the “Hen and Chickens” yard daily; by 1838
the ultimate year, the number was thirty-two. But by far the greatest
number started from the “Swan,” for in 1838 no fewer than sixty-one
coaches hailed from thence.
On Waddell’s decease the freeholds of both the houses were sold, and
bought in by members of the family; that of the “Hen and Chickens”
realising £14,500, and the “Swan,” £6,520. The beds alone of the “Hen
and Chickens” were then stated to bring in £800 per annum. The “Hen and
Chickens” was then leased by Devis, of the “Coach and Horses,” Worcester
Street, at a rent of £600. He shortly afterwards sublet it for £700 to
Mrs. Room, a widowed innkeeper, who remarried and gave it up in 1843,
after a term of seven years, when Devis resumed.
These appear to have been ill years for the famous old house. Coaching
and posting business had decayed, and the commercial growth of
Birmingham did not make amends for the loss of the good business done
with the nobility and gentry who resorted here in the old days of the
road, but now travelled through by train. Devis, accordingly disappears,
and the Waddell family, finding difficulties in getting a tenant, put in
a manager, Joseph Shore by name. A tenant was at length found in Frank
Smith, who had long been a druggist in New Street, but was now ready to
try his fortune as hotel-keeper. His rule extended from 1849 to 1867,
and was then changed for that of Oldfield, who reigned until 1878, when
the old fittings of the hotel were sold and its career brought to a
close. The end of the building, was, however, not yet, and the “Hen and
Chickens” continued in a modified form, until 1895. Lately it has been
pulled down, and a tall, showy “Hen and Chickens Hotel and Restaurant,”
in a Victorian Renaissance style and liver-coloured terra-cotta erected
on the site; a complete change from the old house, once looked upon as
an ornament to New Street, but become at last, owing to the rebuilding
carried on all around, altogether out of date and, by contrast, heavy
and gloomy. Its severe architecture had been frilled and furbelowed at
different times—a portico built out over the pavement in 1830, and a
stone attic storey added in more recent years, with a saucy turret at
one end—but, however comfortable within, the exterior suggested a bank
or some sort of public institution, rather than the warmth and good
cheer of an hostelry, and so it was swept away.
“The Fowls” as Young Birmingham delighted to call the “Hen and
Chickens,” housed of course many notable persons, but not those of the
most exclusive kind. The “Royal,” where no coaches came, was in those
days the first house. In later days, however, somewhere about 1874, the
“Hen and Chickens” lodged the Grand Duke of Hesse, and never ceased to
boast the fact. Absurdly much was made of him. He walked on special
carpets, dined off plate that had graced no plebeian board, and came and
went between rows of servants frozen at a reverential angle of
forty-five degrees. The management even went to the length of placing
likenesses of his wife on his dressing-table, to make it seem more
home-like. Excellent creatures! How touching a belief they cherished in
the prevalence of the domestic virtues, even in the august circumstances
of a Grand Duke!
V
Although the “Hen and Chickens” had so early been removed to New Street,
Bull Ring and High Street continued to be the chief coaching
thoroughfares. There stood the “Swan,” the “Dog” afterwards known as the
“Nelson,” the “Castle,” “Albion,” and “St. George’s Tavern.” In Bull
Street was the “Saracen’s Head.”
But the most exclusive and aristocratic of all was the “Royal,”
afterwards known as the “Old Royal.” This was the house mentioned in the
“Pickwick Papers,” where the waiter, having at last got an order for
something, “imperceptibly melted away.” It stood in Temple Row, and long
arrogated to itself, before ever the title of “Royal” came into use, the
name of “The Hotel.” Other hotels there were, but this proud house
professed ignorance of them. It was originally built, with its Assembly
Rooms, in 1772, and set forth, as a special attraction to its patrons,
the statement that no coaches ever approached to disturb the holy quiet
of Temple Row.
It was about 1825 that something of this seclusion was sloughed off, and
the business transferred to the old Portugal House in New Street, where,
with two additional wings, it blossomed forth as the “New Royal.” Its
old supremacy now began to be challenged by the newly established
“Stork,” in Old Square, then a quiet and dignified retreat, very
different from the same place to-day, with its flashing shops, electric
lights, and tramways; nothing now old about it, excepting its name. The
“Stork,” of course, suffered something at the hands and pens of
witlings, just as did the “Pelican” at Speenhamland, on the Bath Road!
and to make humorous reference to its “long bill” was the custom,
whether the charges were high or moderate.
[Illustration: THE “OLD ROYAL.”]
But the days of the old hotels, exclusive or otherwise, were in sight
when the railway came. Another sort replaced them, and, although the
kind in its turn has gone out of favour, examples may yet be found. Who
does not know the typical hotel of, say, the Fifties and the Sixties,
that abominably draughty type of building, all cold would-be
magnificence and interminable flights of stairs, with lofty rooms,
apparently built for a Titanic race fifteen feet in height, and, by
consequence, never warm, and never with an air of being fully furnished.
That such as these should ever have replaced the cosy old houses can
only be explained on the score of fashion, for there are illogical and
senseless fashions in architecture, as in everything else.
The railway era commenced in Birmingham with the opening of the Grand
Junction and the London and Birmingham Railways in 1837 and 1838. The
early railway engines and carriages, and, indeed, everything connected
with those days of the rail, are curious nowadays, and not the least
amusing are the comments then made on travelling by steam. “A railway
conveyance,” said one, writing in favour of the coaches, “is a
locomotive prison, and, the novelty of it having subsided, we shall
seldom hear of a gentleman condescending to assume this hasty mode of
transit.” That was a very bad shot at prophecy, but it was followed by a
perfect howler in the way of error. “It has already been proved,” says
this person, “that railways are not calculated to carry heavy goods.”
An early London and Birmingham train was an odd spectacle; the engine
with immensely tall funnel, and a huge domed fire-box; the carriages
modelled on the lines of stage-coaches, and their panels painted with
high-sounding names. Luggage was carried on the roof, and the first
guards rode outside with it, until the cinders and red-hot coals from
the engine half blinded them and destroyed their uniform, when they
quitted that absurd position and travelled inside. Early railway
journeys were penitential for travellers, for, instead of rolling
smoothly over wooden sleepers, the granite slabs to which the
fish-bellied rails of that time were riveted, produced a continual
jarring and a deafening rattle. Fares too, with less than a quarter of
the accommodation now provided, were almost double what they are now,
and the breaking-down of engines, and all manner of awkward accidents,
disposed many to think a revival of coaches probable.
VI
The way out of Birmingham is dismal and unpromising, by way of
Livery Street and Great Hampton Street. At the end of that
thoroughfare—formerly known as Hangman’s Lane—Birmingham is left
behind; but some seventeen miles of continuous streets, ill-paved
and hilly, and infested with tramways, yet lie before the pilgrim.
Livery Street, so-called (at a hazard) because its granite setts jolt so
unmercifully the cyclist who is rash enough to ride along it, gives an
outlook on to close-packed, mean, and frowsy little courts and
thoroughfares with grotesquely commonplace or absurd names—among them
“Mary Ann Street.” Here and along Great Hampton Street, where the smuts
from Snow Hill Station and those from adjacent factories now fall
thickest, the Birmingham of little more than a century ago ended, and
gave place to the open heath of Soho, enclosed only in 1793. “At the
second milestone,” says an old Birmingham guide-book, “on the left, when
you have passed through the turnpike, is Soho Factory, a magnificent
pile of buildings”; but that great workshop of Boulton and Watt has long
since disappeared and the turnpike itself forgot; while Soho Heath is
covered, far and near, with streets of a terribly monotonous kind—as
like one another as the peas in a pea-pod. The only landmarks and bright
spots are public-houses. Not inns for travellers, but gin-palaces for
boozers, where plate-glass, gas-lamps the size of balloons, and florid
architecture give the inhabitants of these wilds their only idea of
style and distinction, and that a mistaken one. All else is dull and
grey. Such are Hockley and Soho, and such is Handsworth.
Between those two last Warwickshire is left behind, and Staffordshire
entered—“Staffordshire ful of Queenys,” as an old writer has it. What he
meant by that, no commentator appears yet to have explained, but it
sounds complimentary.
The “elegant village” of Handsworth, as it is called by the author of
that old guide-book already quoted, was built over the great surrounding
commons, enclosed in 1798. That extraordinary person seems to look upon
this enclosing and filching of public property as virtuous and
altogether praiseworthy, and talks with unctuous satisfaction of “at
least 150 respectable houses erected on land which lay formerly entirely
waste. Plots of land”—he continues, with greasy delight—“have been sold
from £200 to £1,000 an acre.”
He tells the same tale of the waste lands of West Bromwich, enclosed in
1801, and realising similar sums. These long thoroughfares, therefore,
are nearly all built upon stolen property, and the rents of the houses
should by right go into municipal or imperial coffers, instead of
private pockets.
West Bromwich, the greater part of whose site was a rabbit-warren so
late as 1800, is a continuation of this weary street. Here, perhaps, it
was that Mr. Bull, “an eminent tea merchant,” while journeying on
horseback from Wolverhampton to London in October, 1742, was overtaken
by “a single Man on Horseback, whom he took for a Gentleman. After they
had rode three or four miles,” the account continues, “the highwayman
then ordered him to deliver, which Mr. Bull took to be in Jest; but he
told him that he was in Earnest, and accordingly robb’d him of about
four Guineas and his Watch, and afterwards rode with him three miles,
till they came near a Town, when the Highwayman rode off.”
West Bromwich is now a busy ironworking town, with newly opened
collieries and a population of 90,000. Just as the cuttle-fish obscures
its surroundings by exuding an inky fluid, so do West Bromwich and
Dudley, away to the left, belch forth clouds of smoke, and between them
till the sky with a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. The
road, running as it does at a considerable height, commands a good view
of the clustered towns and districts of the Black Country, with the
sullen-looking canals, collieries, blast-furnaces, and a hundred other
kinds of the commercial enterprises of this wonderful hive of industry.
Dudley, with its ancient castle on a hill-top, wreathed in inky fumes,
and Dudley Port down below, with rows of brick and tile works spouting
smoke so black and dense as to look almost solid, form the centre; with
Tipton, Oldbury, Priestfield, and Swan Village as satellites offering
their contributions to the general stock of grime and obscurity. At
night all this is changed, and the chimneys that in daylight seemed only
to smoke all become tipped with tongues of fire, casting a lurid glow
upon earth and sky. Turner has left, in his weird picture of Dudley, a
characteristic view of Black Country scenery; and Dickens, in the morbid
pages of the _Old Curiosity Shop_, has described its darker and more
repellent side. It is a country where every effort of Nature to put
forth leaves and grass is thwarted. Land not built upon has been
ransacked for mineral wealth and turned inside out, with the result that
on the shale and debris only the scantiest and most innutritious of
weeds can find a livelihood—and weeds commonly thrive where nothing else
can exist.
VII
At Hilltop, where the rattling and belching steam tramcars branch off
for Dudley, a descent is made by Holloway Bank to Wednesbury—the
“Wodensburgh,” as it is thought to have been, of Saxon times, and the
“Wedgebury” of modern local parlance. Wednesbury begins at the bottom of
this descent at Wednesbury Bridge, where the filthy stream called the
river Tame trickles between slimy mud-banks under the brick arches built
by Telford in 1826; but the end of one town and the beginning of another
in the Black Country, where the streets between half a dozen townships
are continuous, can only be noted with certainty by the borough
surveyors concerned. There are still on the West Bromwich side of the
bridge a few queerly gabled old cottages—kept white by dint of constant
recourse to the whitewash pail and brush—that show by their sunken
position how the road once dipped to the ford, before the bridge was
built.
[Illustration: DUDLEY _After J. W. M. Turner, R.A._]
Wednesbury is not, any more than its neighbours, a place of beauty; but
it is of far more remote origin than most, and, though it be dirty and
foul, and surrounded by waste lands like a vast congeries of domestic
dustbins, has a story going back to Saxon times, and the highly romantic
connection with Woden, the war-god, already hinted at. The old parish
church, conspicuous on the hill that forms the site of Wednesbury, is
beautiful within, even though as black as your hat outside, and,
moreover, dates as to its foundations from the Norman period. Those
foundations have an unusual interest, built as they are of the material
called “pockstone,” which is nothing less than surface-clay baked and
burnt by the underground fires that have raged at intervals from time
immemorial in the coal-beds underlying the town and its surroundings.
For Wednesbury is, or was, one great coalfield, and long before its
modern iron and steel trades had developed, was a place of collieries.
Many of them are exhausted now, but there were times when to dig in
one’s back-yard was to open up a private coal-mine and find fuel for the
seeking, so near the surface did the coal-measures lie. Even to this
day, when the streets are “up” for new gas or water pipes, the
excavating discloses coal of sorts: not perhaps equal to the best
Wallsend, but still coal that will burn and give out heat, and as such
eagerly pounced upon by the poor little ragamuffins of the town, who
come forth with bags and baskets and aprons to freely fill the domestic
scuttle.
The first coal-getting at Wednesbury was by “openworks,” just as gravel
is dug, or the brick-earth of brickfields is excavated. These
“openworks” are very ancient and mostly disused, and even in places
where they still yield coal, it is of inferior quality. To these
succeeded the “bell-pits” of the middle period, and the deep levels of
more modern times. In all this succession of years the underground
conflagrations continued, and the parish registers contain many
references to them; for example, when on “June y^e 20th, 1731,” a
collier was “most dismally scorched and roasted to death by ye Hellish
Wildfire.” Even in recent years these fires, thought to be caused by
spontaneous combustion, have broken out. Such was the one that burned
from 1894 until 1898, and not only destroyed a great part of the King’s
Hill Road, but caused the death of a watchman, who fell into one of the
gaping holes and was burnt to death.
Wednesbury’s blast-furnaces, foundries, iron and brass and steel tube
works, and manufacture of railway wheels and axles support the place,
now that coal is not so plentifully got. The quantities of railway
material may not surprise one, but feelings of astonishment arise on
contemplation of the tubing produced—tubing for bicycles, bedsteads,
water-pipes, gas-mains, and for many other purposes known only to
specialists in these matters; tubing from gauges as slender as a
lead-pencil to a size ample enough for one to crawl into, if so minded.
All the world, it might be thought from a sight of these things, has an
insatiable appetite for tubes!
The coal trade is not so completely exhausted but that pit-men are a
common enough sight in Wednesbury, and pit-girls too, or rather pit-bank
lasses; gentle creatures who sort and pick the coal over at the pit’s
mouth, and have muscles strong enough to fell an ox. It is not known
when a lass of the pit-bank ceases to be a lass; probably they always
remain so, just as postboys were, and “Cape boys” are, nominally
juveniles for the term of their natural lives. Let it not, however, be
thought that the pit-lass is being made fun of: it is done here in print
as little as it is likely to be within reach of her brawny arm.
A curious revival of old customs here is the trade of the “coal-jagger,”
a peripatetic retailer of coals to the poorer classes. The moneyed man
may have his coals in by the ton, but the working-man buys his by the
pony or donkey load of the jagger, who may be seen in the streets
leading a patient and depressed animal hitched up to three or more odd
little three-wheeled trucks, coupled together like a miniature
mineral-train. Each truck contains about a sackful of coals, offered
direct from the pit’s mouth at a price low enough to suit modest weekly
exchequers.
VIII
Down-hill from Wednesbury Market Place, and thence rising to Cock Heath
and Moxley, the road runs between rubbish-heaps; a scene of desolation
that, however ill it may be to live near to, makes a not unpleasing
picture in a sketch, taken at a backward glance, with the town grouped
on a curving sky-line. Moxley, perhaps, hints at decayed trade in the
sign of the mean little “Struggler” inn.
[Illustration: WEDNESBURY.]
As for Bilston, where is the man heroic enough to sound its praises?
Passengers by railway, passing through Bilston, see only deserted
slag-heaps, cinder mounds, and a general area of desolation, but the
road reveals Bilston in an added squalor of grimy houses and frowzy
courts. The collieries and ironworks that created the town are things of
the past, and their ruins only remain to tell of what it was a century
ago. Surely never was there a more second-hand looking place than
Bilston is now, with its long street apparently divided between
old-clothes shops, “marine stores,” pawnbrokers’ establishments, and
public-houses. Even Bilston gritstone, once prized for the making of
grindstones, is under a cloud, and the old saying, that “a Dudley man
and a Bilston grindstone may be found all the world over,” takes a new
significance in the fact that the enterprising native, if he wishes
scope for his enterprise, must go forth in the world to places as yet
unexhausted. But the decay of the town perhaps dates more certainly from
the fearful times of the cholera epidemic of 1882, when Bilston suffered
more severely than any other place; when so many died that help had to
be brought from other districts to bury them; and when hundreds of
children were left fatherless and motherless in the stricken town. Of a
population numbering 14,492, no fewer than 742 died.
You enter Bilston across a tract of abandoned coal mines, and leave it
for a similar waste. The forlorn and derelict condition of these
deserted mining fields, strewn with shale and piled with fantastic, but
always grim and forbidding, rubbish heaps, is a blot upon these busy
districts, and a reproach to the condition of affairs that permits such
things. Apart from the certainty that the mineral wealth of a country
should be the property of the State rather than of the individual
landowner, the question of the deserted coal-fields is a very serious
one. Here, in these barren and absolutely unproductive wastes, the
cynical selfishness of the landed class is abundantly evident. The coal
measures exhausted and the collieries closed down, the land is
unoccupied and contributes nothing in rates or taxes. It may lie thus,
unfenced and hideously sterile, until such time as it is wanted for
building operations. In many instances it will never be required for
that purpose, and so much land has thus permanently become as useless as
the Sahara or the stony deserts of Arabia. There is no reason, beyond
individual self-interest, why such a state of things should exist.
Before the pits were sunk and coal dug, these wild and uncared-for
tracts were in many cases cultivated fields, from which the soil was
removed when the colliery companies began operations. In leasing ground
for this purpose, landowners usually insert a clause protecting
themselves in the event of the coal being exhausted and the works
deserted; a clause binding lessees’ to restore the surface soil, or to
pay a fine of £30 an acre. In practice, it is much cheaper to pay the
£30 fine on every acre than it would be to remove the refuse-heaps and
to spread the nutritious soil over the land again; hence these
abominations of desolation that else might become fields once more, grow
the kindly fruits of the earth again, employ industry, and contribute
toward the rates and taxes of the community.
The old red-brick toll-house still standing by the wayside, about two
miles from Wolverhampton, where Gibbet Lane toll-gate once barred the
way, is in midst of these wastes. The modern settlement of Monmore
Green, as little like the picture of a village green, conjured up by its
name, as possible, is beyond. It was here in September, 1829, that the
“Greyhound” coach came to grief on its way to Birmingham. The breaking
of an axle, that fruitful source of disaster, threw the coach over, and
of the five “outsides” who jumped for their lives, one was killed, and
the other four badly injured.
The great and progressive town of Wolverhampton now looms ahead, a busy
and thriving contrast with the scenes just passed, and a place second to
none in the forward strides made towards improvement in these days of
its expansion.
IX
The old entrance into Wolverhampton, before the making of Cleveland Road
in 1830, was by the narrow Bilston Street, still remaining as an
object-lesson in old-time thoroughfares, and thence by Snow Hill along
Dudley Street, and so into what was then called “High Green,” now known
as “Queen Square.” Darlington Street did not come into being until 1821,
and before that time the rest of the way through the town and out at the
other end, followed a devious course, by lanes long since swept away, or
widened out of recognition. Coaches changing horses at the “Peacock” in
Snow Hill, a house still existing as the “Swan and Peacock,” had the
privilege of driving through its yard, and so by a short cut into Bell
Street, across into Barn Street (long since re-christened Salop Street),
and right away for Chapel Ash, and the open country again. The coaches
thus privileged were the “Tally-ho,” “Hibernia,” “Crown Prince,”
“Emerald,” “Reindeer,” and “Beehive.” The mails and other coaches using
the “Swan” in High Green, or Market Place as it was indifferently
called, or the “Lion” in North Street close by, had a longer journey,
and threaded a mazy course utterly vanished and forgotten since the
broad and spacious thoroughfare of Darlington Street was made.
Wolverhampton has nothing to do with wolves. It was never the “wolves’
town” of Dr. Mandell Creighton’s contemptibly childish etymology, but
probably derived its name from Wulfrun, sister of Ethelred II. She it
was who in 994 founded the great collegiate church of St. Peter, that,
collegiate no longer, stands on the crest of the waterless ridge forming
the site of the town. It is true that there had been both a church and a
town here before that time, for Wulfhere, first Christian king of
Mercia, dedicated a church to St. Mary at “Hamtun” in the year 657, and
the names of both founders have such close points of similarity that
there must ever remain some uncertainty as to which of them really gave
Hampton its distinguishing prefix. It may be noted as a curious fact
that the town is still known in the surrounding districts as “Hampton.”
Although it is not approached from Birmingham and Bilston by any
appreciable hill, Wolverhampton is seen by one standing in Queen
Square—now, as ever, the centre of the town to occupy an elevated site,
sloping rapidly towards the west. It is, indeed, situated, very
curiously, three hundred feet above sea-level, and on the great
watershed dividing the river-system of the Midlands. To the east flows
the Trent into the German Ocean, and to the west the Severn and its
tributaries empty themselves into the Bristol Channel; but, decreeing
though it does the destinies of those rivers, this ridge itself sends
forth only the rivulet called the Smestow.
Wolverhampton is (not very happily) called the “Capital of the Black
Country.” That title is misleading, for the reason that, although it has
grown enormously, and has long ceased to be the agricultural market-town
it once was, it stands, not in the centre, but at the very edge of that
busy and grimy tract. Coming through the Black Country from Birmingham
you suddenly, on taking leave of Wolverhampton, step over the threshold
again into a land of grass and trees and clear sunshine.
It is a fine and an interesting town, not wholly given up to factories
and soot, and still keeping a hold upon ancient memories in the great
church of St. Peter, a noble building that, about 1450, rose upon the
site of Wulfrun’s church, and presents as magnificent an example of the
Perpendicular style as anything to be found in the Midlands. Much might
be said of St. Peter’s if this were the place for it—of its rich
interior, of the curious and beautiful carved stone pulpit, and its
grotesque lion, goggling with its stony eyes, erected about 1480, and of
the life-sized bronze statue of Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, by Le Sœur,
that supreme artist who wrought the beautiful equestrian statue of
Charles I. at Charing Cross. But these pages are not for lengthy
archæological disquisitions, and so St. Peter’s must needs he thus
summarised, and even that fruitful source of angry discussion, the
so-called “Dane’s Cross” in the churchyard, must be but mentioned. It is
not a cross, but a circular pillar of red sandstone, standing twenty
feet high, and covered with interlacing ornament that may be either
Saxon or Norman, and is thought by some to be the memorial of a seventh
century battle of Tettenhall.
St. Peter’s and its surroundings form the pleasantest part of
Wolverhampton, and though electric tramways and the press of commerce
make the neighbourhood anything but reverend, the lawns and beautiful
gardens on whose grass and variegated flowers the ancient tower looks
down prove that, although the town is very earnest on the subject of
getting on in the world, it does not, for all the striving, forget all
those gracious things that make life better worth the living.
Of old times there is little, besides the church, remaining, and the one
notable thing, curiously enough, is, or was, connected with the church
itself. This is the old Deanery, built in the reign of Charles II., and
reminiscent of the time when the oddly conjoined Deanery of
Wolverhampton and Windsor lasted, together with the collegiate
establishment dissolved in 1846. The Deanery, a grand old mansion of red
brick, standing in its own grounds, is now a Conservative Club.
To ask a catalogue of what they make in modern manufacturing
Wolverhampton would mean a lengthy and varied list; but to specialise is
an easier task. Locks stand at the head of all products, with more than
sixty firms—Chubb’s the most generally known—engaged in a weekly output
of close upon 400,000 locks; probably as eloquent a testimonial to the
world’s ingrained dishonesty as anything likely to be advanced. Thirty
firms make the attendant keys. Tin-plate working and japanning come
next, with cycle-manufacturing; and at the end of a long list of
hardware industries, five “soot merchants.” There must be great scope
for their business in this neighbourhood of the Black Country, and the
only wonder is that there are not more of them.
X
Little indeed is left of the Wolverhampton of the coaching era—a fact
not very greatly to be regretted, because the old town had no
architectural pretensions, but a great many squalid cottages and lanes,
of no real interest or antiquity. High Green was the exception. It must
be borne in mind that the Wolverhampton of that time was a very small
place compared with the great manufacturing town of to-day, and that the
“neat market-town” of Wigstead and Rowlandson’s tour in 1797 contained
only some 11,000 inhabitants. To-day it numbers 96,000, and extends
along the Holyhead Road as far as Tettenhall, a distance of nearly two
miles, more than a mile beyond what was, a century ago, the “small
village” of Chapel Ash, a place forming now an integral part of the
town. High Green was a place well named in the adjectival part of its
title, for it occupied the highest part of the commanding ridge on which
Wolverhampton was first built. Whatever there was of a green on its site
has vanished these centuries ago, and as a market-place it has long been
superseded by the great market-buildings near by, and by the Corn
Exchange; both erected about 1851. Before that time it was thronged with
the stalls of butchers, and with country folk come to sell their
vegetables, fruit, eggs, butter, poultry, and other produce. Farmers and
corn-dealers met there, in the open air, careless of the weather, as
their grandfathers and remote ancestors had done before them, holding
forth samples of golden grain in their great outstretched palms, and
doing business with a hand-shake and a convivial glass at the “Swan,” to
the great content of the pigeons that hovered numerously over this then
picturesque centre of the old market-town, not yet transformed by the
discovery of the mineral wealth of the district.
The “Lion” was the principal inn of old Wolverhampton. It stood on the
site now occupied by the Town Hall, and was originally built about 1750.
Thirty coaches a day are said to have changed horses in its yard, or to
have started from its doors, and under the sway of Thomas Badger, who
died in 1799, and of his successor, Richard Evans, it enjoyed for a long
series of years the chief posting business. The yellow-jacketed and
black-hatted postboys of the “Lion” for nearly three-quarters of a
century rode the pigskin, bumped and plied the whip in front of the best
in Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Warwickshire.
Richard Evans was highly successful in the combined parts of
coach-master, horse-owner, and innkeeper. The variety of his business
was surprising, and his methods matched every shade. He ruled his
stable-yards with a passionate storm of objurgatory eloquence, bore
himself with a tactful but self-respecting deference to the great ones
who honoured his house, was popular with the townspeople who used his
assembly-rooms, and at one with the Town Commissioners, a body first
established in 1779, and meeting, in those days before Town Halls, under
his roof. One of his strange guests was the body of the Duke of Dorset,
killed in 1815 in an Irish hunting-field, and brought to England for
sepulture with his forefathers in the Sackville vault at Withyham, in
distant Sussex. A kind of lying-in-state, with the public admitted to
view, took place at every town where the mournful procession halted. The
next year, 1816, Napoleon’s travelling carriage, captured after
Waterloo, was here, being shown in the stable-yard for a week at
sixpence a head to thousands of country-folk and colliers. The pit-men
were not content with gloating over the capture: they wanted to mark
their hatred of “Boney” by dragging his carriage out and burning it.
[Illustration: HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1797. _After
Rowlandson._]
Richard Evans in 1821 sold his coaching business to his son, who took it
to the newly built “New Hotel” in Bell Street, itself now a thing of the
past. Shortly afterwards he relinquished the “Lion” into other hands,
but in a few years the old house began to decline. Landlords and
landladies succeeded one another at increasingly frequent intervals, and
at last it was closed in 1838, to be used for a period partly as a
private house and partly as a chemist’s shop. The growing dignity of the
town and of municipal life had by this time begun to demand the
provision of a Town Hall, and it was acquired and altered at a large
cost for that purpose, only to be found so highly inconvenient that it
was pulled down in 1869 and the building erected that now stands upon
the site.
Next in importance to the “Lion” was the “Swan,” already mentioned,
which stood on the east side of High Green, where Lloyd’s Bank now is.
In the old theatre down its yard, built in 1779, the Kembles, Mrs.
Siddons, and many another trod the boards, and from the balcony over the
“Swan” entrance Daniel O’Connell addressed excited crowds before the
passing of the first Reform Bill. Reform, however, did not still
political passions, for it was in front of this house that the election
riot of 1835 took place, with the result that the military were sent
for, the Riot Act read, volleys fired, and several persons—not rioters,
but women and children—severely wounded.
It was ill work that destroyed the old “Star and Garter” inn, that
stood, a picturesque brick and timber house in Cock Street (since
re-named “Victoria Street”) until 1834. In that old house, on a night in
1642, Charles I. slept, on his way from Shrewsbury to London, to be
intercepted, and his army defeated, at Edge Hill. The inn was rebuilt
and opened again in 1836, with a make-believe “King’s Room,” a spurious
bedstead, and such incongruities as portraits of the King and Cromwell
on its walls.
Beside these hostelries, and the “Coach and Horses” on Snow Hill, the
old inns of Wolverhampton were of a minor sort, where the simpler
business-men of those times repaired in the evening to drink a jovial
glass and smoke a companionable pipe; to play bowls or quoits and enjoy
themselves in what the present generation would consider a very free and
easy, not to say low, manner.
[Illustration: HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1826. _From an Old
Print._]
XI
Perhaps the most striking way of picturing the great changes that have
taken place in Wolverhampton in the course of a century is by comparing
the different aspects presented by High Green at periods ranging from
1797 to modern times. It has had many changes. Only two features in the
series of pictures have remained unaltered during that period: the
handsome old brick houses at one corner have survived, and the noble
tower of St. Peter’s still looks down upon the scene, as it has done for
close upon five hundred years. The series opens with Rowlandson’s
spirited drawing, showing the market in full swing. There are the
butchers’ and other stalls; there you see a milkmaid, milk-pail on head,
and the pack-horse of some country trader in the foreground. On the
right hand is a picturesquely gabled, half-timbered shop, selling such
incongruous things as toys and oysters: the building covered over with
plaster and become an inn, long known as “Cholditch’s,” by the time the
next view, taken in 1826, was drawn.
In that view, the coach, making so stately an exit in the direction of
Birmingham and London, is the “Prince of Wales,” from Maran’s Hotel,
Holyhead, to the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn. It reached London from
Birmingham by way of Henley-in-Arden, Stratford-on-Avon, Woodstock, and
Oxford. The imposing-looking coachman with the three-caped coat was
Miller, said to have been of Dunstall Hall, reduced in circumstances,
and driving a coach as to the manner born. As for the monumental
structure, like the second cousin to a lighthouse, standing in the
middle of the road, that was erected in 1821 by the “Light Committee” of
the town, to celebrate the establishment of the first gasworks and to
illuminate the Market-place. As a monument it was successful enough, and
the patent refracting gas-lamp that crowned it shed a light visible for
miles around; but its height was so great that the Market-place itself
remained in darkness. It only served to illuminate the bedroom windows
of the surrounding houses and light the good folks to bed. The “Big
Candlestick,” as the pit-men of the neighbourhood called it, was a
failure, and, after several proposals had been made to crown the pillar
with a statue of the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, or other
heroes of that time, it was removed in 1842, to be succeeded some years
later by that warlike trophy the captured Russian gun, seen in the
picture of “High Green, 1860.” Railways had then long abolished coaches,
and cabs waiting to be hired form a feature of the scene, eloquent alike
of altered manners and of Wolverhampton’s growth. Some of the houses are
also seen to have been rebuilt.
[Illustration: HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1860. _From a
Contemporary Photograph._]
In the “Queen Square” of to-day the gun is replaced by an equestrian
statue of the Prince Consort: a Gothic stone bank stands on the site of
the old inn, and on the right hand stands a newer new building, with
sundry other reconstructions and changes. High Green became “Queen
Square” from November, 1866, when Queen Victoria unveiled the statue.
History does not tell us why the Prince Consort should have been
especially honoured at Wolverhampton, which owed him nothing, nor he it.
Local association he had none, and in the placing of his effigy here we
find only another example of the tiresome excess of loyalty that has
planted statues of Royal personages thickly all over the kingdom, and
has produced a dreary and unmeaning repetition of “Victoria” and
“Albert” squares, streets, stations, museums, and what not, to the
blotting out of really interesting local names that had endured for
centuries before the wallowing snob came upon the scene, like some evil
pantomime sprite.
Electric tramways now run through Queen Square to all parts of this
modern and progressive borough, and new streets and new buildings of
both a business and a public character have changed the squalid and
formless character of the town into something very different; while
pleasant suburbs extend far into the country districts.
XII
At Tettenhall the borough of Wolverhampton ends, and with it the Black
Country. Crossing over the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, the
road makes direct for Tettenhall Hill, eased in its course by a long
embankment in the hollow, and by a deep cutting through the red rocks of
the hill-top, but still a formidable rise. The old road, however, was
infinitely worse. Its course may still be traced branching off to the
left by the “Newbridge Inn,” where the old toll-house used to stand, and
plunging down into the hollow where Wolverhampton’s only watercourse,
the Smestow brook, trickles under a narrow bridge, thought to enshrine
among its stones some remains of Roman masonry. Thence the old way rose
steeply, and went partly through grounds now private, and up “Old Hill,”
where a bye-road still zig-zags with an extravagant steepness between
sheer rocks. Here is the chief part of old Tettenhall village, much the
same as it was a hundred years ago, and, with the exception of an ugly
modern hotel built on the summit of the rocks, untouched by the life and
changes of all the revolutionary years that have passed since Telford
cut the new road and left this in a quiet backwater of life.
Tettenhall church and pretty churchyard are cut off from the rest of the
village by the modern Holyhead Road. Half-way up the hillside, and
overhung with trees, the old-fashioned rural spot overlooks
Wolverhampton, seated in smoky majesty on its ridge.
[Illustration: OLD HILL, TETTENHALL.]
In the crowded churchyard they show the confiding stranger a stone with
the much flattened and battered figure of a woman, and recount the
legend of it being the memorial of a seamstress who worked on Sundays,
and when reproached for it replied that if it were wrong she hoped her
arms would drop off. Her arms dropped off accordingly the next Sunday,
when plying her needle! The stone is really a much mutilated effigy from
some ancient tomb, cast out of the church so long ago that every feature
has been worn away; but it will be noticed that the arms have been
hacked off at the shoulders.
[Illustration: THE SABBATH-BREAKING SEAMSTRESS.]
On the hill-top is Tettenhall Green, where old road and new meet, and so
go past a park and hamlet oddly named “The Wergs” to Wrottesley Park,
fenced off for the length of a mile by as ugly a stone wall as it would
be possible to find in many a long journey. “The Wergs” is a corruption
of the ancient name “Witheges,” itself a mangled form of “withy hedges.”
It is probable that the name was derived from the sallows with which
some early squatter fenced his land, instead of the rude cut-wood fences
of primitive times. Wrottesley Hall, burnt in 1896, still lifts its
ruined and blackened walls between the trees.
Five miles beyond Wolverhampton, passing the “Foaming-Jug” Inn,
Staffordshire is left behind, and the borders of Shropshire crossed.
XIII
Shropshire is the land of the “proud Salopian.” Of what, you may ask, is
the Salopian proud? It may be doubted, however, if the phrase really
means more than that the Shropshireman has ever been high-spirited,
jealous of his own good name, and quick to wrath. But he has good cause
for pride in the fair shire that held out of old against the Welsh in
the hazardous centuries when this was part of the Marches, the Debatable
Land where the frontiers shifted hither and thither as the Lords
Marchers or the Welsh chieftains warred with varying fortunes, and where
the Englishman often sowed, and raiding Taffy came and reaped unbidden.
Shropshire bore its part well in those centuries of strife, when the
Welsh were continually striving to get back their own; for it should not
be forgotten that this also was Wales in the dim background of history.
More than eleven hundred years ago the Englishman threw the Welshman
back upon his rugged hills and out of these fertile plains, and this
became part of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Not only
politically a part of that realm, but socially, for war was not an
affair of kid gloves in those days, but an affair of race-hatred and
extermination, so that when the conquering King Offa had set his rule
over what is now Shropshire, those Welshmen who had not fled were slain,
and their land occupied by an alien race. So thorough was that change
that the very names of the towns and villages were altered, and are
either quite forgot or else only survive in the memories of antiquaries.
Take a map of England and its neighbouring Wales, and you will find a
mysterious earthwork called “Offa’s Dyke,” traced from near Prestatyn,
on the Flintshire coast, to Bridge Sollars, on the Wye in Herefordshire.
That was the boundary set up by Offa, “the Terrible.” The Shropshire
portion of it runs from Chirk, by Llanymynech, Welshpool, Montgomery,
and Clun, and to this day not only the place-names, but the people on
either side show a distinct cleavage between Saxon and Welsh. In the
heart of Shropshire it is difficult to find a trace of the old race. Who
but the antiquary knows that before Offa came and seized that town
Shrewsbury was “Pengwern”? Yet that was its name. Under the Saxon it
became “Scrobbesbyrig,” that is to say “Scrub-borough,” or the Town in
the Bush. Two hundred years after Offa and his kingdom had perished,
another fierce personage laid his heavy hand upon the Welsh in this
region. This was the Norman, Richard Fitz Scrob, to whom Edward the
Confessor granted what was not his to give, namely, all the land he
could seize from the Welsh on the Borders. The curious similarity of his
name to that of “Scrobbesbyrig” has often led to the supposition that he
built the first castle of Shrewsbury, and that the place took its name
from him. But he certainly built Richard’s castle, on the border, near
Ludlow, one of a chain of more than thirty fortresses designed to keep
the as yet unconquerable Welsh in check.
From “Scrobbesbyrig,” its capital, Shropshire derived its Saxon name of
“Scrobbescire” (pronounced “Shrobshire”), changed in after centuries to
its present form; and let it be noted by all who would not earn the
contempt of Salopians that the right pronunciation of Shrewsbury follows
the derivation, and that to name it as spelled is regarded by all
Salopians as a vulgarism. It is “Shrowsbury” to the elect, rhyming with
_blows_, not _news_.
The name of “Salop,” applied frequently both to shire and county
town—whence “Salopian”—is another matter, and difficult of derivation.
It comes, say philologists, from “the ancient Erse words, _sa_, a
stream, and _lub_, a loop,” describing the site of Shrewsbury, encircled
as it is by the strange windings of the Severn.
Shropshire remains one of the most exclusive and aristocratic counties
in England, as well as one of the wealthiest. It might well have
claimed, not so long since, to be the thirstiest also, the Squire as an
institution lived longer here than in most parts, and flourished most.
Two generations ago, Salopians of every class had the reputation of
being able to drink all others senseless, but that is one of the
obsolete virtues.
One topples over the edge of Staffordshire, as it were, into Salop, for
here the steep descent of a range of hills leads, by a dramatic
transition, from the waterless plateau around Wolverhampton to the
valley of the Severn. Summerhouse Hill is the joy of the cyclist bound
for Shrewsbury, and the bane of his return; with a mile run down in one
direction, and a steady heartbreaking climb in the other. Near the
summit is the “Summer House,” an inn where the flying “Wonder” of
seventy years ago changed horses punctually at 8.16 every morning, on
its journey from London to Shrewsbury; and at the foot of the hill, the
“Horns” of Boningale. Boningale itself may be sought on a slip road that
goes off to the left and returns in a semicircle of five hundred yards:
the tiniest village, with a very small church and one very large
black-and-white farmhouse, almost as ancient as the church itself. The
road onwards is quiet, and unmarked by any outstanding features, save a
house at Whiston Cross; Albrighton and other large villages lying a
little distance to one side.
Whiston Cross, situated 130¼ miles from London, can claim the
distinction of being exactly half-way between London and Holyhead. The
house was once an inn, but has long been the place where the Albrighton
Hounds are kenneled. In the old days of hard drinking, this and the
“Harp” inn at Albrighton were the resorts of a cobbler reputed to be the
greatest sot in the neighbourhood. He must have been exceptional, for he
scandalised even _these_ parts. He was once the victim, when in his
cups, of a joke whose echoes still linger mirthfully in the countryside.
Senselessly and helplessly drunk, he was driven over to a coalpit at
Lilleshall and lowered into its depths. When he came dimly to his
senses, he found himself surrounded by a circle of inquisitors, their
faces blackened, in an uncanny place, spectrally lighted, and was very
soon made to understand that he was dead and come to judgment before a
jury of fiends anxious to consign him to a warm corner.
“I don’t know why I was brought here,” he said miserably, addressing the
supposedly satanic tribunal, “and I can assure you, gentlemen, I was
once a respectable shoemaker, of Albrighton, in Shropshire.”
Beyond Whiston Cross, in Cosford Brook Dingle, the Wolverhampton
Waterworks raise their tall chimneys unexpectedly from the surrounding
woodlands of Halton Park; the engine houses humming with the machinery
that daily pumps more than three million gallons of water for the use of
that enterprising community. In another two miles across the Salopian
plain, Shiffnal is reached, and with it the first, and entirely lovable,
specimen of a Shropshire town.
XIV
Shiffnal is a little place, changed less in the course of three hundred
years than any along this road. Three centuries ago, when it was called
“Idsall” quite as often as by its other name, all the town, with the
exception of the church, was brand new, and its site with it; for the
fire that in 1591 had levelled it with the ground led to the new
township being erected a hundred yards or so to the east of the old one.
[Illustration: SHIFFNAL.]
No fires, however destructive, warned our Elizabethan forbears that
timber was a dangerous material to build with, and Shiffnal arose, one
mass of timbered houses, and by a happy chance they most of them remain
to this day; so that, whether one comes into the town by road, or is
swept swiftly over it by train on the Great Western Railway that looks
down from a lofty embankment upon the queer old Market-place, the effect
is charming indeed. But, lest this magpie architecture should, or ever
could, look monotonous, there have been introduced, from time to time,
buildings in other styles and materials. Down the street, and seen, in
fact, before one arrives at the Market-place itself, is, for example,
the “Jerningham Arms,” stucco-fronted and thrusting forth the elaborate
quarterings of the Jerninghams, Lords Stafford, and lords of the manor,
ensigned with the Bloody Hand of Ulster, which leads the ignorant to
suppose that Allsopp’s ales are obtainable within. The “Jerningham Arms”
was a coaching inn, and the “Star” (prominent in the illustration, with
a skylight on its roof) another, and a handsomer. Behind the fine old
red-brick front of that house, and through the archway, the stable yard
runs down; the beam over the arch rich in the badges of old fire
insurance offices, and above them the sculptured armorial shield of some
forgotten county family.
Shiffnal church stands a little apart: a fine red sandstone building
with a central tower crowned with a low pyramidical red-tiled roof that
only by a little overtops the battlements. Does that sound like a
depreciation of it? I hope not, for it is a type characteristically
English, and very lovable. One may trace many architectural periods in
Shiffnal church, from the Norman when they could not build too heavily,
to the Perpendicular, when lightness was coming in. Not that lightness
has part or lot here, for the church is stately rather in the massive
masculine way. Within a recess of the chancel wall lies the monumental
effigy of Thomas Forster, “sometime Prior of Wombridge, Warden of Tongue
and Vicar of Idsall,” 1526. In that inscription the old name of the
parish is preserved, as it is also on a tablet giving an account of a
much more interesting person; a certain William Wakley. It recounts how
he “was baptised at Idsall, otherwise Shiffnal, May 1st, 1590, and was
buried at Adbaston, November 28th, 1714. His age was 124 years and
upwards. He lived in the Reign of eight Kings and Queens.” But this
ancient’s record is surpassed, for the tablet goes on to tell of “Mary,
the wife of Joseph Yates, of Lizard Common,” who died August 7th, 1776,
aged 127 years. “She walked to London just after the fire in 1666, was
hearty and strong 120 years, and married a third husband at ninety-two.”
Two other curiosities, and we are done with Shiffnal church. The first
is the odd Christian name of a woman—“Kerenhapputh”—on a stone in the
churchyard: the second a Latin inscription of 1691 on the churchyard
wall. It may be Englished thus (the wall supposed to be speaking): “At
length I rise again, at the sole expense of William Walford, the kindest
of men.”
XV
Breasting a long incline of nearly three miles, the road comes to
Prior’s Lee and Snedshill, and, reaching a commanding crest, looks down
upon the industry and turmoil of Lilleshall on the one side, and the
equally busy and industrious Coalbrookdale on the other. The prettiness
of Prior’s Lee is in name alone. It and Snedshill are wastes of slag and
cinder-heaps—some a century old, others the still smoking refuse from
the blast-furnaces that roar and whizz and vomit smoke on the left.
[Illustration: SNEDSHILL FURNACES.]
But the great iron furnaces of Snedshill are seen at their most
impressive at night. The strange cyclist who has never before known the
road sees the reflection of their flames a long way off, and comes upon
the scene bewildered by the rising and falling of the lurid light that
glows intensely in one direction and sinks all other quarters in an
impenetrable obscurity. It is the weirdest of scenes, the surrounding
house-fronts and the tower of Prior’s Lee church standing out in the
radiated glare against the blackest of backgrounds: spouting flames an
angry red, turning the white light of arc-lamps down at the ironworks a
wicked and debauched-looking blue. Sighings of escaping steam, like the
groans of some weary Titan exhausted with labour, rise now and again,
and are succeeded by thunderous crashings and huge clouds of steam and
smoke, mingled with millions of sparks, as the molten metal is now and
again discharged.
To this is added the clattering of coal-waggons where Oakengates and the
collieries lie, deep down in the valley, brilliant at night with
constellations of lights. In strange contrast with all this, the
benighted wayfarer sees roadside cottages whose open doors disclose
housewives going about the business of their homes with all the world,
as it were, for a background. The sight enforces the thought—how great
the little home, how small the vast outside world!
Passing Ketley Station and rising Potter Bank, great banks loom
mystically on the left, and bars of light from wayside inns streak the
road. If it be summer night, sounds of glee-singing rise by the way, for
the colliers, although this is not Wales, have got musical culture.
But daylight strips Ketley of all possible mysticism, for the soaring
banks are then found to be just cinder-heaps, and the depth of the deep
valley on the right is not so appalling after all. Most of Ketley’s
mines are deserted now, but the cinder-heaps are gaunt as ever. Telford
drove a new road through the heaps and used vast quantities of the
cinders in ballasting and paving it, leaving a portion of the Watling
Street, diving down a hollow, on the right. It is still there, with the
disreputable roadside cottages beside it, as of old, and the same
semisavage class as ever inhabiting them.
Away in the distance, rising majestically over the miners’
rubbish-heaps, comes the whalelike outline of the Wrekin, shaggy and
blue-black with pines. Not a great hill, compared with the Stretton
Hills and the Welsh mountains presently to come in sight; but its
isolated position in the surrounding Shropshire plain gives it a
commanding appearance, and has made the Wrekin a centre to which all
Salopian hearts fondly turn in response to that old toast, honoured with
three times three, “To all friends round the Wrekin.” The toast has not
so limited an application as those who are not Salopians, or know not
Shropshire, might imagine, for the Wrekin is visible from incredible
distances, and the view _from_ it comprises not only the whole of
Shropshire, but a radius of distant hills sweeping the horizon round
from Malvern, the Warwickshire Edge Hill, the Peak in Derbyshire, the
mountains about Llangollen, the Berwyns, Cader Idris, and Plinlimmon, to
the Brecon Beacons.
The famous hill rises only 1,260 feet above the surrounding plain, but
just because it _is_ a plain, its Protean bulk looms larger and loftier
than many a taller eminence. Protean the Wrekin is because the outline
of it, viewed from different quarters, varies singularly. Whale-like
from Wellington, from the south-west it looks like a truncated
sugar-loaf, and seen from the road near Wroxeter resembles a huge and
shapely dome.
Wellington lies a mile distant from the road, but straggling outposts of
houses extend all the way, and at Cock Corner one may look down the
cross-road and clearly perceive the existence of the town and what
manner of town it is. To coaching travellers Wellington was but a name
and a distant mass of roofs; for, with but two minutes to change horses
at the “Cock”—or, if they travelled by the famous Shrewsbury “Wonder,” a
minute at Haygate inn, a mile onward—they were gone, and roofs and
chimneys sank, as though by magic, beyond the rounded fields and tall
hedgerows.
The “Cock” has remained game to the present day, and has witnessed the
disappearance of its once prosperous neighbour, the “Hollybush.” That
picturesquely named inn was a coaching house of a humbler sort, and
carriers and coal-waggoners made it a house of call. Now a private
house, brilliantly whitewashed, it seems by that dazzling raiment to
have put away, as far as possible, all coaly memories.
XVI
Haygate inn stands, just as does the “Cock,” at the fork of a bye-road
leading to Wellington. The “Cock” caught the travellers from London, the
“Falcon” (which was really the sign of Haygate inn, although few knew it
by any other name than that already mentioned) those from Wales and
Shrewsbury. It was intimately connected with the Shrewsbury “Wonder,”
being kept by H. J. Taylor, a brother of Isaac Taylor of the “Lion” at
Shrewsbury, who put that famous coach upon the road in 1825. Another
brother kept the chief inn at Shiffnal, and so between them they kept
the hotel and coaching business in the family along the first eighteen
miles from Shrewsbury.
When the “Falcon” was rebuilt, in the flush of the coaching age, it was
built to outlast the requirements of rich and jovial posting and
coaching travellers for at least a century to come. So much is evident
at sight of the house, substantially constructed and designed with all
the dignity of a private mansion. Alas! for all such anticipations; the
first railway train rolled into Shrewsbury Station in 1839, and shortly
afterwards the house became what it is now—a farmstead.
[Illustration: HAYGATE INN.]
Hay gate derived its name from “the Haye of Wellington,” and was a gate
into the forest of the Wrekin in ancient times. Nothing remains of that
forest; the pine-trees that now clothe the Wrekin were planted on what
was then a bare hillside in the early years of the last century.
Down this road that once led into the forest glades in one direction,
and to Wellington in the other, the town is soon reached. Shropshire has
few places so uninteresting, and its modesty in thus secluding itself
from the old turnpike is therefore not misplaced. The narrow and devious
streets of the town are not excused by their houses, almost without
exception ugly and dull. A duller and uglier church, very “classic” and
grimy, fitly lords it over those secular buildings, and looks down upon
the railway station, placed in a cutting in the very centre of the town.
A portion of the churchyard, indeed, was cut away to form the site of
that station. A depressing monument, as pagan and as “classic” as the
church, stands prominent among the humbler tombs. It is black-painted
and gilt, like a jeweller’s show-case, and forms a canopy or shrine over
an urn that does _not_ contain the ashes of the Reverend John Eyton, who
died in 1823, and is commemorated in a very long epitaph. He lies below,
and the urn is merely decorative: just of a piece with the rest of the
pagan affectation around. The author of that epitaph was evidently not
one who “damned with faint praise.” But listen to the virtues of the
departed:—
“As a Christian Pastor he was vigilant, affectionate, and faithful;
unweariedly devoted to the concerns of the fold, gathering the lambs
with his arm, and daily feeding the flock committed to his charge. And
now, while the Chief Shepherd places upon his Head a crown of glory
that will never fade away——.”
And so forth. Another side of the monument takes up the tale, and tells
us what manner of cleric this was:
“A man of whose character and endowments it is difficult to speak in
any other language than that of admiration and reverence. His person
and appearance interesting and attractive. His deportment and manners
graceful and engaging. His intellectual and sacred attainments so
various, so extensive, and so captivating as to render him everywhere
the Desire and Delight of his edified associates.”
All these advantages and virtues did not avail him much for preferment,
for he never became a Right Reverend. And yet this surely would have
been the man for a Bishopric. Nay, Primates could be no more—and are
commonly less.
XVII
Regaining the old turnpike at Haygate Inn, the Wrekin broods monstrous
on the scene for miles to come, its central bulk reinforced by Ercall to
the left, and little attendant Wrekins, crowned with fir-trees, on the
right. In midst of this comes Burcot toll-house, situated on a lonely
rise, where cross-roads seem to butt up against the great hill on one
side and disappear into a valley on the other. This toll-house may well
compare for size and solidity with any on the way from London to
Holyhead; but why it should, and why a shield carved in stone, and
inscribed “W.T., 1835,” should especially distinguish it from its
fellows, are things now hid from mortal ken. Nor has “W.T.” achieved the
fame he evidently desired, for the initials—to whomsoever they really
belonged—are commonly and erroneously ascribed to Telford, whose
Christian name was Thomas.
[Illustration: THE WREKIN.]
From this point, for a distance of nearly two miles, Telford made what
were described in the published projects of that time as “sundry
valuable improvements.” He planned and carried out a new line of road
through the shoulder of Overley Hill, so that the coaches, instead of
toiling over its crest, went through a short piece of rocky cutting
below, and left so much of the old Roman road to solitude and decay.
Coming from Shrewsbury, even this improved road remains a weary drag;
the summit and its little group of villas gained with joy.
Below and beyond comes the Wrekin again, brooding vengefully over the
smiling vale, and in wind and storm spreading a greater blackness over
the scene: at all times giving a sombre cast to the long straight
reaches of the Watling Street. There it has sat, moodily reminiscent,
since time began to be. Geologists, who have their reasons for so doing,
describe it as “a mass of eruptive greenstone,” and say the Wrekin is
“the oldest mountain in England.” Therefore it may well be reminiscent.
It has seen mankind emerge from the primeval ooze and floating as
invertebrate jelly-fishes in the inland sea that washed its base, and
has watched the family history from that interesting era to the present
time; through the period of the arboreal ancestor, when the jelly-fishes
acquired backbones and prehensile tails and took, as monkeys, to
climbing trees; and unless some of the glorified monkeys come meanwhile
as engineers and quarry it off the face of the earth, or blast it away,
it will probably see the race itself follow the lead given by the
governments of this country during the last sixty years, and resume the
condition of invertebrata, wallowing in the slime.
The Wrekin has seen the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the coming of the
Romans and the going of them; saw the first clearings in the primeval
forest, the subjected Britons slaving under Roman taskmasters at the
making of the Watling Street, and the brief period, centuries later, of
coaching. It has looked down over the vale these last sixty years upon
the railway, and the time is ripe for another change. Perhaps we are on
the threshold of it.
It is very still and peaceful on the Roman road, and the traveller has
it and its memories wholly to himself. Among those memories is the sad
story of Robert Bolas, of Uppington, yonder where the church tower and
the hedgerow elms occupy the middle distance, with the Wrekin for
background.
Robert Bolas came of an old and respected family in Uppington, but that
fact did not serve to keep him honest, and it seems that he had long
made a practice of stealing wheat from a farm between his village and
Wroxeter. It all happened very long ago, but the tale is not likely to
be forgotten.
The gradual shrinkage of his grain made the owner, a farmer named
Witcomb, suspicious, and, with a man named Matthews, he kept a watch.
Bolas duly appeared, with an empty sack over his shoulder, which he was
proceeding to fill when Witcomb and Matthews made to seize him. Bolas
then picked up a bill-hook, and attacking them so furiously that
Matthews was killed and Witcomb left, for dead, made off. But it so
happened that Witcomb recovered, and the affair, that had in the
meanwhile created a great stir in the neighbourhood, was explained. For
some reason or another, Bolas was confident of an acquittal, and
cheerfully told his friends he would be home in time to harvest his
barley.
But they found him guilty, hanged him at Shrewsbury, and gibbeted his
body here by the roadside; and so, although, after a fashion, he came
home again, other hands reaped his bearded grain. The thing made so
strong an impression upon the countryside that the phrase, “Don’t make
so sure of your barley,” became proverbial.
All these things happened in 1722. Matthews was buried in Wellington
Churchyard, where his tombstone, stating that he was “barbarously
murdered,” stood until the railway came and swept it and others away.
“Bolas’s Gibbet” long remained a landmark beside the Holyhead Road, a
weatherworn stump bristling with the rusty fragments of nails that had
been driven into the post so that it should not be climbed and the body
removed. That “the evil that men do lives after them” was exemplified
shortly after the body of Bolas came home and was hung upon the gibbet.
There still stands, not a great way ahead, an old roadside “public,” the
“Horseshoes,” where the road forks to Wroxeter. Here, one dismal night,
several youths were drinking and joking, when the conversation turned
upon Bolas. Each dared the others to go in the dark to the lonely spot
and ask the dead man how he felt, and as no one was sufficiently
courageous to go alone, they set off a body. On the way, one more
mischievous than the rest drew off unperceived, and hid in the hedgerow
beneath the gruesome object.
“How are you to-night?” asked the little group, keeping very close
together, and sorry they had come.
“Very cold and chilly,” answered a pitiful voice; and immediately they
all took to their heels. One suffered such a shock that he became a
raving maniac.
XVIII
Wroxeter lies within a short distance, but only approached along a
narrow and uneven lane. Its fine church-tower looks down upon little
more than a few farms and bartons; for village, as generally understood,
there is none. This simple rural place, aromatic with hay and straw and
corn, is the representative of, and takes its name from, the great Roman
city of _Uriconium_, one-third larger than Pompeii, destroyed by the
fury of savage hordes more than fourteen hundred years ago. The City of
_Uriconium_,—the “City of the Wrekin”—was established shortly after A.D.
48, when the Roman general, Ostorius Scapula, had driven out the British
tribes. He set an important station here, at a crossing of the Watling
and the Ikenild Streets, and the place not only served as an armed camp
to guard the roads and the ford of the Severn, but grew to be the most
important market along the road to Wales. It lasted four hundred years,
and only fell some forty years after the Romans had deserted Britain.
_Uriconium_ was then taken by the combined onslaughts of the Welsh
tribes, and burnt to the ground, and the Romanised British who had
remained were all massacred.
[Illustration: THE “OLD WALL.”]
To this great city, its site now under corn and grass land, and
inhabited by a handful of peasants, the Roman road led, on its way to
Wales and the shores of the Menai, and to its site still leads, but
beyond is lost, save to those who study archæology. The only relics left
on the spot to tell of that vanished place are the two Roman pillars
standing before the church; the font, made out of a carved capital; and
that massive fragment of masonry, the Old Wall, standing once in the
centre of the city, but now solitary in a field.
[Illustration: WROXETER CHURCH.]
Superstition brooded for ages upon this spot, and weird legends were
created by the terrors the lonely place had for the ignorant of other
times. Dead and gone Romans, who had, perhaps, been very matter-of-fact
and commonplace persons in their lives, and gifted with all the small
virtues of the hearth-loving citizen, loomed large, menacing, and
supernatural before those whose business took them near the ruin, and so
it was not until modern times that much was done to unearth what relics
might lie deep down below the earth deposited by the changes of so long
a period.
It was in 1859 that two acres of land were excavated. What did they
find? Many things. Fragments of the red Samian ware on which the Roman
citizens served their banquets, and whence they pledged one another,
drinking to the eternity of Rome. A rusty key without a lock, and a
stylus among bones, wine-cups, and scattered coins; the wooden tablets
it wrote upon perished, like the hand that held it. The figure of a
cock, modelled in lead, once a child’s toy, and near it the skeleton of
a child, doubtless the one that owned that ancient plaything. Three
skeletons of older persons were found, crouched up in one of the
underground hypocausts. A hypocaust was a basement chamber, constructed
to heat a room or house. Into one of these places those persons had fled
when the barbarians stormed the city. They intended to creep out when
danger was past, but the place was fired, and they perished in their
hiding-place. Two of these fugitives were women; the other an old man.
Within his grasp lay a pile of Roman coins, 142 in all, and, beside
them, all that was left of his cash-box—some fragments of wood and rusty
nails.
Roofing-slates, still with nails in many of their holes, were discovered
in the ruins; the slate, by its appearance, judged to have been brought
from Bettws-y-Coed. Millstones for grinding corn, and a charred heap of
the corn itself, were found; brooches, seals, household gods, and
fragments of the innumerable intimate articles of everyday life. Even
some careless scribbling, such as that often found on the walls of
Pompeii, was seen; but before it could be protected some graceless
excursionists among the thousands carried by rail at that time to see
the novelty of a buried city, obliterated it with their walking-sticks.
The two acres then explored, with the little that has been done since,
give the impression that if the three-miles’ circuit of the walls could
be excavated, results surpassing the finds at Silchester might be
attained.
From Wroxeter, crossing the Severn, the Watling Street went by the two
Strettons Wattlesborough, taking its name from being situated on the
great road; _Rutunium_, now Rowton; thence to _Mediolanum_ at the
crossing of the river Tanad, under the Breidden, a site now called
Clawdd Coch, or “Red Ditch”; _Mons Heriri_, under the shadow of Snowdon
(whose Welsh name is Eryri, or Eagles’ Mountain) at the ancient
earthwork known as Tomen-y-Mur, in the Vale of Maentwrog; and to the
sea-coast at _Segontium_, identified with Caer Seiont, near Carnarvon. A
branch, with stations of the way at _Bovium_ (Bangor-ys-Coed); _Deva_,
the great fortress of the Twentieth Legion, identical with Chester, on
the Dee; _Varae_, the modern Bodfari; and _Conovium_, by the Conway
(Caer Hên, or Old Fort), traversed the Dee estuary and the coast-line
looking out to Anglesey and the Irish Sea.
XIX
Returning from Wroxeter and passing the tiny hamlet of Norton, the way
lies flat to Shrewsbury. Flat, because we are now come beside the Severn
(which no Welshman calls anything else than Sivern). Away across the
watery plain as we advance are the Stretton Hills on the left, volcanic
and mountainous in outline, blue and beautiful in colour; and, more
distant, ahead, far beyond Shrewsbury, the Breidden Hills, a great bulk
starting from the level without any disguise of foothills or preliminary
rises to detract from their dramatic effect.
The Tern, a tributary of the Severn, crosses the road beneath a handsome
stone balustraded bridge, with views to the right over Attingham Park
and along the road, through a mass of overarching trees, toward the
village of Atcham. There, in the Park, stands the classical stone
building of Attingham Hall, one of those places built a century or more
ago at incredible expense, and only to be maintained at a cost far
exceeding the resources available to-day. Corn at 50_s._ and 60_s._ a
quarter built many fine mansions, and nowadays corn at 25_s._ keeps them
empty. Attingham Hall lacks a tenant. It belongs to Lord Berwick, whose
title does not, by the way, come from the only Berwick commonly
known—the town of Berwick-on-Tweed—but from Berwick Maviston, close by
Atcham, the old home of the extinct Malvoisin or Mayvesin family.
The chief entrance to Attingham Park is through the great archway in
Atcham village. One side of the village street is made up of church,
school-house, post office, a deserted coaching inn, and a number of
rustic cottages; the other is the long brick wall of the Park, densely
overhung with trees, on to which the village blankly looks. The only
opening in this wall is the great archway aforesaid; very tall, Doric,
and stony. With a spinal shiver the stranger, who stands wondering
awhile where he has seen its like, suddenly realises the resemblance it
bears to the entrance of certain great London cemeteries. The arch is
flanked by a stag on one side and by a pegasus on the other, with the
inscription in gigantic lettering in between: “Qui uti scit ei bona.” A
very proper aspiration; but it is just as well that tramps are innocent
as a rule of Latin, or they might not inaptly call and ask for something
on account.
Opposite this gateway stands what was once the “Talbot,” a first-class
posting-house. It looks on to the church in one direction, the entrance
to the Park in another, and down upon the Severn in a third, so that its
situation is by no means commonplace. When the altered conditions of
travelling rendered it no longer possible to carry on a remunerative
business here, the hotel was converted into a private mansion, and the
gravelled drive walled in and turfed, but it has only been occupied for
short periods and has long stood empty. Like the Princess in the fairy
tale, it waits and still waits, looking up the road and down the road
and over the bridge for the expected. It is weary waiting, and even the
rats and mice who lived royally in old times, and were reduced at last
to the pitiful expedient of subsisting on the faint smell of what _had_
been, gave it up and lived on one another. The ultimate survivor is
believed to have committed suicide in the Severn.
It is a noble bridge that spans the river here, and, built before the
art—no, _not_ the art, the science—of constructing bridges in iron was
understood, is of stone, and very steep. This steepness added to its
narrow proportions was a terror to those nervous coach-passengers whose
faith in Sam Hayward of the “Wonder” was not what it should have been,
considering the consummate art he displayed as a whip. But possibly they
thought that all the artistry in the world would be of little use to
save them and the coach if, on one of the wintry nights and mornings
when the Severn mists had obscured the road, they came into collision
with the parapets and so were hurled into the swirling river; and,
moreover, the hours—5.30 in the morning and 10 at night—when the
“Wonder” passed this dangerous spot, are not those when courage is high
and confidence greatest.
[Illustration: ATCHAM BRIDGE.]
It is a gentle rise from here to Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, passing on
the way the old toll-house of Emstrey Bank. On the hill-top, and looking
down the Foregate from the summit of his Doric column, stands the statue
of “old Rowley.” The personage owning that nickname was Sir Rowland,
afterwards Lord Hill, Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief in succession
to Wellington. As a Peninsula and Waterloo hero, and a brother-in-arms
of Wellington, Shropshire people held him in great honour, for was he
not also a Salopian—one of the Hills of Hawkstone—and a fine
representative of the county? It was left to a descendant to bankrupt
the estate and disperse the medals, warlike relics, and trophies of
Hawkstone Park.
[Illustration: LORD HILL’S MONUMENT.]
It is perhaps not the sculptor’s fault, but a result of distance and
acute perspective, that the gallant general on his elevated post bears
an extraordinary likeness to Pecksniff, as pictured by Phiz.
Abbey Foregate must have been the place where Benjamin Disraeli,
travelling post to Shrewsbury in June 1839, in company with Sir Philip
Rose, to fight for one of the two Parliamentary seats the borough then
retained, had his attention drawn by his companion to a huge poster,
displayed on the walls of a roadside barn. Disraeli was standing in the
Conservative interest, and was at the time head over ears in debt.
“Something about you,” said Rose to his companion, as his eye lighted on
the poster. The chaise was stopped, and Disraeli, deliberately adjusting
an unnecessary eyeglass—for the bill was set in the boldest and blackest
of “display” type—slowly read it from beginning to end.
It began, “Judgment Debts of Benjamin Disraeli, Tory Candidate for
Shrewsbury,” and unfolded a long, long list of creditors and the amounts
due to them. After long and careful consideration of the lengthy roll,
Disraeli turned to his friend, and calmly said: “How accurate they are.
Now let us go on.”
Shrewsbury was apparently not so scandalised as it should have been by
this revelation of Disraeli’s financial straits, for the electors
returned both himself and the other Conservative candidate by thumping
majorities.
The Foregate, a broad thoroughfare outside the town walls, was an early
suburb on the hither shore of the Severn, which comes winding again
athwart the road, presenting, when such things were matters of the first
importance, a defence that not the boldest might pass. Whoever held
Shrewsbury, girdled by river and ramparted walls for fully seven-eighths
of a circle, and with the remaining eighth, the only easy approach,
blocked by the frowning dark red turrets of its great castle, was master
of the situation. Hence that race between Henry IV. and Hotspur for
possession of the town in 1403; a race won by the King, who flung his
army into it a day before Hotspur’s Northumbrians and Scots came in
sight; hence, too, the repeated attempts of the Welsh to gain
possession.
Foregate still keeps something of its old suburban character, the
old-fashioned houses partaking both of town and country; curious old
inns neighbouring stately mansions, and village shops shouldering the
doctor’s or the lawyer’s staid Queen Anne and Georgian residences. But
the great feature is the Abbey Church, great even though only a fragment
of its former self. Ruddy sandstone of a particularly deep, almost
blood-red, hue gives its massive and time-worn tower a suggestion of
Shrewsbury’s sanguinary history; just as the great bulk of the Abbey may
have been the measure of the sins of that Roger de Montgomery, Earl of
Shrewsbury, who founded it and died, a world-renouncing monk, within
these walls in 1094. Close upon two hundred years later, in 1283, the
first English Parliament was held in the Chapter House; and that would
be a place of much historic interest to-day, but, like most of the
monastery buildings, it has been destroyed.
XX
“Shrowsbury,” as already noted, is the correct pronunciation of the name
of Shropshire’s capital; a mode that still follows the structure of the
Saxon place-name, “Scrobbesbyrig.” But it is not reasonable to suppose
that the outlander who has never been to Shrewsbury should know all the
rights and wrongs of the case, and though it may grate upon the Salopian
to hear strangers talk of “Shroosbury,” he can have no possible remedy
until he procures a reform in the spelling of the word. Meanwhile, the
outlander aforesaid is often severely entreated for his solecism.
Sometimes, too, he deserves all he gets, as for example when, somewhere
about 1894, the author of “Pictures in Parliament” taunted a Shropshire
member with using a “Salopian pronunciation which for some time hid from
the ordinary member a knowledge that he was alluding to Shrewsbury.” It
did _not_ hide the identity, and moreover, no Salopian ever did or could
use any other pronunciation. Now, if that member had said “Salop” there
would have been more room for criticism, although by that name
Shrewsbury is just as often known in Shropshire. It may be presumed that
every one knows the county to be often so-called, but it is a novelty
for strangers in these gates to hear the word applied to the town. To
this day the railway booking-clerks for at least twenty miles round
Shrewsbury are commonly asked for tickets to “Salop,” and the very
milestones adopt the same name. The Earls of Shrewsbury, on the other
hand, are (it may not be generally known) miscalled by that title, and
are really Earls of Salop. Not, let it be noted, of the town of Salop,
but of the _county_; as seen in the original patent of nobility granted
to the ancestral Talbot in 1442. But, although there is not the shadow
of a warrant for their adoption of the “Shrewsbury” title, they appear
never to have used any other, and in literature, from Shakespeare
downwards, the same custom has always been observed. But why? Is it
possible that the ill meaning of the French word “Salop” has forbidden
the use?
The town presents a hold front from this side of the river, crossed in
these peaceful times without let or hindrance by the English Bridge, a
beautiful seven-arched stone structure built in 1774. It looks not a
little foreign when viewed from the river-banks, with the osier-grown
islands in mid-stream; houses and church spires clustered beyond, and
the Castle turrets closing the view on the right; while the approach
over the bridge discloses a street so steep that it fills the
untravelled Londoner with as much astonishment as it did the lawyer come
to Shrewsbury for the first time by the “Wonder” coach. “I think I’ll
get off,” he said nervously, touching Hayward on the arm.
[Illustration: THE ENGLISH BRIDGE.]
“You be d——d!” shortly replied that past master of the whip and ribbons,
as, springing his team up the hill, he brought the coach round in a
circular course, and, shooting his wheelers and pointing his leaders,
made with the certainty of an arrow through the archway, and into the
stony courtyard of the “Lion.”
The hill leading in this astonishing fashion into Shrewsbury is Wyle
Cop, the main thoroughfare in old days. Its name, meaning “Hilltop,” is
sufficiently descriptive. The “Lion” still stands on the summit, on the
left hand, its coach-entrance yawning as of old; the streets, as narrow
as ever, giving point to Sam Hayward’s clever feat of coachmanship.
“Pleasant and chatty,” says one who frequented the Holyhead Road in
those days, “was Ash, the guard of the ‘Wonder’ coach, but the coachman,
one of two brothers, Hayward[1] by name, could by no means be so called.
The other brother drove the Holyhead Mail. The coachman of the ‘Wonder’
was grimly silent. ‘I will wager,’ said one of this taciturn Jehu’s
passengers to another, ‘that you don’t get a word out of him from the
“Hen and Chickens” at Birmingham to the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, barring a
pure answer to a question.’” The bet was won, for Hayward kept silence
all the way.
Footnote 1:
The authority here quoted says “Hodgson,” but that is an error. Nor
even was there a Hodgson driving the Holyhead Mail, but a guard of
that name who accompanied it on to Holyhead. Many of the statements
made by writers on old coaching days are, indeed, surprisingly
inaccurate, even when they have been contemporary with those times.
Thus, Colonel Corbet sanctions the frontispiece to his _Old Coachman’s
Chatter_, showing the “Wonder” from London ascending Wyle Cop at one
minute to twelve, noon. The “Wonder” reached Shrewsbury at 10.30 every
night; the midday coach was the Holyhead Mail.
But he was no misanthrope. A naturally cheerful nature was overlaid by
an undue sense of responsibility to the proprietors of the “Wonder,”
whose law was “ten miles an hour, including stoppages; or put the
paint-brush over the name of the ‘Wonder’ on the dickey.” Had his road
not been one of the best in the world—true almost to the spirit-level,
and constructed of hard dhu-stone—he could not have kept that excellent
time, day by day, and from year to year. As it was, the doing of it
absorbed the man’s very existence. He might hum an air to himself, but
talk he would not.
“What the deuce ails you, Hayward?” asked one of his box passengers,
“are you dumb, man?”
Then the Sphinx broke silence: “Can’t drive and talk, too,” he said;
and, closing his mouth like a steel trap, spoke no more.
That he was not only a master of the ribbons, but also of a peculiar
feat in driving, has already been hinted. This exploit, only once known
to be attempted by any other,[2] was repeated every time he brought the
“Wonder” into Shrewsbury, and never failed to draw an appreciative knot
of spectators, or to transfix with horror any strangers who might chance
to be among the outside passengers. There was always some difficulty in
driving up the steep and narrow Cop and into the “Lion” yard, standing
on the near side. Other coachmen quartered slowly up, and then, having
first drawn to their off side, turned carefully across and slowly
piloted their teams through the narrow entrance of the “Lion.” Hayward’s
method was radically different. Galloping up the hill and almost
scraping the near-side kerb, he would pass the inn, and then, suddenly
thonging his leaders, smartly turn them round in their own length
opposite the street called “Dogpole.” Then, calling to the “outsides” to
“mind their heads,” he would drive the coach at a trot into the yard,
with an inch to spare.
Footnote 2:
Stephen Howse, of the Ludlow night mail, was the hero of that
occasion. He was born in 1809, and died in 1888.
When the “Wonder” was driven off the London road, and became only a
two-horse coach, running between Shrewsbury and Birmingham, Hayward
drove the “Greyhound” between Shrewsbury and Aberystwith. Then,
following the example of Tony Weller, he “took a widow and a pub.” This
house, the “Raven and Bell,” next door to the “Lion,” was long since
pulled down. He died November 1st, 1851, but his widow was still in
business in 1856. Hayward lies near the scene of his daily exploit, in
the churchyard of St. Julian’s, under the shadow of the square tower
seen in the accompanying view of Wyle Cop. The flowers bloom fresh at
the head of his grave.
XXI
Coaching enterprise, from the earliest to the latest days of the
coaching era, flourished better at Shrewsbury than any other town along
the Holyhead Road. An early mention of public coaches is found in Sir
William Dugdale’s diary under date of May 2nd, 1659, when he says:—“I
set forward towards London by the Coventre coach,” and is followed in
June, 1681, by a reference to a journey from London to his country seat
in Warwickshire by the “Shrewsbury coach.” This was an extremely
deliberate conveyance. It trundled as far as Woburn the first evening
and stopped there the night, for at that period when the state of the
country was unsettled, and roads uncertain, and infested with bad
characters, no one thought of travelling after sundown. The second
evening it lay at Hillmorton, near Rugby, and thence proceeded, on the
third day, to Coleshill. Sir William alighted there, leaving the coach
to reach Shrewsbury by way of Sutton Coldfield, Aldridge Heath, and
Wellington in another two days.
By the light of later coaching history, which shows that coaches between
London and Shrewsbury were established principally at Shrewsbury to go
to London—proving that the desire of country folk for the metropolis was
greater than that of Londoners for the country—it would seem that this
pioneer coach was also a Shrewsbury venture. It probably did not
continue long, for even sixty years later Pennant describes how the
able-bodied rode horseback to London, while the rich, who were the only
people who travelled frequently, had their own carriages, leaving a very
inconsiderable and uncertain number to support a regular conveyance.
Thus it is that in 1730, when three Shrewsbury ladies visited the
capital, we find them riding horseback, escorted by five gentlemen and
six servants. Such goods as then passed between the two places came and
went by pack horses, and it is not until 1737 that another glimpse of
vehicles plying regularly along the road is obtained. From Shrewsbury in
that year began the long-drawn journeys of the “Gee-ho,” whose
establishment was due to a very shrewd and enterprising soldier,
appropriately named Carter. He had been billeted at the “Pheasant,” on
Wyle Cop, where the pack horse business was then located, and so
enslaved the heart of the widowed Mrs. Warner, who kept the inn, that
she married him. The old house is still on Wyle Cop, changed only in
name, and that only by an addition. It is now the “Lion and Pheasant.”
The “Gee-ho” in part supplemented, but in greater measure supplanted,
the pack horses. It was chiefly intended to carry goods, and was drawn
by eight horses, which, with an extra couple to pull it out of the
sloughs, brought the lumbering and creaking vehicle to or from London in
seven, eight, or nine days, according to the condition of the roads.
Even in 1749, twelve years later, we do not find the failure of the
first stage-coach of 1681 forgotten, for a certain Pryce Pugh, who was
then landlord of what his advertisement calls the “Red Lion on Wild
Cop,” in drawing attention to his house, mentions room for a hundred
horses, and notes the starting of a stage-waggon for London, but says
nothing of a coach. The horses, doubtless, were post-horses for riders.
But if passengers were still scarce and not worth the provision of a
coach, something could be done, and was done, to expedite the waggons,
so that passengers and goods could be conveyed at once. Imagine, then,
the stir created by the announcement on October 22nd, 1750, that the
“Shrewsbury Flying Stage-waggon will begin to fly on Tuesday next, in
five days, winter and summer.” They were, of course, only the poorer
classes who were thus catered for——people who had no objection to being
wedged in between the rolls of Welsh flannel, the butter and lard, and
miscellaneous consignments being conveyed; or else we should not in the
same year find a lady, anxious to reach London, riding twenty-two miles
to Ivetsey Bank, across country, to catch the Chester and London
stage-coach, which, taking six days over the whole journey, would not
have brought her to town any sooner.
But times now began to move rapidly, and the close of 1750 saw a new
conveyance on the road. This was the “Caravan,” an affair greatly
resembling modern gipsy-vans, and fitted up inside with benches for
eight, twelve, or even, at a pinch, eighteen persons. It was drawn by
“six able horses,” and professed to reach London in four days, but often
occupied the whole of five. If it had taken the direct way, instead of
wandering off to the Chester road, this promise could have been kept, as
it was in 1752, when the proper way was adopted, and Birmingham reached
the first night. The fare to London by the “Caravan” was 15_s._
The roads were then, under the operation of various Turnpike Acts and
the General Highway Act of 1745, beginning to lay aside something of
their pristine horrors, and Shrewsbury coaching enterprise was once more
aroused to great issues. In April, 1753, the “Birmingham and Shrewsbury
Long Coach, with six able horses, in four days,” started from the “Old
Red Lion” (the “Lion,” Wyle Cop), and went to the “Bell,” Holborn. The
fare was only 18_s._, not more than 5_s._ over and above the price of a
third-class railway journey that nowadays takes you either way in
something less than three hours and three-quarters. Competition began at
Shrewsbury in less than three months after the establishment of the
“Long Coach,” for in the following June Fowler’s “Shrewsbury Stage-coach
in three and a half days” began to set out from the “Raven and Bell” to
the “George and White Hart,” Aldersgate Street; fare one guinea, outside
half-price. It is not on record how these rivals regarded one another,
but they seem to have continued, each going to London once a week, for
thirteen years before circumstances warranted the intrusion of a third.
In April, 1764, however, a “Machine” was started, to go three times a
week and do the journey in two days, at a fare of 30_s._ The continually
increasing fares up to this point were balanced by the lower hotel
expenses on the shorter time taken, and so the “Machine” became popular
in summer. But this celerity of motion could not be sustained during the
winter, when the journey was extended to three days. In the spring of
1765, when it returned to its fine weather rapidity, it received the
name of the “_Flying_ Machine,” with the fare raised to 36_s._; but in
August, 1772, when its time was reduced to one and a half days, the
price came down by a couple of shillings. The reason for this combined
acceleration of pace and reduction of fare is instantly
apparent—opposition was threatened. It came with the spring of the
following year, but did not directly challenge the supremacy of the
“Flying Machine,” for the “new Flying Machine,” as it was called, by
John Payton, of Stratford-on-Avon, and Robert Lawrence, of the “Raven
and Bell,” Shrewsbury, took the Stratford-on-Avon and Oxford route to
London, was half a day longer on the journey, and charged 2_s._ more.
The proprietors of the original “Flying Machine” must have felt relieved
when those particulars were disclosed; but their nerves received a worse
shock in the spring of 1774, for the confederates who had started the
“new Flying Machine” re-named it the “London and Shrewsbury New Fly,”
and announced several alterations and improvements. It was to perform
the journey in a day and a half, to go three times a week, and, fitted
“quite in the modern taste” and with steel springs, it offered decided
advantages over the old favourite. In addition came the unkind
announcement that, “notwithstanding the Fly sets out after the old
coach, it will be in London as soon.” How sweet a sop for lazy
travellers, none too eager to rise, and how bitter the taunt to the old
firm!
It is not to be supposed that they tamely submitted to this impudence.
Their reply was soon forthcoming. It stated that the proprietors of the
“original London and Salop Machine,” in the modern taste, on steel
springs (the Machine, not the proprietors) and bows on the top, called
upon all travellers to observe “that the road through Coventry, being
several miles nearer than through Oxford, will fully demonstrate the
most speedy conveyance to London.” The “bows on the top” were seats for
the outsides, who, if carried before, must have been accommodated in the
“basket,” a wicker-work structure, hung on behind. Unfortunately for the
“original,” it had very determined competitors to deal with. Its
business suffered, just as, thirteen years before, it had come upon the
scene and cut up the trade of the “Long Coach” and Fowler’s “Shrewsbury
Stage.”
[Illustration: WYLE COP AND THE “LION”]
The rivals even put on another conveyance, the “Diligence” they called
it, conveying three passengers at the express speed of Shrewsbury to
London in one day, at £1 11_s._ 6_d._ each. This startling innovation
was announced to go three times a week.
There were thus in 1776 three modes of getting to London. Rivalry,
however, had outrun custom, and discretion had far out-distanced both.
The “Original” slipped back to a two days’ journey, twice a week, the
“Fly” dropped one weekly journey during the winter, and the “Diligence”
soon ceased to run at all.
But Robert Lawrence, the landlord of the “Raven and Bell,” and partner
in the newer coaching enterprises with Payton, of Stratford-on-Avon, was
a remarkable man. Given a wider sphere of action, there is no knowing to
what greatness he might have developed. As it was, he did much for
Shrewsbury in his time, and greatly influenced the traffic along the
Holyhead Road, from end to end. The route had until then been invariably
by way of Chester; but the casual inspection of any map will soon show
that that city lies at a considerable distance to the north of a direct
line drawn from London to Holyhead, and that Shrewsbury is placed much
more centrally. It occurred to Lawrence that the difficulties and
dangers of the route by what we now call the Holyhead Road, _viâ_
Llangollen and Capel Curig, were much exaggerated, and that time might
be saved and the dangerous ferry (as it then was) of Conway missed by
avoiding Chester altogether. In that case Shrewsbury would regain much
of the trade that belonged to it by virtue of its geographical position.
These prime facts grasped, Lawrence set himself to alter the course that
traffic had taken for centuries, and devoted his life to this one aim.
It was, as may readily be supposed, no easy matter, and he was obliged
to begin his reforms slowly. Thus, on July 3rd, 1779, we find him
setting up a post-coach to Holyhead by Wrexham, Mold, St. Asaph, and
Conway, three times a week, and in one and a half days, in conjunction
with other innkeepers. The fare was £2 2_s._
This ceased in 1783, but in the meanwhile, in conjunction with some
London innkeepers, he had started the first stage-coach to perform the
whole journey between London and Holyhead. This was established in May,
1780, going through Coventry, Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, Walsall,
Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Llangollen, Corwen, Llanrwst, and Conway. In
November of that year Lawrence removed from the “Raven and Bell” to the
“Lion,” next door, a larger house, and announced his determination to
pursue with unremitting industry the object he had in view, of securing
the Chester traffic for Shrewsbury.
This bold pronouncement roused the Chester proprietors and the
innkeepers along that route to fury. They threatened Payton with
opposition to his Birmingham, Oxford, and London coaches if he did not
break his connection with Lawrence, and when Payton declined to listen
to them, established themselves as a confederacy at the “Raven and
Bell,” just vacated by his partner, and put the “Defiance” coach on the
road to London, by Worcester. Lawrence, in his turn, perhaps somewhat
alarmed by the storm he had raised, issued an advertisement, thanking
the public for their patronage, and entreating further support in his
attempts to open up a direct road to Holyhead. Without this
encouragement, he said, “several years’ labour and great expense he has
been at (together with the great advantage to the town of Shrewsbury)
would be entirely lost.”
He was not content with advertising, but travelled largely, and waited
upon many people of influence for their interest in obtaining the
improvement of the route on which he had set his heart; and prevailed
upon several persons who had been upper servants in great English
families to establish inns at the several stages. His exertions were not
fruitless. Several of the principal travellers began to travel the
Shrewsbury route, and not only saved some miles and avoided the Conway
ferry, but had the additional advantage of superior accommodation.
Lawrence had a powerful ally in the press, and the _Shrewsbury
Chronicle_ is early found recording successes. Thus, February 3rd, 1781,
the Editor “is happy to inform the publick that the travelling through
this town daily increases,” and from that time proceeded to record the
names of important personages who passed through, in preference to
Chester. In the same year Lawrence still further enlarged his views, and
inspired the _Chronicle_ with the statement: “We have not a doubt, from
the rapid increase of business on this road, that, if proper application
is made, one, if not both, of the Irish mails will pass through the
town.” He had, in fact, been making interest with the Post Office to
that end. The mails of that day, however, were not coaches, but mounted
postboys; the first mail-coach in England not being established until
August, 1784.
Lawrence indeed went to surprising lengths, and seems to have
constituted himself a species of informal road-authority, to judge from
the _Shrewsbury Chronicle_ of April 13th, 1782, in whose columns care is
taken to “inform the publick that the new road through Wales, _viâ_
Llanrwst, has by the activity of Mr. Lawrence been kept open,
notwithstanding most other roads were rendered impassable by the heavy
falls of snow.” In the September of that year, Lawrence had another
triumph, for Earl Temple, the new Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, travelled
by Shrewsbury, and lay at the “Lion,” where he was received in state by
the Mayor and Corporation. “His lordship,” we learn, “said he was
extremely glad the Shrewsbury road had been recommended to him, as he
found it not only considerably nearer, but the accommodations were in
every respect perfectly to his satisfaction.”
In February, 1784, we still find Lawrence “determined to use every
effort to establish effectually what he has so long laboured at a great
expence to accomplish,” but it was not until 1802 that his exertions
procured the commencement of a shorter line of road, branching off at
Pentre Voelas from his previous route by Llanrwst and Conway and going
to Bangor by the present route, _viâ_ Bettws and Capel Curig. He was
aided in this by the Lord Penrhyn of that time, with whom it had long
been a favourite scheme, and who, to ensure its popularity with
travellers, built the great inn beside it at Capel Curig. By the
completion of this road a saving of eight miles was effected.
Meanwhile Palmer had established mail-coaches, and Lawrence had secured
an “Oxford, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury Mail, on Mr. Palmer’s plan,” so
early as September 5th, 1785. But it went no further until 1808, when it
was extended to Holyhead.
New times, however, had now dawned, and the modernised Holyhead Road was
coming into existence, under the control of greater forces than Lawrence
could have brought to bear. The Government and Telford between them
planned the “New Parliamentary Road,” which by July 1817 was
sufficiently advanced for the mails to be sent this way. The “Oxford,
Birmingham and Shrewsbury Mail” was therefore discontinued beyond
Birmingham, and the “New Holyhead Mail” began to run from London by the
present Holyhead Road, in thirty-eight hours. Shrewsbury had at last
achieved its due, and the “Chester and Holyhead Mail,” a slower coach,
by Northampton and Stafford, was regarded as altogether an inferior
affair.
XXII
When at last Lawrence was gathered to his fathers and new men took up
the business of coaching, the daily Mail-coach to Holyhead and the two
stages, running twice a week, were increased to seven coaches to or from
London daily, in addition to numerous local stages. There were the
“Oxonian Express,” through to Holyhead, by High Wycombe, Oxford, and
Birmingham; the “Union,” by the same route, going no further than
Shrewsbury; the “Shamrock,” to Holyhead, by Coventry and Birmingham; the
“New Mail,” to Holyhead by the same route; the “Prince of Wales,” to
Holyhead, by Oxford and Birmingham; and two Post-coaches. One could then
actually do the journey between London and Shrewsbury in eighteen hours.
There were also Crowley’s and Hearne’s vans and waggons, three-horsed
and six-horsed, for the carriage of goods, plodding very soberly and
with much jingling of harness and whip cracking, accomplishing the
distance in three or four days.
But to accomplish the journey by coach in eighteen hours did not satisfy
the new spirit come upon the scene. Isaac Taylor, who had taken the
“Lion” coach-office and appears to have separated the businesses of
inn-keeping and coach-proprietorship—that house being then occupied by
William Tompkins, who was succeeded by Mrs. Basnett in 1835, and by Mrs.
Brown in 1842—started the celebrated “Wonder” between Shrewsbury and
London, in 1825, to “perform,” as the old coach advertisements expressed
it, the journey of one hundred and fifty-eight miles in sixteen hours.
The “Wonder” set the fashion of day coaches running long distances, and
was the first to accomplish over a hundred miles a day. The proprietors’
complete satisfaction and pride in what they had found it possible to do
are seen clearly reflected in the name given to the coach. Taylor had a
strong company of allies to work the enterprise. It was horsed out of
London from the “Bull and Mouth” by Sherman, and by the most reliable
men at Coventry, Birmingham and Wolverhampton; while at Shiffnal and Hay
gate were two of his own brothers.
According to the time bill here appended, there were sixty-five minutes
consumed in stops on the way. Add to these fifteen minutes for the
fourteen or fifteen changes at the various stages down the road, and the
result is eighty minutes to be deducted from the running time, thus
giving a net average speed of a little over eleven and a half miles an
hour.
TIME BILL OF THE “WONDER” COACH, LONDON TO SHREWSBURY
_Departed from the “Bull and Mouth” at 6.30 morning._
_Left the “Peacock,” Islington, at 6.45 morning._
┌─────────────┬─────────────┬──────┬─────────┬─────────┬───────┬──────┐
│Proprietors. │ Places. │Miles.│ Time │ Should │ Did │ Time │
│ │ │ │allowed. │ arrive. │arrive.│lost. │
├─────────────┼─────────────┼──────┼─────────┼─────────┼───────┼──────┤
│ │ │ │ H. M.│ H. M.│ │ │
│Sherman │St. Albans │ 22½│ 2 3│ 8 48│ │ │
│J. Lilley │Redbourne │ 4½│ 0 25│ 9 13│ │ │
│ │ Breakfast │ │ 0 20│ │ │ │
│Goodyear │Dunstable │ 8¼│ 0 48│ 10 21│ │ │
│Sheppard │Daventry │ 29¾│ 2 54│ 2 15│ │ │
│Collier │Coventry │ 19 │ 1 47│ 4 2│ │ │
│ │ Business │ │ 0 5│ │ │ │
│Vyse │Birmingham │ 19 │ 1 39│ 5 46│ │ │
│ │ Dinner │ │ 0 35│ │ │ │
│Evans │Wolverhampton│ 14 │ 1 15│ 7 36│ │ │
│ │ Business │ │ 0 5│ │ │ │
│Evans │Summer House │ 6½│ 0 35│ 8 16│ │ │
│J. Taylor │Shiffnal │ 6½│ 0 35│ 8 51│ │ │
│H. J. Taylor │Haygate │ 8 │ 0 43│ 9 34│ │ │
│I. Taylor │Shrewsbury │ 10 │ 0 56│ 10 30│ │ │
├─────────────┼─────────────┼──────┼─────────┼─────────┼───────┼──────┤
│ │ │ 158 │ 14 45│ │ │ │
└─────────────┴─────────────┴──────┴─────────┴─────────┴───────┴──────┘
This was a programme kept with surprising punctuality throughout the
year; a punctuality and an evenness of working obtained only by the
large number of horses kept and the frequent stages. The Shrewsbury
“Wonder” thus came to be regarded with such veneration for its
time-keeping qualities that watches and clocks were regulated by its
passing. When the swift yellow coach hove in sight at the end of a
village street, the inhabitants, finding their timepieces fast, would
not assume the lateness of the “Wonder,” but would put back the hands
with a thorough and well-merited belief in the coach.
The stud of horses kept for the “Wonder” numbered one hundred and fifty,
all sleek and plump. None of the horses worked more than one hour out of
the twenty-four, being required merely on one of the ten-mile stages,
which they frequently performed in five minutes under schedule time, and
then were taken fresh and vigorous from the traces. They were fed
liberally, with the view of keeping them heavy, rather than muscular;
strength for short and powerful exertion being required, rather than
endurance. Their average value was £20 and they were seldom worked more
than four years on this fast coach. Well groomed and cared for, theirs
was a lot to be envied.
The surprising performances of the “Wonder,” and its financial success,
at last raised up a spirit of rivalry in the breasts of others in the
horsey and coaching way, so that in 1834 a competitor was put upon the
road, named (from the pseudonym adopted by C. J. Apperley, that famous
sporting writer), the “Nimrod.” Jobson, landlord of the “Talbot” inn,
horsed the “Nimrod” out of Shrewsbury. From London it was horsed on
alternate days by Horne, from the “Bull,” Holborn, or by Robert Nelson
from the “Belle Sauvage,” as far as Redbourne. The proprietors of the
“Wonder,” whose enterprise had in its success raised up this
competition, were furious, and determined to put another coach on the
road. Accordingly, the “proud Salopians” were astonished by the
appearance of an advertisement in the _Shrewsbury Chronicle_ during
July, 1835, announcing a new coach, designed to supplement the
celebrated “Wonder.” It ran:—
Isaac Taylor, ever grateful for the distinguished support he has
received from the public, announces a new and elegant fast day coach,
called the “Stag,” every morning at a quarter before five, arriving at
the “Bull and Mouth,” opposite the General Post Office, at seven the
same evening. I. T. has been induced to commence running the “Stag,”
to prevent the celebrated “Wonder” being in any way injured by racing
or at all interfered with in the regularity which has hitherto been
observed.
The figures quoted above give a journey of fourteen hours and a quarter,
a speed not approached within half-an-hour by the “Wonder” itself at its
very best. But this kind of thing could not, and did not, last, and
while it did continue must have been cruelly hard on the horses.
The “Stag” was designed to run a little in advance of the “Nimrod,”
while the “Wonder” followed it. In the expressive language of the road,
the “Nimrod” was “well nursed,” and only by the greatest good luck
chanced to pick up any passengers on the way. They raced along with such
a hearty rivalry all the way that the three coaches often arrived
simultaneously at Islington, _two hours before time_. It is surprising,
both that nothing ever happened to them, and that Shrewsbury could at
that time have had sufficient intercourse with London to render this
wholesale competition, in view of the other coaches running at the same
time, a paying speculation.
The rivals then commenced cutting one another’s throats by actually
rendering the affair unprofitable, and paring down the fares by one
third, trusting that those with the longest purse would be able to
survive, and recoup themselves when the others had been driven off the
road. Fifteen hundred pounds were lost in twelve months by the
proprietors of the “Stag” and “Wonder” in this way; but they had the
satisfaction of seeing the “Nimrod” off the road, and though the
“Emerald” and “Hibernia” night coaches, extended for a time from
Birmingham, loaded well from the rival yard, the famous “yellow belly,”
as the “Wonder” was fondly called, went on, with fares raised again to
48_s._ inside and 30_s._ out, from the 30_s._ and £1 to which, in
competition, they had fallen.
Thus did the “Wonder” maintain its pre-eminence in the little time left
before the London and Birmingham Railway came, in 1838, to cut its
journey short, and the Shrewsbury and Birmingham Railway, in 1849, to
complete the work of sweeping _all_ the coaches off the road into the
limbo of obsolete institutions. In its last few years the “Wonder” was
accelerated by one hour on both up and down journeys, for, starting an
hour later, it reached its destination at the same time as before.
Indeed, at the very time when railway enterprise cut it off in
mid-career, a further acceleration was contemplated. It was proposed to
perform the journey in thirteen hours. To do this it would have been
necessary to establish six-mile, instead of ten-mile stages, and to
abandon all stopping for taking up intermediate passengers.
But in the last days of its entire journey the “Wonder” was made to do a
remarkable thing. It left the “Bull and Mouth” at the moment when the
train for Birmingham steamed out of Euston, and reached Birmingham
twenty minutes earlier. That extraordinary feat was not repeated, and
was only possible even then by reason of the rails being slippery with
rain and the locomotive wheels losing grip, causing great delay. From
1839 the “Wonder” ran only between Shrewsbury and Birmingham, by way of
Ironbridge and Madeley, and ended its career, as a two-horse coach, in
1842.
XXIII
If Shrewsbury was a place to and from which came and went many fast
coaches, it certainly sent forth one coach that was phenomenally slow.
The “Shrewsbury and Chester Highflyer,” at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, was very much less of a flyer than might have been
expected from its name.
Those two places are forty miles apart. The “Highflyer” set out from
Shrewsbury at eight o’clock in the morning, and arrived at Chester,
under favourable circumstances, at the same hour in the evening. This
snail-like crawl of little over three miles an hour is so remarkable
that it invites investigation, whereupon some extraordinary things are
revealed. At Wrexham, for example, two hours were allowed for dinner,
and if his passengers wanted to linger over another bottle, Billy
Williams, the coachman, who had looked in at the coffee-room door to
announce the starting, would affably say, “Don’t let me disturb you,
gentlemen.”
“Billy Williams,” as he was to one class, “Mr. William Williams” to
another, “Chester Billy” and “Shrewsbury Billy” to the rest, was—need it
be said?—a Welshman, and if any one wished for a little extra time in
which to see Wrexham Church and its tower—one of the “wonders of
Wales”—his patriotic ardour could not withstand the application for a
further halt. Then, when Ellesmere was reached, another long stop was
made to sample the _cwrw da_, the famous ale of that place; and, in
fact, stops anywhere and everywhere, so that the wonder was, not that
the journey occupied twelve hours, but that it did not take twenty-four.
It must, indeed, have required some sharp driving, between whiles, to
perform the distance in a dozen hours, and it was probably during one of
these spurts that another coachman—one Jem Robins—was killed by being
crushed under the coach when on one occasion it was overturned at an
abrupt corner.
Billy Williams, however, made a peaceful end. He retired, or _was_
retired by the railway’s usurpation of his line of country. He was what
our grandfathers called an “original,” and a _protégé_ of the Honourable
Thomas Kenyon, at Pradoe, to whom he gave an excellent reason why horses
should seem to go better at night.
“Hang me, Billy!” the honourable had exclaimed, “I’ve tried to account
for it, but never could.”
“Why, I’m surprised at you,” said Billy; “do you mean you don’t know
that?” “Why, of course I don’t,” replied the squire. “Well, then,” said
Billy, “if you want to know the _real_ reason, it’s because you’ve had
your dinner.”
Billy was the hero of a story that long made a laughing-stock of him.
The Honourable Thomas Kenyon was driving on one occasion to Chester
races, but before setting out with his party from Pradoe thought that,
as it was a particularly hot day, Billy might feel more comfortable if
he exchanged his breeches and leather tops for lighter raiment. He
accordingly told him to go upstairs and put on a pair of his own white
trousers. Billy went up, and came back attired in a manner his host had
never contemplated, for he had put the trousers on over the other
garments!
Those days of fast coaches and slow coaches seem very remote from these
railway times, when by a quick train you may reach Shrewsbury from
London in three hours and thirty-five minutes, arriving, without turning
a hair, at the castellated building that serves for a railway station,
say, by the 2.10 p.m. train from Paddington, bringing you to the capital
of the “proud Salopians” at 5.45, not too late for tea. Thus, between
lunch and the afternoon cup you have accomplished what the “Wonder” at
its best took fourteen hours and three-quarters to do. This
forty-eight-miles-an-hour gait is, of course, not remarkable as railway
travelling goes, but it would have sufficiently startled the old
Shropshire squires, who thought they knew something of pace, aye, and
went it themselves, in every sense.
Those were fine fellows, and their grand and beautiful old town of the
Three Loggerheads still keeps an air—historic, racy, and individual—even
in these levelling days. The memory of the hard-drinking, hard-swearing,
and anything and everything but hard-working, Shropshire squires of the
first quarter of the nineteenth century, who drank deep and left no
heeltaps, “to friends all round the Wrekin,” will not readily fade. The
heritages of their descendants—gout and encumbered estates—forbid the
generous capacity of their forbears for old port and gambling to be
forgot, and such things, however excellent they may be as vouchers for
the fact that they lived their lives of old, are little desired by a
generation that also desires to live and go the pace after its own
ideals.
There remain in Shrewsbury many signs of this fine old free-handed way
of living, when the town was not only the capital of the Marches of
Wales, but resorted to for its “season” by the county families, who had
their own town houses here, and came to them from their rural seats just
as do their descendants to the London season. For another thing, the
picturesque old town—seated so grandly within the girdle of the yellow
Severn that enfolds it lovingly—is full of the queerest, quaintest inns
that can be imagined; their strangely roomy and cavernous construction
equalled only by their uniquely incongruous signs.
Much has already been said of the “Lion” inn, in connection with
coaching, and let it now be more particularly treated, first of all with
the remark that it was the foremost inn of its day. It was also the
scene of some of Mytton’s mad exploits: that Jack Mytton, of Halston,
who was a true pattern and faithful exemplar of the old-time Shropshire
squire. They still show the window through which he leaped, for pure
devilment, when he was being chaired, shoulder-high, by the enthusiastic
burgesses on his return for Parliament in 1819. He sprang from the chair
on that occasion, and alighted, amid a shower of broken glass, in the
bar. No one was particularly surprised, for his was a freakish nature;
but they _would_ have been astonished if he had walked in, in the usual
way, by the door.
It was here, too, that the adventure of the foxes, narrated by “Nimrod,”
occurred. Mytton, “on going into the bar of the ‘Lion Inn’ one evening
when somewhat ‘sprung’ by wine, was told there was a box in the
coach-office for him, which contained two brace of foxes. He requested
it might be brought to him, when, taking up the poker, he knocked the
lid off it, and let the foxes out in the room in which the landlady and
some of her female friends were assembled—giving a thrilling view-halloa
at the time. Now it cannot be said they ‘broke cover’ in good style; but
it may safely be asserted that they broke such a great quantity of
bottles, glasses, and crockery-ware as to have rendered the joke an
expensive one.”
It will not be matter for surprise, after this, when it is said that
Jack Mytton was absolutely the most fearless and dare-devil among the
courageous, reckless spirits of his time. He was always ready to risk
breaking his own neck, and that of any one else who might have the
misfortune to be thrown into his company while driving; and the story
told of him and his nervous friend in a gig together is perfectly true.
The friend gently remonstrated with him on his wild driving. “We may be
upset,” said he. “Were you ever much hurt, then, by being upset in a
gig?” inquired Mytton. “No, thank God!” exclaimed the friend, “for I was
never upset in one.” “What!” replied the squire, “never upset in a gig?
What a d—d slow fellow you must be,” and, running his near wheel up the
bank, over they both went.
XXIV
The “Lion” was the hotel to which De Quincey came in 1802, when, as a
youth, he was setting forth in his unpractical way for London. He had
walked in from Oswestry, reaching Shrewsbury two hours after nightfall.
Innkeepers in those times knew little of pedestrians who footed it for
pleasure, and classed all who walked when they might have rode as
tramps. Therefore, it will be allowed that De Quincey timed his arrival
well, at an hour when dusty feet are not so easily seen. However, had
his shoes been noticed, he was ready with a defence, for he came to the
“Lion” as a passenger already booked to London by the Mail. An Oswestry
friend had performed that service for him, and here he was come to wait
the arrival of that conveyance.
“This character,” he says, “at once installed me as rightfully a guest
of the inn, however profligate a life I might have previously led as a
pedestrian. Accordingly I was received with special courtesy, and it so
happened with something even like pomp. Four wax-lights carried before
me by obedient mutes, these were but ordinary honours, meant (as old
experience had instructed me) for the first engineering step towards
effecting a lodgment upon the stranger’s purse. In fact, the wax-lights
are used by innkeepers, both abroad and at home, to ‘try the range of
their guns.’ If the stranger submits quietly, as a good anti-pedestrian
ought surely to do, and fires no counter-gun by way of protest, then he
is recognised at once as passively within range, and amenable to orders.
I have always looked upon this fine of 5_s._ or 7_s._ (for wax that you
do not absolutely need) as a sort of inaugural _honorarium_
entrance-money, what in jails used to be known as _smart_ money,
proclaiming me to be a man _comme il faut_, and no toll in this world of
tolls do I pay so cheerfully. This, meantime, as I have said, was too
customary a form to confer much distinction. The wax-lights, to use the
magnificent Grecian phrase επομπ ευε, moved pompously before me, as the
holy-holy fire (the inextinguishable fire and its golden hearth) moved
before Cæsar _semper_ Augustus, when he made his official or ceremonial
_avatars_. Yet still this moved along the ancient channels of
glorification: it rolled along ancient grooves—I might say, indeed, like
one of the twelve Cæsars when dying, _Ut puto, Deus fio_ (It’s my
private opinion that at this very moment I am turning into a god), but
still the metamorphosis was not complete. _That_ was accomplished when I
stepped into the sumptuous room allotted to me. It was a ball-room of
noble proportions—lighted, if I chose to issue orders, by three gorgeous
chandeliers, not basely wrapped up in paper, but sparkling through all
their thickets of crystal branches, and flashing back the soft rays of
my tall waxen lights. There were, moreover, two orchestras, which money
would have filled within thirty minutes. And, upon the whole, one thing
only was wanting—viz., a throne, for the completion of my _apotheosis_.
“It might be seven p.m. when first I entered upon my kingdom. About
three hours later I rose from my chair, and with considerable interest
looked out into the night. For nearly two hours I had heard fierce winds
arising; and the whole atmosphere had by this time become one vast
laboratory of hostile movements in all directions. Such a chaos, such a
distracting wilderness of dim sights, and of those awful “Sounds that
live in darkness” (Wordsworth’s _Excursion_), never had I consciously
witnessed.... Long before midnight the household (with the exception of
a solitary waiter) had retired to rest. Two hours, at least, were left
to me, after twelve o’clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflections,
and the local circumstances around me deepened and intensified these
reflections, impressed upon them solemnity and terror, sometimes even
horror....
“The unusual dimensions of the rooms, especially their towering height,
brought up continually and obstinately, through natural links of
associated feelings or images, the mighty vision of London waiting me,
afar off. An altitude of nineteen or twenty feet showed itself
unavoidably upon an exaggerated scale in some of the smaller
side-rooms—meant probably for cards or for refreshments. This single
feature of the rooms——their unusual altitude, and the echoing hollowness
which had become the exponent of that altitude—this one terrific feature
(for terrific it was in its effect), together with the crowding and
evanescent images of the flying feet that so often had spread gladness
through these halls on the wings of youth and hope at seasons when every
room rang with music—all this, rising in tumultuous vision, whilst the
dead hours of the night were stealing along, all around me—household and
town—sleeping, and whilst against the windows more and more the storm
was raving, and to all appearance endlessly growing, threw me into the
deadliest condition of nervous emotion under contradictory forces, high
over which predominated horror recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in
London into which I was now so wilfully precipitating myself.
“... Such thoughts, and visions without number corresponding to them,
were moving across the _camera obscura_ of my fermenting fancy, when
suddenly I heard a sound of wheels, which, however, soon died off into
some remote quarter. I guessed at the truth, viz., that it was the
Holyhead Mail,[3] wheeling off on its primary duty of delivering its
bags at the post-office. In a few minutes it was announced as having
changed horses; and I was off to London.”
Footnote 3:
_Not_ the Holyhead Mail. De Quincey is writing of 1802, when the
Holyhead Mail, as already shown, went through Chester. He refers to
the London, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury Mail, which, started in 1785,
lasted until 1808. It was by this he travelled.
XXV
“All the mails in the kingdom,” he continues, “with one solitary
exception (that of Liverpool), were so arranged as to reach London early
in the morning. Between the hours of four and six a.m., one after the
other, according to their station upon the roll, all the mails from the
N[orth]—the E[ast]—the W[est]—the S[outh]—whence, according to some
curious etymologists, comes the magical word NEWS—drove up successively
to the post-office and rendered up their heart-shaking budgets; none
earlier than four o’clock, none later than six. I am speaking of days
when all things moved slowly. The condition of the roads was then such,
that, in order to face it, a corresponding build of coaches,
hyperbolically massive, was rendered necessary; the mails were, upon
principle, made so strong as to be the heaviest of all carriages known
to the wit or the experience of man; and from these joint evils of
ponderous coaches and roads that were quagmires, it was impossible for
even the picked breed of English coach-horses, all bone and blood, to
carry forward their huge tonnage at a greater rate than six and a half
miles an hour. Consequently, it cost eight-and-twenty massy[4] hours for
us, leaving Shrewsbury at two o’clock in the dead of night, to reach the
General Post-office, and faithfully to deposit upon the threshing-floors
of Lombard Street all that weight of love and hatred which Ireland had
found herself able to muster through twenty-four hours in the great
depôt of Dublin, by way of donation to England.”
Footnote 4:
The “solid” hours, or the “mortal” hours, of modern colloquial speech.
No apology, it will be conceded, is necessary for having quoted De
Quincey at this length, especially as these passages are omitted from
many editions, and so are little known. The eloquence that thus gives
expression to the morbid imagination of this forerunner of modern
neurotics is well employed here, and so largely has mind usurped
dominion over matter in later years that few of the present generation
will altogether fail to sympathise with his nocturnal terrors.
The circumstance that led to his being shown into the ball-room of the
“Lion,” was that of the house being under repair. That room is still in
existence, and a noble and impressive room it is, occupying the upper
floor of a two-storeyed building, added to the back of the older house
perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago. Lofty, as he describes it, and
lighted by tall windows, the features of the two music-galleries and the
chandeliers are still there, together with the supper-room at one end,
divided off from the greater saloon, and so disproportionately lofty.
The ball-room is additionally lighted from the ceiling by a domed
skylight. The moulded plaster decorations on walls and ceiling, in the
Adams style—that style which so beautifully recast classic
conventions—are exquisite, and even yet keep their delicate colouring,
as do the emblematic figures of Music and Dancing painted on the
door-panels. At rare intervals the room is used for its original
purpose, but it more commonly serves, throughout the year, that of a
commercial travellers’ stock-room.
The way to this derelict haunt of eighteenth-century gaiety lies down
the yard of the inn, and up a fine broad stone stairway, now much
chipped, dirty and neglected. On the ground floor is the billiard-room
of the present day, formerly the coach dining-room. In crepuscular
apartments adjoining, in these times given over to forgotten lumber, the
curious may find the deserted kitchens of a bygone age, with the lifts
and hatches to upper floors that once conveyed their abundant meals to a
vanished generation of John Bulls.
[Illustration: THE “LION” YARD.]
This portion of the house is seen to advantage at the end of the
cobble-stoned yard, passing the old coach office remaining there,
unchanged, and proceeding to the other end, where the yard passes out
into a steep and narrow lane called Stony Bank. Looking back, the great
red brick bulk of the ball room, with the stone effigy of a lion on the
parapet is seen; the surrounding buildings giving a very powerful
impression of the extensive business done here in days of old.
The “Lion” suffered severely when the railway was opened to Shrewsbury,
and the more so because its position, from being the most favourable,
was suddenly changed into the most unfavourable; the railway-station
lying at the other end of the town, and travellers no longer passing as
a matter of necessity by Wyle Cop.
For many years the “Lion” has therefore been all too large for present
needs, and its upper floors unfurnished and given over to rats, mice and
spiders. But it has had better fortune than befell the “Talbot.”
The “Talbot,” in Market street, was the great rival of the “Lion.” It
was the house to which came John Jobson to set up the “Nimrod,” and be
generally a thorn in the side of Isaac Taylor, of the “Lion” yard.
Although much else is lost, fugitive memories still remain of Mrs.
Jobson’s turban, hinting that she must have been a remarkable person.
Why has not some diarist of that time left us an intimate account of all
these things?
After the coaching age and Jobson were both simultaneously snuffed out,
in 1842, the “Talbot” was taken by E. Wheeler and Son, followed shortly
by one Peters, who had been a coachman on the “Nimrod.” It is to be
feared he found it anything but a lucrative speculation, for the house
was shortly closed. Some little while later, it was taken by the Post
Office. The building still exists, little altered, although the lower
part is a fancy warehouse, and the upper floors let out as offices, by
the name of “Talbot Chambers.” It is a great square unbeautiful
red-brick structure, with the sign, an effigy of that old English hound,
the Talbot, still surmounting the entrance.
The “Raven and Bell,” frequently mentioned in the rivalries of the old
coach-proprietors, is not to be confounded with the “Raven” in Castle
Street, but was situated on Wyle Cop. The “Raven,”—a favourite sign in
Shropshire and Staffordshire—and almost exclusively confined to these
two counties, derives from the old heraldic coat of the Corbets, that
ancient Shropshire family whose ancestral acres are situated at Moreton
Corbet, and is an ancient play upon the family name, by way of
_corbeau_, the French for raven. Indeed, not only the Corbets of
Moreton, but most others of the same name, bear one or more ravens as
their heraldic cognizance.
Wyle Cop is still a place of inns. There are the beautiful old
“Unicorn,” half-timbered and gabled, and that oddly conjoined “Lion and
Pheasant”; and many another to be found throughout the town.
XXVI
But if the inns be quaint, how shall justice be done to the quaintness
of the mediæval timbered houses in the High Street, or Butcher Row?
There is no town in England—no, not even Chester—that can show a greater
number, or more beautiful examples of black and white; while for queer
street names Shrewsbury certainly bears away the bell. There are Wyle
Cop, and the houses at its foot, once known as “under the Wyle”; Pride
Hill, which does not refer to the almost Spanish pride of Salopians, but
to an old mansion of the Pride family that once stood there; Shoplatch;
Murivance, on the old town walls; Mardol, or “Dairy Fold”; and Dog-pole,
originally “Duck-pool.” In midst of all these is the Market-square, with
the old red sandstone Market-house in the centre; a place notable in
these days rather for a pleasant and aristocratic quiet than for
anything connected with marketing. The old trading interest went in
1809, when the new Market buildings and Corn Exchange—a not altogether
successful combination of red and yellow brick—were opened. A curious
inscription on the front of the old building dates it back to Queen
Elizabeth’s time, and above, in a recess, stands the effigy of that
Richard, Duke of York, whose head graced one of York’s gates in 1460,
after the Battle of Wakefield. The effigy was brought from the old
gatehouse on the Welsh Bridge, demolished in 1791. Armoured from heel to
crown, it reminds one vividly of those feudal Daimios of Japan whom it
was imperative to sweep away before that country could emerge from
barbarism and savagery. And let it not be forgotten that our “chivalry”
of old was as savage and as barbarous as anything to be found in China
or any other Asiatic country.
A warrior of unflinching resolve and proud belief in self was Clive, one
of Shropshire’s greatest sons, whose bronze statue, its pedestal simply
inscribed with his name, stands in advance of the Market-house. It was
well merely to place his name there, for what do Shropshiremen need to
be told of Clive? That would be an ill day when they should forget his
youth, his manhood, his achievements, and his tragedy. To serve your
country—to give her Empire, trade, and wealth—these things do not fall
to the lot of many men, and it is well they should not, for they bring
the curses and the rabid enmity of the factious, the deprecation of the
feeble-hearted, and the vitriolic hatred of the envious and the
mean-souled; ever the loudest voiced among the body politic. Few are
those who, unmoved, could be the recipients of such base slander and
ingratitude, and Clive was not one of them. The man who gave us India
died by his own hand, but none the less done to death by the Little
Englanders of that day.
The dedications of Shrewsbury’s churches are as unusual as the names of
its streets. There are St. Chad’s, St. Alkmund’s, and St. Julian’s,
among others; but the finest church of all is St. Mary’s, whose spire,
soaring to a height of 220 feet, is oddly at variance with the tower and
the rest of the building, being of white stone, while the body of the
church is in red. St. Mary’s spire is visible from great distances. It
tempted a steeple-jack named Cadman to a fearful death in 1739. He had
been repairing the spire, and, having completed the work, was foolish
enough to essay the feat of sliding down a rope fastened to the spire at
one end, and at the other to an oak tree across the Severn. The rope
broke, and he was flung from mid-air into the street of St. Mary Fryars,
being instantly killed. A curious epitaph to him remains:—
Let this small monument record the name
Of Cadman and to future time proclaim
How by a bold attempt to fly from this high spire,
Across the Sabrine stream he did acquire
His fatal end. ’Twas not from want of skill
Or courage to perform the task he fell.
No, no; a faulty rope being drawn too tight,
Hurried his soul on high to take its flight
And bade the body here a last good-night.
St. Mary’s is largely Norman, and very, very beautiful. St. Chad’s, on
the other hand, built a hundred years ago, is Greek of sorts and
designed in a perfect circle; the model of a heathen temple, and the
worst of bad taste. But there is this satisfaction; it is not in an
obtrusive position, and unless it be diligently sought is not likely to
be found.
[Illustration: THE MARKET-PLACE, SHREWSBURY.]
The Castle, on the other hand, is the first thing seen by the railway
traveller from London, just as it was the least likely in coaching days.
When the Psalmist sings of the valleys being exalted and the mountains
laid low, he parallels the changes wrought at Shrewsbury by the railway,
for the traffic that came in by Wyle Cop has been wholly transferred to
another line of route, where the Castle is the most prominent object. If
there were ever one who, alighting at Shrewsbury station and, entering
the station-yard, failed to see the Castle, he surely would be blind to
the light of day, for the frowning battlements that even now glower down
from their craggy foothold, after eight hundred years, overhang very
dramatically the cabs and carriages, the portmanteaus and Gladstone bags
of modern life. The keep is all that is left of the original Norman
stronghold. The outworks have disappeared these hundreds of years past,
and the walls of the keep itself have been patched and re-faced.
Impressive still is that ancient fortress in sunshine, but infinitely
grand when the sun is setting, the lights of the station begin to
twinkle, and the signal-lamps to gleam green and red. Then those
ponderous turrets and ruddy walls take on a silhouetted blackness that
effectually hides the innovations and the modern touches only too
visible in the broad eye of day.
Shrewsbury School is as prominent as the Castle itself, on the way up
into the town; a school no longer since modern buildings have been
raised on the other side of the Severn. Now used as a Public Library and
Museum, and with a seated bronze statue of Darwin, its last famous
scholar, in front, it fitly enshrines within its noble Tudor walls many
records of Shrewsbury’s and Shropshire’s past.
One thing, certainly, the visitor to Shrewsbury cannot, nay, must not,
fail of doing. He must not neglect the delicacy peculiar to the town—
A Shrewsbury cake of Pailin’s best make,
as Ingoldsby has it in his “Bloudie Jacke of Shrewsberrie.” Only Pailin
no longer makes Shrewsbury cakes. He has long been gathered to his
fathers, and let us hope he is quiring with the celestial throng. But,
if Pailin be dead, the making of the especial cakes goes on unfailingly,
and the eating of them is a rite—a canonical observance almost.
Over against the shop where the original Pailin earned his undying
fame—why has Shrewsbury no statue to him?—is the courtyard that gives
access to that wonderfully beautiful timbered building, the Council
House, the spot where, in bygone days, the Council of the Marches
governed the Principality of Wales and these marchlands. “Lords’ Place”
they sometimes name this vice-regal court.
A great feature of Shrewsbury is the Quarry. Now the Quarry is not a
quarry at all, but a public park beside the Severn, in whose beautiful
grounds is probably the largest and most beautiful avenue of limes in
the kingdom; and amidst those noble trees there stands a stone effigy of
Hercules, covered over with the green stains of weather until he looks
quite the most horrid Hercules the explorer is likely to discover
anywhere. Also, his muscles are things of a weird and wonderful
fascination, more resembling subcutaneous apple dumplings than mere
representations of gristle and sinew. Who is there that lives within a
circle of fifty miles from Shrewsbury and has not heard of the Quarry
and its flower shows? Do not the railway companies run excursions
especially for those who flock there? What Shrewsbury would do without
its Quarry it is difficult to imagine, and scarce anything more
disastrous could be thought of than that it should ever be improved
away; for the town is so placed upon its almost island site that the
houses huddle closely up to one another in most directions, and this is
one of the very few clear spaces within the circlet that the Severn
makes.
[Illustration: THE COUNCIL HOUSE.]
XXVII
Indeed, when you have descended Mardol, and so across the Welsh
Bridge—the “reddie way to Wales”—have left the town on the way to
Holyhead, you are not yet clear of streets and houses. There, on the
further shore of Severn, outside Shrewsbury altogether, is the long,
steep street of Frankwell, all old houses and tottering tenements, dirty
and crazy, and so picturesque that surely some top-hatted, frock-coated
smeller of drains will presently level it with the ground and build some
sanitary and abominably ugly successor. The pity of these reforms that
must needs be so destructive! Not many places are more charming to the
artistic eye than Frankwell. There, among many other old houses is the
timbered “String of Horses” inn, that perhaps got its name when the road
was a steeper ascent even than now, and eight and ten horses in line
toiled up the rugged way to Wales.
In those old days, going back many centuries ago, the “Frankwell” of
to-day was the _Franche ville_, or “Free-town,” where the outlanders
might squat; the “beggarly and turbulent” Welsh, for example, who might
by no means come and live or ply their trades within the walls, and must
go forth from the town every night. Partly as a defence against more
threatening dangers, and partly to keep the Frankwell aliens, and other
unauthorised and undesirable rabble, outside for the night hours, when
the powers of evil are exalted, the gatehouse was long maintained across
the Welsh Bridge and the gates duly shut at sundown.
Darwin, who by his doctrine of evolution and heterodox reading of
accepted phenomena caused many flutterings of episcopal skirts, uprooted
much placid belief, and gave many a simple soul anxious times, was born
in that great house, the Mount, on Frankwell hill-top, so long ago as
1809. The house stands in its own grounds, surrounded by high walls,
just the same now as then; only the toll-gate, spoken of in Telford’s
reports as “Dr. Darwin’s”—although Dr. Darwin had nothing to do with it
and probably wished it at the devil, with the shouts of “Gate!” all
night long—is gone. Here the old houses begin to thin out, and beyond,
to Shelton, one mile and three-quarters from the town, suburban villas
line the way.
[Illustration: SHELTON OAK.]
At Shelton Gate, where the road branches to Welshpool, still stands that
battered and riven monarch, Shelton Oak, just within the garden-wall of
one of these modern villas, but readily to be inspected. “Glyndwr’s Oak”
it is often named, from the persistent legend that Owain Glyndwr from
its branches watched his ally, Harry Hotspur, being defeated at the
Battle of Shrewsbury, on that fatal day, July 21st, 1403. But,
unfortunately for the credibility of that legend, the battle was fought
three miles away, at a spot not visible from here, and Glyndwr was very
far distant on that particular day. This has been proved again and
again, and it saves something of Glyndwr’s reputation to accord him a
decent _alibi_; but the myth is immortal. It has brought no good to the
old oak, for, what with the relic-hunters who have hacked pieces away,
and their fellow-sinners who have carved their own names on its giant
trunk, it is in sorry case. Age, of course, is responsible for its
hollow body and dead limbs, but the kindly ivy wraps it fondly round and
hides many a scar. The trunk has a girth of 45 feet, a measurement that
goes far to prove an age going a hundred years or more back beyond
Shrewsbury Fight, and that _if_ Glyndwr had been here he could have,
indeed, climbed its branches. Had he desired to see the battle, he
should have taken his courage in his hands and gone down the road to
Shrewsbury, beyond, to get a good view. But there were those at
Shrewsbury who could have desired nothing better, and Glyndwr, _if_
again he had been here, would perhaps have remembered too keenly what
they did down there to the rebel Prince Dafydd when they caught him,
more than a hundred years before. What they did was to draw him on a
hurdle, hang and quarter him, and divide the pieces among the clamorous
towns. Greedy London got his head, and, crowning it with a tinsel crown,
spiked it upon Temple Bar, or London Bridge, or some similarly prominent
place.
Passing the outlying houses of Bicton village, the road comes to
Montford Bridge, where we take our last look at the Severn from
Telford’s sturdy red sandstone bridge.
The Severn is no sooner left behind than the Breidden Hills, first
glimpsed ten miles away and then lost, come again into view. They rise
suddenly from the level with even more dramatic effect than the Wrekin;
not of a greater height, rising only to 1200 feet, but of true
mountainous character. The distance of seven miles separating them from
the road, while not obscuring them, has the grand effect of blotting out
all petty detail and giving the appearance of a huge, blue-black, and
apparently unscalable mass. To give the last touch of theatrical effect,
a monument tops the highest point; perhaps, the traveller thinks, the
memorial of some hardy mountaineer who essayed to climb these heights
and perished in his rashness. But it is nothing of the sort; only a
pillar erected to keep green the memory of Rodney’s naval victories.
“Colofn Rodney,” as the Welsh call it, otherwise “Rodney’s Pillar,” is
inscribed in Welsh to the effect that
The highest pillars will fall,
The strongest towers decay;
But the fame of
Sir George Brydges Rodney
shall increase continually
and his good name shall never be
obliterated.
From behind “the Breidden,” as Salopians call the Hills, came the Welsh
in olden times to plunder and commit outrages on these exposed
frontiers; and the whole district remained a veritable Alsatia until the
beginning of the seventeenth century; outlaws and freebooters, both in
Shropshire and Montgomeryshire, the real authorities, who usually slew,
but in their lighter moments and more kindly vein contented themselves
with making sheriffs’ officers eat the writs they carried, seal and all;
or just stripped the traveller and with an oath and the prick of a sword
bade him begone.
[Illustration: THE BREIDDEN HILLS.]
The red rock that rises, tall, rugged, and precipitous behind Nesscliff
village, and gives that place its name, was the fastness of one of the
last of these gentry, Wild Humphry Kynaston, who, when forced from his
seat at Middle Castle and outlawed, lived in a cave here and began a
career as wildly romantic as that of Robin Hood.
The Ness gave a name not only to Nesscliff, but to the neighbouring
villages of Great and Little Ness, in lonely and sequestered spots at a
little distance from the road. Nesscliff itself has put off the outward
trappings of romance, and has but a few unremarkable cottages, the very
ugly old red-brick “Nesscliff Hotel” of coaching days, and the older
and, dazzlingly whitewashed “Old Three Pigeons.” Telford’s fine road,
too, disclaims any memories of lawless times, and except where the
branch road goes off to Knockin, is in itself as safe and commonplace as
any in England. At that point, however, just at the fork, a deep and
foul horse-pond offers a likely snare for the outward-bound stranger on
dark winter nights; although its sides are guarded by breast-walls as
old as Telford’s day, to the traveller making towards Shrewsbury.
Gallows-tree Bank, one of the rises on the way, now a name only, and not
well known at that, had its significance in the old days, together with
another of the same name a mile short of Oswestry; better known because
it gives its grim title to “Gallows-tree Gate,” an old toll-house built
beside that Golgotha. The especial need for these engines of retributive
justice, placed here in old times, is seen in the peculiar political and
social condition of the Marches. Nineteen miles separate the towns of
Shrewsbury and Oswestry, and only the smallest of villages are found
between. There had once been an attempt to establish a town—with markets
and fairs and municipal life—midway, but it failed, and the site of that
enterprise may be sought at the quite insignificant village of Ruyton,
to which a finger-post, pointing along a bye-road, directs.
“Ruyton-of-the-Eleven-Towns” is the name of that place, and one that
whets curiosity. “Towns,” however, is a misleading term in this
connection, and never meant more than the eleven “townships,” or petty
subdivisions of land, into which the manor of Ruyton was subdivided. The
Earls of Arundel were anciently lords of this manor, as also of that of
Oswestry. One of them granted in 1308 a full market charter to Ruyton,
with right of scot and lot, and of assize of criminals, and many other
privileges, and it is possible that the place would have thrived, only
for the fact that another Earl of Arundel, ninety-nine years later,
rendered these privileges useless by an arbitrary ordinance that none of
the tenants of his various manors were to offer anything for sale at any
fair or market until they had first offered it at Oswestry. The penalty
for disobeying was a fine of six shillings and eightpence. There is an
eloquent piece of fifteenth-century protection! The result, of course,
was that Oswestry had the “pick of the market,” and Ruyton decayed.
With that decay the road grew more lonely and dangerous. It had always
been a wild country, with robbers roaming the open heaths that spread,
forbidding and desolate, where enclosed fields now border the road; and
as Shrewsbury and Oswestry grew and trade waxed between them, the
plunder to be gained grew more and more tempting. Oswestry was then, and
for long after, the chief seat of the Welsh flannel market, and every
Monday the Shrewsbury drapers were accustomed to ride to it and back on
business. So dangerous was the journey that, even so late as Queen
Elizabeth’s time, the drapers, not without due cause, had prayers for
their safety read in St. Alkmund’s church before they set out, and were
“ordered”—no need for being bidden, one would think—always to go
together, and to bear arms. Perhaps it was because their prayers, their
companionship, and their arms did not suffice to protect them, that, a
few years later, we find them insisting that the Welsh cloth-weavers and
flannel-makers should bring their goods to Shrewsbury to be sold.
XXVIII
Along the road, half a mile or so short of West Felton, on the right
hand, stands the lodge guarding the entrance to Pradoe, the home for
half a century of that famous whip and amateur of coaching, the
Honourable Thomas Kenyon. Whether Pradoe be a corruption of the old
Welsh word “Braddws,” meaning “Paradise,” none can now say with
certainty, but sure it is that the beautiful park in whose recesses the
house is secluded, half a mile from the road, has one of the loveliest
outlooks upon the distant Welsh mountains of any domain in this fair
county of Shropshire. From the tall windows of the noble drawing-room at
Pradoe the landscape slopes down towards where the road runs, hid from
view; and in the blue distance, glimpsed between the romantic stems of
fir trees, rise the steep sides of the Breiddens, their highest point
crowned with the Rodney Pillar. The fame of the Honourable Thomas
Kenyon—“His Honour,” as he was known in his day—will not readily be
forgot between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, whose nineteen miles he drove
times innumerable in his coach and four. His was a prominent figure, any
time between 1803 and 1851, among those “country gentlemen of England,”
of whom Sir Robert Peel once declared he would rather be the political
leader than enjoy the confidence of princes. Whether as a sportsman or a
magistrate, “His Honour” was held in the greatest esteem. He was the
third son of Lord Chief Justice Kenyon, and was born in 1780 at
Gredington, a few miles north of Ellesmere. “Nimrod” has a
characteristic passage showing how early Thomas Kenyon’s love of horses
developed. “Nimrod” was fifteen years of age at the time, and a guest
with his father at Gredington:—
“Where are Lloyd and George?” asked Lord Kenyon, wishing that my father
might see them.
“They are in the garden,” was the answer.
“And where is Tom?”
“Master Thomas _is in the stable_, my Lord,” was the reply given by the
footman.
He was, in fact, taking an active part in caring for the horses, just
as, in later years, he “delighted in seeing twelve or fourteen horses
bedded down, all for his own driving on the Shrewsbury road.”
“The most popular man in the county,” as he was presently to be known,
married in 1803, and settled at Pradoe. He became active in the
volunteer movement consequent upon the threatened invasion of England by
Napoleon, and was Chairman of Shropshire Sessions and High Steward of
Oswestry. That he never chose to compete for Parliamentary honours was
due to his love of a country life in general and of the road in
particular. He set up his own four-in-hand and drove it himself, on an
average, three times a week, the thirteen miles from Pradoe to
Shrewsbury; at other times the five miles to Oswestry, or, on occasional
longer trips, to Llangollen or Bangor. Long before Telford had taken in
hand the first portion of his work on the Holyhead Road, “His Honour”
and his neighbour, Sir Henry Peyton, had done something to improve the
part that ran close by. It was in those days heavy with sand, and “as
bad a road as ever coach travelled on.” Grips and watercourses ran
athwart, and rendered it specially dangerous at night. He had these
defects covered over, and the sandy parts laid with hard material.
[Illustration: THE HONOURABLE THOMAS KENYON. _From an Old Print._]
A rigid punctuality was the chief feature of “His Honour’s” drives. He
is described as having been a stylish whip, though by no means a fast
driver, and never tempted to any racing rivalry. He was a species of
Providence to the country-folk who had business calling them into
Shrewsbury, and would always give a lift to any decent wayfarer. Only
one condition he insisted upon: that no walking-sticks were allowed. Any
one desiring a ride must choose between throwing his stick away and
walking. Ducks and geese and market-baskets were permissible, and many
an old market-woman rode to or from Shrewsbury on his coach; but sticks
never had a place there. The reason of this objection to them does not
appear. His punctuality was as invariable as that of the “Wonder”
itself; and we have already heard how the country-folk took out their
watches as that smart turn-out passed—not to see by how much the coach
was overdue, but to set their watches by it. The country people whom he
had brought into Shrewsbury learned, by many doleful experiences, to
value punctuality as greatly as he; for if, when ready to return, they
came to the “Lion” yard a minute too late, they would find the
inexorable squire and his coach gone, and have to resign themselves to
walking home.
This lover of the road and all its ways lived to see the old order pass
away and railways supplant the crack teams that passed his gates.
Endeared to all the coachmen and guards on the Holyhead, and the
Chester, and Liverpool roads, he was the recipient in 1812 of what was
called “a Token of gratitude presented by the Coachmen and Guards of the
‘Lion’ Establishment, Shrewsbury.” This took the form of a silver salver
purchased with a subscription of a hundred and twenty guineas. The
presentation was made in the course of a dinner at the “Lion” by Isaac
Taylor, himself, as the guest of the evening truly said, “one of the
most spirited and respected coach-proprietors in the kingdom.” It was an
occasion marked by much compliment, and much enthusiasm for the road,
but the glory had already waned. Four years before, the London and
Birmingham Railway had cleared the greater part of the Holyhead Road of
its coaches, and the “Wonder” itself, from the smartest four-horse coach
in England had become a two-horse conveyance; but still a wonder, the
wonder being that it could, in the face of the railway advance, have
kept the road at all.
Nine years later, in 1851, the Honourable Thomas Kenyon died, and was
laid to rest in the church of West Felton.
XXIX
Beyond that straggling village, at a point where a branch of the
Ellesmere canal runs athwart the road and is lost in a long perspective
to the right, is the hamlet called “Queen’s Head,” taking its name from
the old coaching-inn of that name still presenting a stolid red face to
the highway. The inn, the road, the canal, and a deserted toll-house all
tell a tale of the havoc wrought by the railway. It was a busy place
once, for many coaches changed at the inn, and on the old grass-grown
wharves of the canal many a ton of goods was unloaded from the barges
that in times gone by passed in great numbers, laden with coals, bricks,
and manure. It is also the point whence a branch road, going through
Whittington, and rejoining the main Holyhead Road at Gobowen, saves a
mile by avoiding Oswestry altogether.
[Illustration: QUEEN’S HEAD.]
Along that road lies the road to Halston, where, in the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, lived the Mad Squire, Jack Mytton, of whose
exploits we have already heard something at Shrewsbury. He came of the
ancient family of Mytton, and traced a distinguished ancestry from 1373,
when Reginald de Mutton, as the name was then spelled, was a Member of
Parliament for the county town. Between that time and his own there were
Myttons who left names honoured in the law and in the service of King
and Country, and had always held a tight hand upon Halston; handing from
father to son, a fine estate and a handsome rent roll.
John Mytton was born in 1791, and his father died two years later. His
admiring friend and biographer, “Nimrod,” gives us the picture of an
unlicked cub, spoiled by the indulgence of his mother. Expelled from
Westminster and Harrow schools and rusticated from Oxford, he was
gazetted to a cornetcy in the 7th Hussars after Waterloo, too late to be
taught anything on the battlefield, and just at the time when he came of
age, and the estate, carefully managed during a long minority of
nineteen years, fell to his own disposal. A rent roll of £10,000 a year
and an accumulated sum of £60,000 only existed for him to dissipate as
soon as possible; and he was not long about it. In four years he had
left the army, and come home to marry and be the Squire and a Member of
Parliament, and to enter upon the wildest part of a career that
squandered upwards of half a million sterling and brought him to an
early grave in 1834.
The “hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-fighting and hard-hitting Jack
Mytton” has left an immortal memory in North Shropshire. They tell still
of his exploits; of how he only engaged a certain gamekeeper for the
Halston coverts on condition that he should thrash a sweep supposed to
lurk there. The gamekeeper accordingly went forth to battle and fought
for his promised place, giving the sweep a thorough hiding. Hard-hitter
though he was, the Squire met his match that day, for he was the Sweep!
Another encounter, from whose gory twenty rounds he came victorious, was
his set-to with a miner who had annoyed him when out with the harriers.
The miner boasted himself a “tough ’un,” but was knocked out of time.
Mytton gave him half a sovereign and a hare, and told him to take it to
Halston “and get another bellyful.”
To his maniacal pranks there was no end. He once went duck-shooting on
the ice in the depth of winter, naked, and a favourite amusement was to
ride into the drawing-room in full hunting costume on the back of a tame
she-bear. To put a guest to bed (dead drunk of course, for hospitality
in those days could do no less, and both inclination and etiquette on
the guest’s side did their part) in company with the bear and two
bull-dogs was a prime joke.
One of his exploits is connected with the toll-gate that once stretched
across the road just beyond the “Queen’s Head.” It lay, of course, on
his way home from Shrewsbury, whither he had gone one day. Returning at
some time between eleven o’clock and midnight, the turnpike man, roused
out of his bed, and thinking the hour past twelve o’clock and another
day come, insisted upon charging him another toll. It was a bitterly
cold night, and the pikeman was glad enough to hurry back to bed.
Waiting until he had got between the bedclothes, Mytton rode back and
had him out again to open for him, and returned a little later to rouse
the worried wretch once more from his slumbers with the cry of “Gate!”
The man then returned the money and Mytton went home.
Among his eccentricities was an inordinate love of filberts. He and a
friend ate eighteen pounds on one occasion, on the way down from London
in his carriage, and when they reached Halston they were “up to their
knees in nutshells,” as he declared. A sporting hairdresser of
Shrewsbury, who generally supplied him with filberts, once said that he
had sent two cartloads to Halston in one season. Perhaps he ate them to
provoke a thirst, and certainly his exploits with the port equalled his
consumption of nuts, four to six bottles a day being his usual
performance.
But he would drink anything. On one occasion, going into the
establishment of the sporting hairdresser, he called imperiously for
something, and taking down a bottle of lavender-water, knocked the head
off and drank the contents. He said it would be “a good preservative
against the night air.”
In a comparison made by an admiring friend between him and the dissolute
Lord Rochester of Charles II.’s time—a comparison showing Mytton to be
Rochester’s superior in every kind of extravagance and depravity—it was
said that Rochester was drunk continually for five years, and Mytton
beat him by seven. He had a breath like a wine-vault and a complexion
like a beet-root, as a result of these excesses. They, naturally, did
not lessen his extravagances, but never left him helpless. “Damn this
hiccup!” he exclaimed one night, when standing in his nightshirt, about
to get into bed, “but I’ll _frighten_ it away,” that being the usually
accepted theory of ridding one’s self of that distressing spasm. So
saying, he took a lighted candle and, applying it to the tail of his
shirt, was instantly enveloped in flames. By the exertions of two
friends, who rushed to his aid and tore the blazing garments piecemeal
from him, he was saved from being burnt to death; but his only remark
was, as he staggered, naked, to bed, “The hiccup is gone, by God!”
He ran his course to its appointed and inevitable end. The fine timber
of his estate went to pay for his racing, hunting, gambling, and
drinking extravagances, and for others still less reputable, and the
estate followed. A relative remonstrated with him, and deplored the
approaching necessity of alienating those ancestral acres. “How long,”
asked Mytton, “has the property been in the family?”
“Five hundred years,” was the reply.
“Then,” rejoined the reckless Squire, with an oath, “it is high time it
went out of it.” Imprisonment for debt, and exile to the Continent came
later. Brandy did what port could not, and sent the graceless scion of
an ancient stock to his death-bed. His body was brought from London and
laid among the ashes of worthier men, who had passed on to their
descendants the patrimony they had received, Halston passed away with
the Mad Squire to other hands, and his son lived and died landless,
filling the position of bailiff to a Shropshire nobleman.
XXX
Up along the rise from Queen’s Head, past Aston Park, where sepulchral
burrows of prehistoric man are seen beneath the trees, the way lies on
to Oswestry. The town of “Odgerstree,” as the country people call it, is
entered soon after passing the old toll-house of Gallows Tree Gate. Once
called Maserfield, it lost that name at an early date, and acquired its
present title when history was very young indeed. It owes the name of
Oswald’s-tre, or Oswald’s Town, to the Christian King Oswald of
Northumbria, slain here in the year 642 in battle with the heathen
Penda, King of Mercia. Oswald had taken the offensive, and as a raider
only met his deserts; but the Church accounted him a martyr, made him a
saint, and dedicated to him a religious house that in the course of time
rose here. The parish church bears the name of St. Oswald to this day,
and his Well, not so holy as it once was, may be found near by.
From the earliest times Oswestry was a fortified place. It stands two
miles on the English side of Offa’s Dyke, that boundary between the
Welsh and the Saxons, and, occupying an advanced position, close upon
the more rugged Welsh mountains, was greatly exposed to sudden inroads
of the Welsh. Five miles away stood the great castle of Chirk, placed
there to command the easy road from Wales into England by the Vale of
Llangollen; but Oswestry was a fortified post and a market town in one.
Sometimes it would be attacked; at others, the Welsh resorted to it as
the only place where their needs could be supplied. In course of time
the requirements of trade broke down the barrier between the two
nations, and Oswestry, from being a Saxon outpost where the roving
Welshman, when caught, was surely put to death, became itself half
Welsh. The results are plain to see, even now. Offa’s Dyke, along almost
the whole of its length, still sharply divides the two races, and only
in the immediate neighbourhood of Oswestry is the division blurred and
indistinct. Here English names and Welsh mingle, and each understands
something of the other: even Welsh place-names exist on the English side
of the Dyke.
The Civil War of Charles I.’s time was the last occasion of Oswestry
being besieged. It was held for the King by a band of Shropshire
loyalists who, to render themselves more secure against attack, partly
demolished the tower of the church, standing outside the town walls and
likely to afford the besiegers a great advantage. But the siege did not
last long. A breach was made in the defences, and a youth named Cranage,
“enlivened by the Parliamentary generals with wine,” volunteered to go
under fire and explode a petard at the Castle gate. The gate was blown
in and the garrison surrendered.
After that period the Castle remained in ruins, and the town walls and
gates were left to decay. So long ago as 1782 the work of removing the
gates was begun, and now not a fragment remains. Of the Castle, once
planted on a hilly site in the town, only some shapeless walls in a
public garden are left. When the craze for modernising Oswestry began, a
hundred and twenty years ago, the market rights still belonged to the
Earls of Powis, Lords of the Manor, who were paid “Toll-Thorough” on all
goods entering the town, and on the gates being removed to widen the
streets, the places where tolls were still payable were marked by carved
stones. One of these may be seen in Church Street, on the site of the
New Gate that stood until 1782. It occupies an eminently greasy position
in the party-wall dividing two butchers’ shops, and bears the words
“Toll-Thorough” and the date. The arms of the Earls of Powis are still
to be seen, boldly carved on it, but the Corporation purchased the
market rights and abolished tolls in 1833.
History of the larger sort had then been done with, but some interesting
happenings may be recounted. For example, the Princess Victoria passed
through Oswestry with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, on her Welsh
tour, _en route_ for Wynnstay, August 4th, 1832—the tour that made King
William IV. so indignant. It was “almost a Royal Progress,” he said.
Oswestry was a happy town that day. The Princess’s carriage changed
horses at the “Wynnstay Arms,” the Honourable Thomas Kenyon presented a
copy of the _History of Oswestry_, and everybody cheered. There was at
that time a diary-keeping tradesman in the town, a Pepys in his little
way, and a most engaging wrestler with the art of spelling. He tells how
“Tom Kinaston” (postboy at Knight’s “Wynnstay Arms”) “got drunk and whas
turnd from Mr. Knites as Post Boy; alsow a woman kild at Winstay, thear
being such a crowd to See the Royal Pursaneags. Oswestry was the seam as
a wood from Pentrey Poeth to Betrey St. With rchs across the streets and
frunt of the houses all covered with Laurel and ock.”
The “Wynnstay Arms,” mentioned in this amusing account, was the chief
inn of coaching days, and remains much the same in appearance. It was
once known as the “Cross Foxes,” the two names meaning the same thing,
for two foxes, “counter-salient,” as the heralds say, placed back to
back, form a prominent feature in the arms of the Wynnes of Wynnstay,
the great landowning family of this district.
The Wynne arms are satirically referred to by Gwillim, who says: “They
are not unlike Samson’s foxes that were tied together by the tails, and
yet these two agree; they came into the field like two enemies, but they
meant nothing like fighting, and therefore pass by each other, like two
crafty lawyers which come to the Bar as if they meant to fall out deadly
about their clients’ cause; but when they have done, and their clients’
purses are well spunged, they are better friends than ever they were,
and laugh at those geese that will not believe them to be foxes till
they, too late, find themselves fox-bitten.”
Another charge in the old coat of the Wynnes is a spread eagle, referred
to in the proud motto of the family: “Eryr Eryrod Eryri” = “The Eagle of
the eagles of North Wales.”
Much might be said of the Wynnes, if one had a mind to it, for each
succeeding Sir Watkin has been a species of Providence to the district,
from Oswestry to Llangollen, and many of them great sporting figures in
North Wales. One of that long line has put upon record his method of
conveying his rents to London in days of old. His precautions might well
fit the escorting of a convoy through an enemy’s country, and although
dealing only with a period covering the close of the eighteenth and the
opening of the nineteenth century, read like a mediæval romance.
First of all, the “fourgon,” as he styles his carriage, was thoroughly
overhauled, so that no defects might remain to cause a breakdown on the
long and arduous four or five days’ journey. Then the iron bullet-proof
lining of the carriage was examined, and four of his most muscular
gamekeepers selected to accompany him. All at last being ready, two
keepers were seated on the box, each provided with a double-barrelled
gun, and two others, similarly armed, in the dickey. Sir Watkin would
personally superintend the loading of the carriage with the products of
his rent-roll, and would then take his seat, accompanied by his
land-bailiff. After a day’s journey of between forty and fifty miles,
the coach would be drawn up at some hostelry well known to Sir Watkin,
and the treasure guarded throughout the night by two of the keepers and
by the two carriage-dogs which had trotted beneath the equipage all day.
With such precautions, it is not altogether remarkable that the worthy
Baronet’s fortress on wheels was never attacked.
Carriage dogs—Dalmatian hounds or “plum-pudding” dogs—are not so
fashionable as they were. Until recent years they were often to be seen
trotting at an even pace under the carriages of the aristocracy and the
wealthy during the London season, and were almost wholly kept for the
sake of style and display. They were then, apart from being somewhat
companionable and soothing to the nerves of restive horses, wholly
useless; but—just as the waist-belt of a groom is the now meaningless
survival of the necessary belt by which ladies riding pillion on
horseback in the old days clung to the horseman—they had originally a
very good reason for existence. Carriage dogs, in fact, date from more
than two centuries ago, when families, travelling in their “chariots”
between their country and their town houses, and often carrying great
store of valuables with them, were always accompanied by these dogs,
whose especial business was by no means comprised solely in keeping pace
with the equipage. Indeed, the serious part of their profession only
began when the wayside inn was reached, and the carriage put up in the
coach-house. Throughout the night they kept watch and ward over their
master’s goods; and ill fared the thief, or even the incautious
stable-hand, who went near.
XXXI
Modern Oswestry is a place of engineering shops, foundries, and mining
interests, and, as the seat of the Cambrian Railway locomotive and
carriage works, is busy and prosperous. Not a vestige of its old trade
in Welsh flannel remains, for the mills of Lancashire long ago began to
produce a cheaper article than the Welsh could make. Very little of old
Oswestry is left, and although the streets are still for the most part
narrow and crooked, the greater number of the houses are modern. Inns
abound in the grimy and slovenly place; a very different state of things
from a hundred years ago, when Rowlandson and Wigstead came here and
found it “remarkable for having (though rather a large town) the fewest
public-houses we ever witnessed.” No one is at all likely to raise that
complaint in these times.
The road out of Oswestry passes close by two grassy hills crowned with
trees, the original site, according to legend, of the town, and still
known as “Old Oswestry.” The Welsh name them, and the ancient
entrenchments that ring their summits, “Hen Dinas,” or “Old Fort.”
Hidden away behind is Porkington, a historic estate whose real name is
Brogyntyn, but thus vulgarised by the invading Saxon certainly as early
as the reign of Henry III. Quite recently Lord Harlech, who now owns the
estate, has re-adopted the original name, but “Porkington,” after an
existence of six hundred years, is not so readily forgotten.
The Great Western Railway crosses the road on the level, three miles out
of the town, at Gobowen, on its way to Chester. Gobowen village itself
is utterly commonplace, but marks the beginning of one of Telford’s
important alterations in setting out a new line of road, in place of the
three miles of steep, circuitous, and narrow old road leading from here
to the “Bridge Inn” at the crossing of the river Ceiriog. The old road
is still in existence, and can be easily explored. It goes off to the
left soon after the “Cross Foxes” is passed, beginning where a narrow
lane, entered by a turnstile, runs between the “Railway Tavern” and a
hideous Wesleyan Chapel: an atrocity in red and yellow brick and blue
slates.
Having found the old road, you “dinna turn none,” as the Shropshire
country folks say, but go straight ahead, up hill and down dale, along a
track that in every rut proclaims “old road,” and “disused” in the grass
and rubbish plentiful everywhere along its course. At its further end,
where the Ellesmere Canal is crossed, the rotting quays by the waterside
are faced by a row of cottages and a little general shop, pushed
suddenly into the background, as it were, when those two successive
blows of fate—the making of the new road and the coming of the
railway—took away both the wayfaring and the canal traffic. It is a
picture of bygone prosperity and present ruin as complete as ever drawn
of any deserted mining town in California.
The new road is the model of what a road should be; broad, level, and
straight. It passes the estate of Belmont, and was indeed cut through a
portion of the Park, sold to the Commissioners for the Parliamentary
Road in 1820. To the ground sold for this purpose the Lovetts, who owned
Belmont, agreed to add, as a gift, the site for a toll-house, afterwards
erected and known as Belmont Bar. One condition was attached to this
gift: that if within seventy years the toll-house should no longer be
required, the ground should revert to the estate. The Shropshire gates
were abolished towards the close of 1883, and the toll-house has,
therefore, again become private property.
There is not a single dwelling near, or within sight of, that old
toll-house, lonely by the wayside at the edge of a dark plantation: and
the life of the old man who lives there rent-free on a small weekly
allowance must be dull indeed. It would be lonelier and duller still
were it not for the tramps, whose footsteps can be heard stealthily
crawling round the house and trying the doors and the shuttered windows
at all hours of the night. They add a little spice of excitement to life
in such a place; but an occupant who had anything to lose would be
nervous. One night the old man discovered two navvies and a woman in his
garden, preparing to camp out there. As they seemed to be genuine
travellers on the way to a job of work, he brought them in, warmed them
at his fire, and let them sleep by the hearth. Early in the morning they
prepared to go, and made their breakfast before he rose. “God bless you,
Daddy!” said the woman as they went, “we’ve left you something”; and he
found a pound of sugar, a loaf, and some tea.
At the “Bridge Inn,” where the old road comes down in a steep bank, all
ruts and loose stones, to meet the new, the Ceiriog foams and splashes
in its ravine. Across the bridge that spans it, and we are in
Denbighshire and Wales. In Wales, after a fashion; but the steep road
winding upwards to Chirk has to be traversed before the narrow opening
into the valley of the Dee and the Vale of Llangollen is gained; and
there were those at this strategic point in olden days who saw to it
that unauthorised passengers did not pass. For as the village of Chirk
crowns the plateau, so also does the Castle of Chirk command a cleavage
in the hills, where Castell Crogen stood in days before the existing
fortress and the Norman builders of it were thought of.
Seven hundred years ago, this was just as it is now, the readiest road
by which to enter North Wales. Accordingly, when Henry II. set himself
to conquer the Welsh, and to stamp their national life out of existence,
he led his army to the Ceiriog. There was fought the battle of Crogen,
and when Henry had won it he pushed on across the rough country of the
Berwyn mountains to Corwen. He had been better advised to advance by the
more ample valley of the Dee, and the Vale of Llangollen; but Henry
Plantagenet was the Buller of his age, and his rank bad luck and ill
generalship combined caused him to lead his army the hardest way.
Arrived at Corwen, amid the dense woods and thickets that then covered
the hillsides, he found the chieftains of all Wales, having sunk their
own quarrels for a time, assembled with a host of followers to bar his
passage. They knew their wild country, he did not, and so, in fearful
weather, commenced a disastrous retreat, and was not safe from pursuit
until the walls of Oswestry were in sight. Not for him was the conquest
of Wales. To a greater than he, in a hundred and twenty years’ time, was
to fall that achievement, and even when Llewelyn, the last independent
Prince of Wales, was slain in 1282, and his country subdued, there yet
remained the long-drawn rebellion of Owain Glyndwr that was to break out
a hundred and twenty years later, and for ten years to imperil the
English rule.
Castell Crogen gave place to the present castle of Chirk, built by Roger
Mortimer of Wigmore, who murdered his ward, Gruffydd ap Madoc, to obtain
possession. From that time this was one of the strongest fortresses on
the Borders. In long years after the Mortimers, and many another family
who had held it, had gone their ways, Chirk came into the possession of
the Myddeltons. The first was a Sir Thomas, of Queen Elizabeth’s time,
who, from being a wealthy London citizen and Lord Mayor, became in 1595
the purchaser of this estate. His brother was the famous Sir Hugh
Myddelton who brought the first water supply to London by the New River,
and whose paltry stone statue, set up in modern times, stands at the
beginning of this very road to Holyhead, on Islington Green. The son of
the first Sir Thomas had some stirring experiences in the castle his
father had bought. The spacious days of Elizabeth were done, and the
bitter years of civil war had come to shake the country from end to end.
This Sir Thomas was a man of changeable views. He at first took arms for
the Parliament, and in his absence found his castle of Chirk seized and
held for the King. He lay siege, and unsuccessfully, to his own house,
then changed sides, and was himself besieged in it by his former allies
to such effect that he was obliged to surrender. It cost this
injudicious trimmer £80,000 to repair the damage done. That Cromwell
suffered his fortress to stand is sufficiently remarkable; but here it
frowns to-day a splendid specimen of feudal architecture without, and a
princely residence within.
XXXII
Chirk village in summer-time is enlivened by innumerable excursion
parties on those days of the week when the Castle is thrown open;
otherwise it is a dull little place, its only outstanding features that
sometime coaching inn, the “Hand,” and the church. The church is made,
by the huge and numerous monuments within, to redound greatly to the
honour and the glory of the Myddeltons, and the Myddelton-Biddulphs.
Among others, two occupy the place on either side of the altar commonly
reserved for the Decalogue, those ordinances being stowed away out of
sight. The most amazing memorial of all is that to “Sir Richard
Myddelton, Bart.,” described as “great in his descent, great in his
possessions,” and, it may be added, greatest in his monument.
Here we bear sharply to the left, and, crossing an elevated ridge, come
to the fringe of the Denbighshire coal-fields at Black Park toll-house,
superseded in 1824 by Whitehurst Gate just beyond, commanding not only
the Holyhead Road, but that to Cefn, Ruabon, and Wrexham as well,
branching off to the right. The Road Commissioners sold the toll-house
at Black Park for £10.
Crossing the Holyhead Road, just beyond Whitehurst, is Offa’s Dyke
itself, that famous boundary called by the Welsh _Clawdd Offa_, and
regarded by them for centuries as an insulting mark of Saxon power. This
is the point where the early frontiers marched; and England is English
still on the hither side, and Wales Welsh on the other, in almost as
striking a degree as when the earthen ditch and rampart were raised
eleven hundred and fifty years ago. Chirk is thoroughly English; Vron,
the next village, no less thoroughly Welsh. The merest trifles serve to
show this. Ask the first person on the road what is yonder great
structure straddling in the distance across the valley, and, if he be
not actually a Welshman come from that direction, he will tell you it is
“The Aqueduct.” At Vron, on the other hand, the reply will be that it is
“Pont Cysylltau.” English, too, is the roadside conversation heard;
immediately exchanged for Welsh on the other side of that old boundary.
Offa’s Dyke, cut through as it is by the road, might very easily be
missed in this land, where smooth fields are the exception and rugged
pastures the rule. Its site is marked distinctly, however, by a
farmhouse, named after it, “Plâs Offa,” standing near the road. On the
one hand, the Dyke, very like an ordinary hedgerow, with great trees
growing on the embankment, may be seen going uphill towards Chirk
Castle; on the other it plunges, straight and resolute, steeply down to
the river Dee. It is on this side that the Dyke shows at its best, with
an embankment in places over ten feet high, and a ditch on its outer
side, six feet deep and twelve broad. Offa here built himself a monument
more lasting than many of bronze or marble have proved.
[Illustration: OFFA’S DYKE.]
[Illustration: THE VALE OF LLANGOLLEN.]
But to return to Whitehurst Toll-house awhile. There the “fertile and
happy” Vale of Llangollen first opens out before the traveller in a
deep, long, and narrow vista closed by mountainous hills. It is the gate
by which one enters the romantic land of Wales, that lies there in the
setting sun like a Promised Land flowing with milk, honey, and _cwrw_;
the river Dee sparkling in the distance, and the last sunrays lighting
with a magic glow the hillsides and the precipitous Eglwyseg Rocks. A
mediæval knight coming upon this profound valley and these crannied
precipices would have halted and offered up the prayer, _In manus tuas
Domine_, before going on his way, for the Unknown hid many terrors in
those days, and Loathly Worms and unimaginable horrors might then have
peopled the rocks. To the modern stranger, with none of these terrors,
the scene also calls a halt. He sees the sun go down, lighting the
hill-top roofs of Cefn and Acrefair with a mysterious glow, and glinting
redly in the serried windows of Wynnstay; lights come out in cottage
windows as day draws in, and signal lamps shine red and green on the
great railway viaduct crossing the valley immediately beneath him; and
it is well if he comes to this spot ignorant and unprepared, for then
those colliery villages of Acrefair and Cefn, and the distant smoky
shafts of Ruabon, hold many mysteries; the histories of the great
railway viaduct and the canal aqueduct of Pont Cysylltau in the middle
distance do not put a curb to his imagination, and the dim outline of
Wynnstay, majestic in the crepuscule, might be not merely the French
Renaissance and very Mansard-roofy, Alexandra-Palace-like residence of
Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, the local magnate, but a fairy palace. Nor
need the fiery dragon that should inhabit the fairy-like and mysterious
landscape be missing, for the lighted trains that come down the valley
and cross the viaduct in thunder can well sustain the part to the eye.
It is surely in some early autumn evening, when stormy weather threatens
not too insistent, and when kindly mists hide the hill-tops, rendering
unlimited their possibilities of height and cragginess, that the
exploring cyclist, say, should come to the Vale of Llangollen,
previously uninstructed in what he is to find there on the morrow. It is
to be premised, however, that he be not an unimaginative man. Let all
such reach Llangollen by train in the glaring sun of a July afternoon,
when everything is revealed, and imagination finds its occupation gone.
The stranger coming down the darkling road, past the little hamlet of
Vron Cysylltau, and winding midway between the hills and the valley,
obtains the true exploratory thrill. It is true that he will find, on
after and daylight experience, that the road is a sandpapered one, on
which the puzzle would be to find a rut or a loose stone; but he will
proceed with the caution proper to a Livingstone or a Speke in unknown
African wilds, and, when at last the lights of Llangollen begin to
twinkle before him, will sigh with a great content for perils overpast,
and rest at his inn.
Let us forbear in these pages to discuss the accommodation that
Llangollen now affords. Is it not the business of the town—the town,
mark you!—to find accommodation for tourists of every sort, with the
result that it is become a place of many hotels and boarding-houses, and
very different from the tiny village of Llangollen that disgusted the
travellers of a century ago, of whose one and “only tolerable” inn (he
names the “Hand”) Wigstead severely remarks: “Of the accommodation of
that—_Cætera desunt_—” which, by some little freedom, may be translated
“the less said the better”?
XXXIII
Our imaginary and imaginative traveller, waking at Llangollen to morning
sunshine and matter-of-fact, will, if his mind is of the proper critical
kind, be at once disappointed with the town and enthusiastic on its
setting. Around it, shutting out the noisy world, rise the great heights
of Barber’s Hill and Castell Dinas Bran, the last-named a mighty
eminence rising to a height of over a thousand feet, and diademed with a
circlet of very ancient and time-worn ruins. If any one were known to
have visited Llangollen and not to have climbed the steeps leading to
“Crow Castle”—as it is called in English—on him or her would fall the
righteous wrath of those who, much enduring, _have_ made that toilsome
pilgrimage. From this height you command not only the town of Llangollen
at its foot, diminished as though looked at through the wrong end of a
telescope, but mile upon mile of heaped-up or overthrown mountains,
tumbled and fantastic masses, growing at last indistinct in the
direction of Snowdon; or, looking eastwards, see the Eglwyseg Rocks, a
long range of mural precipices, curiously stratified, stretching towards
Ruabon, with the Vale below their unscalable crags. The slate-works of
bygone years have made little impression upon the scene, but they
sufficiently impressed Ruskin, who speaks of “the Works (whatever the
accursed business of them) on the north hillside.”
In the rear of this fortified hill extends the region eloquently called
the “World’s End,” where infrequent tracks lead to nowhere in
particular, and the craggy descent of one hill but to the immediate
toilsome ascent of another. Those who named the “World’s End,” named it
well. The ruined Castle itself on this blusterous height is only a
matter of rude walls; shapeless but for a tall fragment that shoots up
above the rest and shows against the sky as you near the summit, like
some gigantic cockerel in the act of crowing. Who built the Castle and
who destroyed it are equally uncertain matters. Eliseg, Prince of Powis,
occupied it in the eighth century and Gruffydd ap Madoc five hundred
years later; that false Gruffydd who sided with the English under Henry
III., and, later, founded Valle Crucis Abbey for the expiation of that
and many other sins and wickednesses. But when these walls were
unroofed, and by whom, no man knows.
[Illustration: LLANGOLLEN.]
The only architectural gem in these surroundings is that Abbey, two
miles away in the Vale of the Cross, a transverse valley opening on to
the Dee. There its ruins still nestle among the trees, just as Turner
has pictured them, surrounded by the most fertile land within many
miles. Men of Wrath might build themselves impregnable castles on
shivery hill-tops, but holy monks knew a better way, and mortified the
flesh in the fruitful and sheltered lowlands, where the fishponds were
unfailing, the kine came lowing into byre at eventide, the corn was
gathered in its season, and the fruit ripened early on sunny walls. But
the habitations of wrathy and peaceable are alike overthrown, and both
are the sport of the excursionist and the amateur photographer.
But now for more intimate grips with Llangollen, that “dirty, ill-built,
and disagreeable town,” as the Reverend Mr. Bingley described it in
1798. Many at that time told the same unflattering tale, and though it
be out of date to-day, Llangollen as a town cannot, with the exception
of the bridge across the Dee, be said to contain anything in the least
beautiful or interesting. Only the lovely vale and the encircling
mountainous hills render Llangollen endurable. One forgets the mean
houses in the beauty of the scenery. Dividing the place in half, the Dee
flows noisily over a bed of rocky slabs and under that old bridge once
regarded as one of the wonders of Wales. Engineering wonders are so
plentiful nowadays that the mind, supersaturated with them, and the eye,
accustomed to works on a gigantic scale, refuse to marvel at anything
more. Only one wonder is left to the modern visitor to Llangollen—the
wonder that Llangollen Bridge should ever have been considered a wonder.
One has mentally to project oneself into the period when the bridge was
built, over five hundred and fifty years ago, to understand why it was
so considered. It was built when times were always disturbed, and when
nothing in the nature of a town or a hard road existed here; and
certainly they wrought well who built, for though the Dee has come down
in floods innumerable, it still stands. It was doubled in width in 1873,
and modern times have witnessed the coming of the railway up the vale
along the course of the Dee, causing it to be lengthened by another
opening. Four old pointed stone arches and a stone and girder span now
make the total sum. Let the number here be specified, for the many
travellers who have written on Llangollen exhibit a curious inability to
give them correctly. Turner, whose view of Llangollen may be referred
to, gives six, and in addition, places a viaduct on a hillside possibly
intended for Castle Dinas Bran, in a place where no viaduct or aqueduct
ever was or could be. Those are, however, the merest trifles compared
with his dealings with the Dee, represented as flowing in the opposite
direction it takes in Nature, and upwards towards its source.
[Illustration: LLANGOLLEN. _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._]
XXXIV
Llangollen owes its name to St. Collen, the patron saint of the parish
church. “The name,” says the Reverend W. Bingley, “is pretty enough, and
of no great length.” Sarcastic Mr. Bingley! Here is a portion of St.
Collen’s name, quoted by him:—“Collen ap Gwynawc, ap Clydawc, ap Cowrda,
ap Caradawc Freichpas ap Lleyr Meirion, ap Einion Urth, ap Cunedda
Wledig,” and so forth, like recurring decimals. “Ap” being Welsh for
“son of,” it becomes quite evident that Collen’s ancestry was, speaking
in the decimal manner, corrected to at least six places. Welshmen,
happily, have long ceased to thus trail their genealogical trees after
them, and life in the Principality becomes simplified by so much. Nay,
the “ap,” for all the tenacity with which the Welsh cling to their
nationality, is rarely in use nowadays, and has long been used as a kind
of alloy, wherewith to coin new family names. From this source come the
patronymics of Price, Prichard, Probert, and other common Welsh
surnames, once Christian; originally Ap Rhys, Ap Richard, and Ap Robert.
“Prothero,” too, derives from Ap Rhyddero, “Pugh” from Ap Hugh, and
Bevan and Bowen from Ab Evan and Ab Owen. In the case of the Thomases
and other names where the combination is impossible, the prefix has been
generally abandoned, and so while the Scot and the Irishman retain their
“Mac” and “Mc,” Taffy has in this respect at least Anglicised himself.
St. Collen’s Church is by no means beautiful or interesting, and its
crowded churchyard is damp and dismal. It is the first on the journey
along the Holyhead Road in which the Welsh language usurps the place of
English, and here certainly, if even other signs were wanting, the
Englishman—the “Saxon” as the Welsh called him—will find himself, to all
intents and purposes, in a foreign land. The average educated
Englishman, from whom the general sense, at least, of Latin epitaphs and
those in two or three Continental languages is not hidden, stands
mystified before these Cymric tombstones and, if he be of a reflective
nature, finds it not a little humiliating that even the ragged little
urchins in the streets of Welsh towns and villages are often bi-lingual,
and in this respect better educated than he.
Among the few English epitaphs is one not often met:—
Our life is but a winter’s day,
Some breakfast and away:
Others to dinner stay and are full fed;
The oldest man but sups and goes to bed.
Large is his debt who lingers out the day;
Who goes the soonest has the least to pay.
The subject of those lines had a short reckoning. He went (to pursue the
simile) after lunch, dying in his nineteenth year.
The chief monument in the churchyard (ornament it is not) is the
triangular pillar to those fantastical old frumps, the Ladies of
Llangollen, and their servant. On it you may read of the “Amiable
Condescension” of the one, the friendship of the other, and the faithful
service of the servant. “It is believed,” continues the epitaph, “they
are now enjoying their Eternal Reward.” Let us hope so—but what may be
the most appropriate reward in the hereafter for collecting old oak and
entertaining society travellers along the Holyhead Road to tea and
small-talk, it is not easy to imagine. Let us hope the Bricklayers,
Cabinet-makers, Blacksmiths, and Bakers who lie around, with their
trades all duly specified on their tombstones, also have _their_ reward
for well and truly bricklaying, cabinet-making, blacksmithing, and
baking.
That Llangollen is not only geographically but socially in Wales is very
evident, in the churchyard, in the names over the shops, and in the talk
of the streets. Griffiths, Jones, Williams, Roberts, and Evans have it
all their own way, and are repeated over and over again, recalling the
humorous story of how the Welsh originally got their names. Llewelyn—was
it?—had spent a long time in naming the clans, and at last, growing
weary of the work, said: “Let all the rest be called Jones!”
As for the talk, the bridge over the Dee is the place to hear Welsh.
That favourite lounging-place becomes on market-days as noisy as a
parrot-house with the excited talk of Welshmen black-haired and Welshmen
red. Who can shout like a Welshman, and who but a Taffy or Frenchman
works himself up into such gesticulating rages on such trivial
occasions? Feather-headed pride, conceit, insincerity, treachery, fickle
enthusiasms, religiosity, falsehood, and superstition, have always
characterised the Welsh in the pages of history; but the modern Welshman
is not superstitious, and has no faith in the wild legends of his own
land, nor belief in the _diablerie_ that was part of his grandparents’
creed. He regularly attends the services of his hideous
Calvinist-Methodist Chapel, and is as completely, religiously and
politically, under the thumb of the Boanerges who ministers within as is
the Irish peasant beneath the sway of the Romish priest. The Welshman
clings fanatically to his nationality and his language, and is saturated
with matter-of-fact Radicalism; but although he does not believe in the
fairies, is careful not to speak ill of the little people, lest evil
come of it; and although so pious, is commonly a shameless and
resourceful liar. Untruthfulness has always been a characteristic of
Taffy, and judges have quite recently commented upon the prevalence of
perjury in Welsh courts of law.
Education is advancing by leaps and bounds in the Principality, and
sometimes lights heavily on the shoulders of some decent farmer’s son,
and constrains him thenceforth to walk the world an example of the
perfect prig. Culture, in fact, brings all the acrid defects of the
Cymric character into prominence, and impels those who have taken it
badly towards political nostrums of unpatriotic bias, or social
“movements” where the faddist shrieks and has his being.
XXXV
Llangollen was “discovered” in 1788 by those feminine Robinson Crusoes
commonly called the “Ladies of Llangollen.” Their singular story and the
alliterative title have gone forth to all the world, and are familiar
where the achievements of many worthier persons are unknown. If
eccentricity may rightly be considered a proper passport to fame, then
the Ladies of Llangollen are justly celebrated, but if the extraordinary
mental obliquity that shaped their wasted lives be looked upon
pathologically, the consideration they received in their time and the
tolerant interest in them in later years must seem highly mischievous.
When the Ladies first came to Llangollen, the place was but a village on
the post-road to Holyhead. The newly established mail-coaches went a
different route, and only one inn—the “Hand”—existed for the
accommodation of travellers. But, although the road was rough, and the
accommodation matched it, this was the route by which travellers between
London and Ireland came and went; and so although the village was less
than one-tenth the size of the Llangollen of to-day, it could not have
afforded that “romantic retirement from the world” the two Ladies are
said to have desired.
These eccentrics were by no means of that age or those social
surroundings that might reasonably be expected to dispose them to
renounce the world, its pleasures, and its duties. One of them was
extremely youthful; both enjoyed the advantages of good birth and social
position. Lady Eleanor Butler, the elder, by some twelve years, of the
two, was twenty-nine years of age, and was the daughter of that John
Butler, Member of Parliament for Kilkenny, who in 1791 obtained the
reversal of the attainder which had many years before deprived his
family of the Earldom of Ormonde and Ossory: the Honourable Miss
Ponsonby belonged to the Bessborough family. A favourite explanation of
the friendship of the two is that they were disappointed in love, and
thereafter determined to live for each other, apart from the world. It
is an explanation that at any rate, if quite unfounded, is evidence of a
not unpleasing desire to seek romance in the most unlikely places. Lady
Eleanor Butler was the originator and moving spirit in this eremitical
enterprise. Tiny in stature, _petite_ in figure, and overshadowed by the
tall and commanding figure of her youthful friend, she at the same time
possessed and retained during the whole of their career will-power for
two. Several unsuccessful attempts to elope from their homes in the
neighbourhood of Waterford took place before their relatives became
unwillingly convinced that their eccentricity was quite unconquerable;
but at last they were allowed to depart whither they would, their
respective families doubtless expecting them back again so soon as the
novelty of the escapade had worn off. In May, 1788, therefore, they left
Waterford for Dublin, attended by their one servant, Mary Carryl, who
shared their fortunes for upwards of forty years. Landing at Holyhead,
they travelled for awhile in North Wales, seeking a suitable spot. That
they did not readily find one seems to throw something of a sardonic
side-light upon the scheme; for even nowadays, when the tourist plumbs
the deepest valleys and scales peaks often thought inaccessible,
solitude is not difficult to achieve in this part of the world. Robinson
Crusoe’s island, or a solitary lighthouse, would not have suited their
project, which, frankly, seems to have been the building up of a
reputation for eccentricity in a spot where it could readily be
observed. As well might one, in these times, attempt to set up a
solitary cell on the platform of Willesden Junction, and escape
observation, as in those days play the hermit at Llangollen. Why, it was
a halting-place on the great road between two kingdoms; with kings and
princes, lords-lieutenant, peers, members of Parliament, and the whole
social circle to which those two humbugs belonged travelling constantly
to and fro throughout the year, within hail of their windows.
On the hillside sloping down to the great road they found a modest
cottage, which, with some adjoining land, they purchased and commenced
to convert into the odd museum it is now. They called it “Plas Newydd,”
and by that name it is now familiar to many thousands of summer visitors
to Llangollen.
It was not long before the fame of this so-called “romantic” retreat
spread to London; brought, doubtless, by some traveller whom the Ladies,
as keenly alive to advertisement as any theatrical manager, had invited
up from that not too comfortable hostelry, the “Hand.” From that time
forward a constantly increasing stream of callers presented letters of
introduction at Plas Newydd, on their passage along the great road.
Every one who was any one found a welcome there. Rank, fashion, art and
literature, politics, were all represented in their visitors-books.
Artistic and literary visitors left sketches and sonnets, and presented
autograph editions; rank and fashion gossipped and tittle-tattled and
corresponded; and political and influential callers eventually made a
Government pension possible to these precious “hermits.” It was in 1788
that Lord Mornington wrote them, somewhat mysteriously, about some
“arrears” in that pension which “he will not fail to interest himself in
despatching,” adding that “Mr. Pitt is acquainted with their situation
and with the motive that so greatly recommends them to His Majesty’s
favour.” What was that recommendation? What national service did the
Ladies of Llangollen render that they should have received a Government
subsidy? Is it possible that, in those palmy days of the Secret Service
Fund, the Ladies were eavesdropping agents, gathering political gossip
from Irish members travelling this road and reporting it to Downing
Street?
In no real sense did these two friends retire from the world. Indeed,
they visited all the best people within reach of a carriage-drive from
Llangollen; but always, however far the distance, making it a point
never to sleep away from home. Their costume was invariable, and
strange. It consisted of riding-dress; with white stockings, shoes,
beaver hats, stiff starched neckcloth, and short, powdered hair. Their
coats were of decidedly masculine cut. Charles Mathews, who saw them
occupying a box at the Oswestry Theatre when he was playing there in
1820, said they “looked exactly like two respectable superannuated old
clergymen.” Their love of jewellery, however, was a distinctly feminine
trait, and was carried an inordinate length. Lady Eleanor had the Cordon
of the Order of St. Louis, presented by Louis XVIII.; and both wore a
vulgar profusion of ribbons, brooches, and rings.
[Illustration: THE LADIES OF LLANGOLLEN. _From an Old Print._]
As time wore on, they came to know and be visited by every one of note.
Wordsworth enjoyed their hospitality, and composed a sonnet, as a kind
of votive offering, in the grounds: grounds graced by fonts and
fragments of ancient crosses, stolen from Valle Crucis Abbey and other
places, to fit the whim of these insatiable collectors of “curios.”
Wordsworth’s offering was, sad to say, not accepted with enthusiasm. Why
not? For the reason that he had dared to call their home a “low-roofed
cot”:—
... Where faithful to a low-roofed cot,
On Deva’s Banks, ye have abode so long:
Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,
Even on this earth, above the reach of time.
The Ladies declared they could write better poetry themselves!
XXXVI
The great Duke of Wellington was, of course, well known to the Ladies.
They had known him from a boy. It was from an old Spanish Prayer Book
given him by Lady Eleanor that he learnt that language when going out to
his campaigns in the Peninsula.
Reminiscences of this queer old couple abound in the published diaries
and correspondence of old-time travellers; but none afford so good a
picture as that drawn by Lockhart, who accompanied Sir Walter Scott on a
visit to Llangollen in 1825. Lockhart, writing to his wife, says: “We
proceeded up the hill, and found everything about them and their
habitation odd and extravagant beyond report. Imagine two women—one
apparently seventy and the other sixty-five—dressed in heavy blue riding
habits, enormous shoes, and men’s hats, with their petticoats so tucked
up that at the first glance of them, fussing and tottering about their
porch in the agony of expectation, we took them for a couple of hazy or
crazy old sailors. On nearer inspection they both wear a world of
brooches, rings, etc., and Lady Eleanor positively _orders_—several
stars and crosses, and a red ribbon, exactly like a K.C.B. To crown all,
they have cropt heads, shaggy, rough, bushy, and as white as snow, the
one with age alone, the other assisted by a sprinkling of powder. The
elder lady is almost blind, and every way much decayed; the other in
good preservation. But who could paint the prints, the dogs, the cats,
the miniatures, the cram of cabinets, clocks, glass cases, books,
bijouterie, dragon china, nodding mandarins, and whirligigs of every
shape and hue—the whole house, outside and in (for we must see
everything, to the dressing closets) _covered_ with carved oak, very
rich and fine some of it; and the illustrated copies of Sir Walter’s
poems, and the joking, simpering compliments about Waverley and the
anxiety to know who Melvor really was, and the absolute devouring of the
poor Unknown, who had to carry off, besides all the rest, one small bit
of literal _butter_ dug up in a Milesian stone jar lately from the
bottom of some Irish bog. Great romance (_i.e._, absurd innocence of
character) one must have looked for; but it was confounding to find this
mixed up with such eager curiosity and enormous knowledge of the tattle
and scandal of the world they had so long left. Their tables were piled
with newspapers from every corner of the kingdom, and they seemed to
have the deaths and marriages of the antipodes at their fingers’ ends.
Their albums and autographs, from Louis XVIII. and George IV. down to
magazine poets and quack doctors, are a museum. I shall never see the
spirit of blue stockingism again in such perfect incarnation. Peveril (a
family name for Sir Walter) won’t get over their final kissing match for
a week. Yet it is too bad to laugh at these good old girls; they have
long been the guardian angels of the village, and are worshipped by
every man, woman, and child about them.”
The collecting mania grew upon the old women with the passing of the
years. They had long converted their cottage from a labourer’s dwelling
to the likeness of a curiosity shop, and had begged or bought all the
ancient Elizabethan, Carolean, and Jacobean carved wooden four-poster
bedsteads within a circle of twenty miles from Llangollen, to decorate
the interior and exterior of Plas Newydd; but their passion for old oak
was insatiable. The posts of the black oak porch and the other profusely
carved oak decorations that front the house to this day were placed here
by them. Here is still the famous carved frieze of cat and acorns that
they went into raptures over, and opposite is the little dog, also in
black oak, with which, after years of anxious waiting and searching,
they matched the cat. So wedded to this passion for old oak did the
Ladies become that no one was welcome as a visitor who did not bring
with him an offering of this sort. They were proud of their house. “When
we fust came home,” Lady Eleanor was wont to say, drawing a word-picture
of the place, “then and afterwards, we had only bare walls and a roof.”
Then they would point out the trees they had planted in the garden; and
the laylocks that made so fragrant a bank of blooms in the spring.
(They, in common with others of their order, continued to say “fust,”
and “laylock,” and “obleege” when merely common people had adopted what
is now the usual pronunciation.)
Well, well: the trees are more beautiful now than ever they could have
been before, but the ladies are gone. Their servant died in 1809; Lady
Eleanor, in her 90th year, in 1829, and Miss Ponsonby two years later.
But the interior of the house is much the same: rich in oak so black as
to absorb much of the light; with a wealth of beautiful old china and
miscellaneous odds and ends that would have delighted the soul of Horace
Walpole. These collections owe much of their completeness to the late
General Yorke, who had known the two ladies, and rescued the houseful of
curiosities from utter dispersal at the sale by auction, conducted by
that George Robins whose extravagant auctioneering eloquence has become
a classic. In his words, the grounds of Plas Newydd occupied “a wooded
knoll, overhanging a deep and hallowed glen”; language that may compare
favourably with Wordsworth’s sonnet.
[Illustration: PLAS NEWYDD.]
We have seen Lockhart excusing himself for laughing at these “good old
girls,” as he calls them, and have his word for it that they were “the
guardian angels of the village”; but whatever they may have done in
their lifetime has been quite thrown into the background by the
posthumous benefits their fame has conferred upon Llangollen. Local
charities until recently benefited largely from the fees charged to
visitors curious to see the collections at Plas Newydd; but since a
party of thieves and vandals broke some of the objects and stole others
the house has not been so readily accessible. It would be quite
impossible for a stranger to visit Llangollen for even the shortest
space of time and then to come away ignorant of the Ladies, for
photographs of them, statuettes, and paintings abound at every turn, and
must prove an important source of revenue. It is no more possible to
flee from the Ladies of Llangollen in Llangollen than it is to avoid
Lorna Doone at Ilfracombe, or Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon.
XXXVII
The settlement of “The Ladies” here synchronised with the appreciation
of the picturesque in rural scenery, then a new-born and strange
portent. The only travellers along this road into Wales had been those
who were obliged to take the journey on business; pleasure in
travelling—pleasure in such solitary and rugged scenery—was quite out of
the question, and if travellers remembered Llangollen at all, it was as
a place where the coach changed horses, and where the one inn afforded
the worst cheer at the highest prices. But in the last quarter of the
eighteenth century the tourist sprang suddenly into existence. None were
more astonished than the Welsh peasantry at this strange spectacle of
people who had riches and comfort in their own homes travelling for
pleasure and delight in their mountains and rivers; aye, and often
walking, not for economy, but for love of that exercise, in strange
places. Sometimes the astonished Welshman was incredulous. He would ask,
“Where do you come from?” “Why do you come here?” and “Where do you go
to from hence?” and, dissatisfied with the answers received, would ask,
“Are there, then, no mountains or rivers in England?”
One of these early tourists was Warner, author of a “Picturesque Tour.”
Arriving at Llangollen on their walk through Wales of over a century
ago, Warner and the companion of his pedestrian tour went, of course, to
the “Hand.” But that then solitary inn of the place could not attend at
once to the tired and hungry tourists. Much more important guests than
dusty-footed travellers (always at that time regarded with suspicion)
were occupying the attention of the establishment. These were the
Margrave of Anspach and his suite, who came, undoubtedly, in carriages,
and whose dinner the wearied couple could distinctly smell. Abashed,
they went to contemplate the beauties of Valle Crucis, what time the
Margrave dined. It is not surprising that they did not altogether care
for the place. Empty bellies are not kindly critics of architectural
ruins. But what _does_ surprise the reader of their tour is that they
went on and explored the mighty hill of Dinas Bran before returning to
the “Hand,” when, the Margrave and his suite, even down to the footmen
and page-boys, having fed to repletion, they found, at last, some
attention.
It would seem, judging from an expression used by Daniel O’Connell, that
the hotel now called the “Royal,” but originally named the “King’s
Head,” was established by some action on the part of the Ladies of
Llangollen. The “Hand” was in those days notoriously ill-equipped, and
O’Connell wrote in the visitors’ book of the “King’s Head”:—
I remember this village with very bad cheer,
Ere the Ladies, God bless them, set this inn here;
But the traveller now is sure of good fare,
Let him stay at this inn, or go to that ’ere;
But all who can read will sure understand
How vastly superior’s the Head to the Hand.
The sign of the “King’s Head” was changed to the “Royal” after the visit
of the Duchess of Kent with the Princess Victoria in 1832.
[Illustration: VALLE CRUCIS ABBEY. _After J. M. W. Turner, R. A._]
XXXVIII
When the traveller sets forth from Llangollen, he does so primed with
stories of the excellence of the scenery and the road. The folded
mountains, some clothed with pine and larch to their very summits,
others stern and jagged with rocks, far exceed any word-picture, as do
also the valleys and the glittering course of the Dee, dashing
impetuously over boulders and pebbly beaches, or more rarely sliding
quietly where the trout lurk in deep and darkling pools, where the
Welshman still navigates that early British canoe or boat—whichever you
like to call it—the “coracle,” a craft that no Saxon can master. The
scenery is exquisite, the air cooler and more refreshing as you leave
Llangollen, and the road broad and hard.
But as you come past Berwyn station, that picturesque little place on
the railway line running so neighbourly and yet inoffensively parallel
with the road and the Dee, you are conscious, whether awheel or afoot,
that the road is not by any means flat. The old coachmen, indeed, knew
this, although imperceptible to the casual eye, to be one of the most
trying rises on the way to Holyhead; and the modern cyclist, who pedals
bravely up its two miles, thinks sadly upon the debilitating air of
Llangollen until its crest is reached and he perceives the true state of
affairs. Telford was confronted by a dilemma here. He could do either of
two things: carry the road thus steeply over the ridge of Rhysgog, or
take it in more level fashion, but in three parts of a circle, following
the great bend the Dee makes at this point—a bend so great that it
almost coils back upon itself. He chose the first course, and so,
although he saved more than a mile, has punished all travellers that
have used the road since then.
Emerging from the sombre plantations that darken the greater part of the
rise, the road, terraced on the shoulders of the hills, runs down to
Glyndyfrdwy, passing the toll-house of that name, and coming to the
village where the “Sun” inn stands on the left, on entering. This is the
little “pot-house called the ‘Rising Sun,’” mentioned by Colonel
Birch-Reynardson, one of the places where the Holyhead Mail changed
horses when he took the reins. Across the river is Llansaintffraid,
which gave a name to a toll-house here—one of the few that have been
demolished.
At the other end of Glyndyfrdwy, passing that pretty, tree-shaded
anglers’ house, the “Berwyn Arms,” the hills recede and the valley opens
out. The Mail at one time changed here. In those days it was called the
“New Inn.” Just before the scenery becomes comparatively homely, two
strikingly prominent hills or tumuli, at a short distance from one
another, are seen overhanging the Dee. The second of them, standing
isolated and crowned with a spindly group of fir trees, is known as
“Owain Glyndwr’s Mount,” and there are those among the great Owain’s
worshippers who still affect to see the foundations of his house in the
rolling meadow beneath.
Owain Glyndwr is one of the greatest and latest of Welsh national
heroes, and the valley of the Dee is especially linked with his memory.
It could scarce be otherwise, for his name of Glyndwr was a territorial
one, and derived from his ancestral estate situated here at Glyndyfrdwy
and for some miles along the Dee between Berwyn and Corwen.
[Illustration: OWAIN GLYNDWR’S MOUNT.]
It was in the year 1400 that Owain rose in rebellion and set all Wales
aflame against the English. He was no hot-headed patriot, rising for the
mere idea of throwing off a foreign yoke, but a man who had suffered
wrongs and sought redress in vain. Lord Grey of Ruthin, one of the
powerful Lords Marchers, had seized a portion of his land, held it by
force of arms, despite the decision of the Courts in London, and
represented the injured man to be a rebel who refused the feudal duty of
sending help to aid the King against his opening campaign against the
Scots. Hitherto he had been no rebel, but a loyal supporter of the
English rule, at that time long established firmly in Wales. Not only
so, but he had moved in the Court circles of that day, and was not only
an educated gentleman, but a personage of wealth, consequence, and
influence in his own country, and precisely one to be well treated by
politic rulers.
Glyndwr was driven into rebellion, if ever man was. He was no youth, but
a man of forty-two years of age when matters came to this crisis. He was
also one of skill and resource, and, before the provocative Grey could
do much, had burnt his town and castle of Ruthin, and, turning towards
England, advanced with fire and sword up to the very walls of
Shrewsbury. Fortune smiled from that time, first upon one and then upon
the other side. English expeditionary forces under the young Prince of
Wales drove Glyndwr back, and burnt his ancestral halls at Sycherth and
Glyndyfrdwy, and yet when stress of weather warned the English to
retreat, Glyndwr, unconquered, was snarling at their heels. Later, he
himself assumed the title of Prince of Wales, and in royal manner
entered into a tripartite alliance with Hotspur and Mortimer to dethrone
Henry IV. and divide England and Wales between them. And had the Battle
of Shrewsbury been decided the other way there can be little doubt of
their success.
The Welsh bards and seers had been very busy with prophecies and
portents even at his birth, and Shakespeare—who thought Welshmen
excellent subjects to make fun of—has used these forebodings and
Glyndwr’s rising arrogance with effect in that scene of _Henry IV._
where the allies meet at Bangor. “At my birth,” says Glyndwr—
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak’d like a coward.
“Why,” retorts Hotspur, “so it would have done at the same season if
your mother’s cat had but kitten’d, though you yourself had never been
born.”
“I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” adds Glyndwr; to which the
unromantic Hotspur observes:—
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
It is plain, if we take the Shakespearean view, that there were never
such ill-assorted allies as Hotspur and Glyndwr. The one boasts, in true
Welsh style, that no man is his equal, and Hotspur is only ready to
allow that no man speaks better Welsh.
Had this alliance been successful, Glyndwr’s sovereignty was to extend
over Wales and to include all the territory comprised within a line
drawn from the Mersey to Burton-on-Trent, and from thence to Worcester
and the mouth of the Severn. But he distrusted Hotspur, even if he was
frank with Mortimer, who had become his son-in-law; and when Hotspur
advanced from the Scottish borders to give battle to Henry IV. at
Shrewsbury, left him to fight a hopeless struggle against overwhelming
numbers. Had Glyndwr been a true ally and joined forces Shrewsbury Fight
would have had a different ending. But, cursed with those streaks of
treachery and suspicion that mar the character of the Celt, Glyndwr let
his ally be destroyed, and with that desertion wrought the eventual
failure of his own ambitions. This is no place to follow his fortunes,
rising and falling in a long and hopeless struggle. Successes he had in
plenty, and he laid the greater part of Wales waste, but Saxon tenacity
wore him down in the long run. After a romantic career, he at length
became a beaten fugitive, and at the last fades out of sight, in 1416.
No man knows where or when he died; but legends connect the little
village of Monnington, in Herefordshire, with his obscure end.
The Welsh bards who twanged their harps in Owain’s halls, and ate his
food and swilled his sack and metheglin, did him an ill service when
they sang of the deeds he was to do and the glory that was to be his.
His halls are gone, and only traditions and the researches of the
antiquary preserve his story. His Mount stands still by the roadside,
and vague stories of how he stood here and watched for the approach of
his enemies are told; but one may have a shrewd suspicion that it is
only your literary Welshman who nowadays knows or cares much about him.
XXXIX
More in accord with modern Wales is Llansaintffraid, across the Dee,
with its trim lodging-houses and villas, and little railway-station
which the railway authorities, alarmed at the name of Llansaintffraid,
have christened by the simpler title of “Carrog.” More villas, more
lodging-houses, and many tourists mark the approach to Corwen, a village
or townlet that does not favourably impress the stranger fresh from
Llangollen. No one could with truth say that the houses of Llangollen
are beautiful, but the scenery there makes full atonement: at Corwen the
scene is tame, the hills recede, and the Dee flows through a wide
valley. Just here, where the town should be especially attractive, it is
mean at the best, and at its worst downright ugly. Moreover, the railway
company has deliberately chosen to place its coal-sidings and
engine-sheds alongside the road and abutting upon the old Dee bridge.
Opinions upon Corwen are singularly unanimous through the course of over
a hundred years. In 1797 Wigstead must have found it at its worst. The
houses were then, he says, of clay and loam, and “most miserable hovels:
the people, cows, asses, hogs, and poultry all live in one apartment,
and all turn out at the same time in the morning.” The following year,
another tourist finds Corwen a “disagreeable little town”; and in modern
times the kindliest of itinerists has nothing better to say of the place
than that “the tourist will not find much to detain him” in it.
The little that does suffice to detain him centres in the old church
whence the name of the town derives, Cor Wen meaning White Choir. No
longer white, but on the contrary, greyish-black and unlovely, the
church stands behind the houses of the long street, and immediately
under a huge pile of cliff-like rocks called Pen-y-Pigyn, crowned by a
flagstaff, whence Owain Glyndwr is said to have cast his dagger, in some
unexplained fit of anger. It is a legend stupidly invented to account
for the rudely incised figure of a cross, resembling a short sword, seen
in the granite slab now built as a lintel into the south porch. A
battered old churchyard cross stands near the west door, and several old
slate tombstones with two semicircular hollows, are to be seen, cut in
this manner to receive the knees of those who came to pray by the
graveside of their dead. On the southern side of this churchyard, more
melancholy than most, a row of almshouses, called “Corwen College,” may
be noticed; built in 1750 for six widows of Merionethshire clergymen,
who may thus meditate among the tombs from morn to eve on the evil fate
that left them widows before their husbands had attained to fat
prebends, decanal dignities, or the culminating honours and riches of an
episcopal throne.
The odd effigy of Iorwerth Sulien, an early vicar of the church, divides
with the fine old timber roof the honours of the interior.
The “Owen Glendower” inn at Corwen has long since lost the “fierce
gigantic figure like that of some Saracenic Soldan” that once served for
a sign, and attracted the attention of every eighteenth-century
traveller; and has in other ways altered since the time when the first
tourists came, note-books in hand. It must be confessed that the first
tourists in Wales are now become highly amusing where they intended to
be improving, and not a little dull when their intent was jocular. One
of them who says he was “Josephus Rex,” is not a little obscure at
first, but presently we find that phrase to be a ponderous play upon
words, and that, in short he meant he was Jo King—joking. You take him,
do you not? How exquisitely pretty a wit!
Such an one as this must have been the Rev. Mr. Evans who, in 1705,
toured the Principality. He found “decent accommodation,” and pointed
civility at Corwen, where others had found nothing of the kind; but it
was stupid of him to ask for a “tonsor” when he meant “barber,” and
wanted a shave. Instead of bringing him a tonsor, they brought him a
blind harper. He retained the harper, but still clamoured for his shave;
whereupon, a “blooming damsel of twenty-five years” came with razors,
soap and hot water, and deftly scraped his chin.
Most of Corwen’s business activity is centred in its railway-station at
the further end of the town, where roads divide like the two arms of the
letter Y; one, to the left, going to Bala, and the other for Holyhead.
Here those two leviathans, the Great Western and the London and
North-Western Railways, meet and go their several ways to Barmouth and
to Rhyl. Beyond, for twenty-two miles, there is a vast expanse of
country where no railway goes, and if Corwen wants to visit
Bettws-y-Coed and Bettws desires to return the call, they have either to
take the road or else embark upon a roundabout railway journey of fifty
miles. The engineering works for a line that should connect the two
along the Alwen, Geirw, and Conway valleys would not be so very great;
the difficulty perhaps lies in the question, which of the rivals is to
do it? Meanwhile, one passes over the ancient bridge that spans the Dee
on six lichened arches, and bids good-bye to the modern world for awhile
just as effectually as Borrow did when he tramped the road fifty-five
years ago.
It is at first a tame road, by comparison with the scenes left behind,
and it is not until the “Druid’s Head” inn—or what once was that
hostelry—is passed that its character grows wild. The old toll-house of
Macs Mawr and the “Cymro Goat Inn” mark the change in pleasant fashion
by a bridge at the confluence of the Alwen and the Geirw. Their _curu_
at the “Goat” (whether it be a Billy or a Nanny is no matter) is better
than their English, and the traveller is little likely to make himself
understood, unless he be as clever a Saxon as Borrow himself, who lost
no opportunity of showing the astounded Welshmen that he understood
their language. Imagination pictures what he would have done, after
several highly critical pulls at his tankard. “Maes Mawr,” he would have
asked, “that means ‘great meadow’; that is it, I suppose, across the
road?” pointing to a pasture under the lee of the hills; and, when he
had been answered in the affirmative, telling his astonished host the
history of it, carefully “got-up” before-hand.
Here you meet few people besides farm-hands and drovers. Of drovers
plenty, urging their small Welsh sheep and their bony cattle to market.
If you be at all curious you remark, perhaps, that the sheep are small.
“Yess,” says the drover, “they wass ferry small sheeps whateffer. They
wass take them from the mountains to makee the other sheeps petter. They
will be”—here they break away suddenly, and the drover hurries after
them with an opening “Tam!” swallowed up in a torrent of Welsh
expletives.
XL
From Maerdy Post-office, half a mile onwards, commences a steady rise of
nearly two miles, the uplands on the right presently culminating in the
crags of Cader Dinmael, and the valley of the Geirw on the left
gradually deepening and contracting into a profound and narrow gorge;
the road running round cornices of rock, fenced by breast-high masonry
on the one side, and overhung by rocky cliffs on the other. With
boring-tools, pickaxe, and blasting-powder, Telford forced a way for his
road round this shoulder of the mountain and converted what had been a
narrow and dangerous track into a smooth highway, thirty-six feet in
width. This is the spot rightly called in the old road-books “the
romantic Pass of Glyndyffws,” and the bridge that seems to hazardously
leap the gorge where the Geirw plunges and foams is identical with the
“Pont-y-Glyn-Bin”—the Bridge of the Glen of Trouble—named by Borrow.
Very justly he speaks of this as “one of the wildest and most beautiful
scenes imaginable,” and of the bridge as “a kind of Devil’s Bridge,
diabolically fantastical, flung over the deep glen and the foaming
water.”
“Projecting out over the ravine,” he continues, “was a kind of
looking-place, protected by a wall forming a half-circle, doubtless made
by the proprietor of the domain for the use of the admirers of scenery.
Cut on the top surface of the wall, which was of slate and therefore
easily impressible by the knife, were several names, doubtless those of
tourists who had gazed from the look-out, amongst which I observed, in
remarkably bold letters, that of T******”
Borrow would have been more correct in his surmise if he had given the
credit of this little balcony built out from the road to Telford. He it
was who designed that little look-down into the depths, together with a
few others along this road at particularly favourable view-points, thus
proving his own appreciation of scenery and the possession of that
artistic sense denied engineers by architects, who, as a body, are the
most intolerant, opinionated, and barbarous set of professional men in
existence, ready to ruin an old building for an idea, or to destroy the
artistic work of one period to replace it with modern imitations of the
especial style that suits their individual opinion.
Glyndyffws (how tearful and wonderful these Welsh names!) is lovely
beyond expression. Nowhere else are the mountain-ashes and the
scrub-oaks more exquisite than here, where they are seen clinging
tenaciously to the jagged ledges of the ravine, soaked continuously in
the moisture thrown up from the tortured water below, and clothed in
every twig and wizard limb with moss and lichens. This, of course, was a
spot that most powerfully impressed the imaginations of old travellers.
Hear one of them. He speaks of the “deep and dismal chasm through which
the hoarse-sounding torrent roars over the disjointed rocks beneath,
and, lashing the rocky sides that check its impetuosity, rolls its angry
waters to the Dee.” But we have not done with him yet. He goes on to
describe the “stupendous fissure fully two hundred feet deep, overhung
by large forest trees,” and continues in that strain to a wearisome
length, until, in fact, we tear ourselves away, catching as we go such
disjointed phrases as “awful scene,” “maddened torrent,” “profundity of
horrible bed,” and so forth. That old tourist, fortunately for himself,
did not visit Snowdon, after so recklessly expending all his adjectives
on the way. Had he done so, he must surely, bankrupted in phrases, have,
in presence of Snowdon’s grandeur, become a literary insolvent, paying
the equivalent of a farthing in the pound.
Leaving Pont y Glyn and its “tremendous roar” behind, “the prospect,”
according to a century-old wayfarer in these wilds, “becomes as
uninteresting as Bagshot Heath.” But scarcely so. That Heath has no
mountains enlivening the distance, nor a clear and beautiful stream
trickling in little sharps and trebles through a solitary valley, such
as this. Indeed, the hamlet of Tynant passed, where a shop, an inn, a
chapel, and some scattered farmsteads in the cwms or on the hillsides
comprise the whole, the rest of the way to Cerrig-y-Druidion is
singularly beautiful in the open and unfenced sort. The name of Tynant
alone, which means the “House by the Stream,” points to a solitude once
greater than now, when the inn was the only house here.
It was to this quiet spot, by the sparkling trout stream, that Dick
Vickers, who once drove the Holyhead Mail between here and Shrewsbury,
retired, as Colonel Birch-Reynardson relates. He had been in early days
a postboy, and had then performed the feat of driving “His Honour,” of
Pradoe, from that place to London faster than the fastest. “His Honour”
was posting up to town in a light barouche, and reached the “Lion” yard
at Shrewsbury just as the “Wonder” was starting. “Dick,” said the
squire, “I wonder whether I could beat the ‘Wonder’ into town; I should
like to do it if I can.” And, in short, it was done, that celebrated
coach coming in a bad second.
But steady and careful as old Time was little Dick when on the bench.
“Little Dick” they called him because “he had to get on sixpennyworth of
halfpence to look on the top of a Stilton cheese,” and those cheeses are
of no great stature. In an evil hour he gave up the ribbons and set up
as a farmer at Tynant, where, when his day’s work was done, he had been
used to fish the little stream. But farming was a very different matter
from driving four horses, and he lost his money in it, and so one ill
day they found him hanging from a beam in one of his barns.
Flat for four miles to Cerrig-y-Druidion, with spreading moors ahead,
the village itself stands prominent on a knoll, with an old road going
to its bleak and hard-featured street, and the Holyhead Road just
skirting its fringe. Cerrig-y-Druidion means “the rock of the Druids.”
[Illustration: CERRIG-Y-DRUIDION.]
“This place,” says Warner, “as its name imports, was connected with the
awful superstitions of the ancient Britons, and exhibited some years
since vestiges of Druidical worship.” These vestiges were British stone
huts or tombs—the “kistvaens” of archæological literature. Warner and
the peasantry thought them to be prisons, but, whatever they were, they
have long since disappeared; only the rocky site—like a granite island
rising from the surrounding level—remaining to give a reason for
Cerrig’s name. It is curious to reflect that the village of Crick in
Northants, was originally Cerrig, and that the name of Carrick, in
Ireland, has a similar meaning. Only in England, where ages ago “the
coiling serpent” (as the Welsh call the advancing Saxon) established
himself and expelled the Celt, has the word been corrupted. When Borrow
came to Cerrig-y-Druidion he says he stayed at the “Lion—whether the
white, black, red, or green Lion I do not know.” It was, in fact, the
“White Lion,” which still protrudes a battered and weather-beaten sign
over the bye-street, while the “Saracen’s Head” stands boldly upon the
main road. How he met the Italian who spoke Welsh, and on the morrow met
the Irish fiddler with the game leg and the infernal cheek, let the
pages of _Wild Wales_ relate.
XLI
The scattered cottages and old toll-house of Glasfryn bring one to
Cernioge, the place to which the milestones have been insistently
directing, since Corwen. What, the stranger wonders, is this place
(“Kernioggy” the Welsh pronounce it) that it should be thus dignified?
Well, here it is, just a farmhouse lying back from the road, with a pond
beside it under the trees, a few outbuildings, and an older toll-house
than the Glasfryn one. Not, nowadays, a very striking spot, except for
its remote solitude; yet this, in the old days of road-travel, was a
quite famous inn and posting-house, a stage between Bettws-y-Coed and
the “Druid’s Head.” The inevitable reflection here is that if it was to
such lonely places as this that travellers of old were glad to come,
exclaiming with delight as to their comfort, how discomfortable must
travelling then have been!
The older toll-gate standing close by, and early deserted, was found to
be inconveniently close to the inn, and certainly no postboy, having
been halted at the gate for toll, could in the few remaining yards drive
his patrons up to the house with the flourish and circumstance that the
times demanded. It is all very well nowadays, when even a first-class
fare between London and Holyhead only costs a trifle over two guineas,
for the traveller to leave the railway station in the decent obscurity
of a cab; but, in times when a journey between those places might cost
anything from thirty to fifty pounds sterling, travellers liked some
pomp and circumstance for that expenditure. And they generally obtained
it, for when travelling was so costly that few but the well-to-do were
found upon the roads, and when the guest at an inn was wont to drink
many bottles of the best port, it was eminently desirable he should be
received and despatched with the greatest show of consideration.
[Illustration: CERNIOGE.]
“Cernioge Mawr”—or “Great Cernioge”—was the full name of the place.
George Borrow conceived it to have derived from “Corniawg,” which means
a place with many chimneys or turrets; certainly not descriptive of the
existing house, but perhaps so in remote days when an old mansion stood
here, its gables and clustered chimneys prominent to wayfarers in this
solitude while they were yet far off, down the road.
The accommodation at Cernioge, whose sign, by the way, was the “Prince
Llewelyn,” seems to have varied considerably at different times, and
somewhat over a hundred years ago it appears to have been very bad. Some
tourists in 1795, hearing that the inn kept three chaises and a
post-coach, assumed a larder to match, but found “not a single article
of food that even hungry appetites could relish.” Another, three years
later, in speaking of the house as “a solitary inn, in the midst of a
desert, chiefly intended for the accommodation of the coaches which run
this road,” talks bitterly of the larder “in unison with the population
of the country: nothing to be had but a leg of mutton, which it seems
was tripping over the dark brown heath about three hours ago.”
By 1836, however, a change had come over the scene, for another tourist
is found to speak of the “comforts and accommodations not being
exaggerated”; but by that time its day was almost done. Another ten
years saw the road exchanged for the rail, and Cernioge became what it
is now, a farm.
Beyond this sometime inn the road descends, and “Snowdonia”—a term
invented by Pennant a hundred and thirty years ago—opens up before the
advancing explorer; a majestic disarray of tumbled peaks and lesser
hills, smeared across with trailing mists. Then, in two miles, comes the
hamlet of Pentre Voelas, with the “Voelas Arms,” a slate-fronted inn, by
the way, displaying a very elaborately blazoned coat-of-arms over its
door. “Toujours Prest” says the motto under that family scutcheon, and a
very good motto too. Let us hope it has always been descriptive of the
inn also, and that it, unlike Cernioge, was “Always Ready.”
From this point it is a seven-mile descent to Bettws-y-Coed and the Vale
of Conway: a descent beginning gradually and gently, with pleasant
scenery on either side, and culminating in a two-mile length of steep
and winding road, with towering rocks overhanging on the one hand, and a
deep wood-enshrouded valley on the other. Beside the road stands an
inscribed stone that tells how Llewelyn ap Seicyllt, an obscure Prince
of Wales, was slain in 1021.
Passing Henresea toll-house at five and a half miles from Bettws, the
rocky chasm is skirted where the Conway boils and frets and splashes
over obstructing boulders, or flows swiftly and with an unwonted
calmness over some reach of smooth-slabbed rock. At the bridge of Glan
Conway, where the road is taken across, is one of these quiet
interludes. The water glides with a silent swiftness, infinitely
impressive, over rocks clothed in moss, as it were in green velvet: the
“Lincoln green” of Robin Hood and his merry men. Deep pools, a little
aside from the main current, have the hue of dilute stout and porter; as
though a raft freighted with Barclay and Perkins’ best had made grievous
shipwreck here; shallower pools resemble brown sherry, and the sliding
main stream, threaded with gold by the glancing sunlight, resembles some
god-like brew of nectar or ambrosia, tipped into the kennel and run to
waste by the fanaticism of some celestial Wilfrid Lawson.
The Conway presently plunges quite out of sight below the mountain road
that winds on a cornice at Dinas Hill, lodged midway between the depths
and the heights, and buttressed by sturdy masonry against sliding down
into the woods whose tree-tops are seen far below. Away ahead, blocking
a long valley, the great peaked mountain of Moel Siabod rises up and
pretends to be Snowdon; imposing on many a confiding stranger with its
2,800 feet and bold outline, and discounting the real view of Snowdon,
700 feet higher, but not so effectively seen, at Capel Curig.
[Illustration: THE WATERLOO BRIDGE.]
This profound valley, or rather, meeting-place of valleys, is a kind of
rendezvous of many waters—the Machno, the Llugwy, the Lledr—pouring into
the Conway. Fairy glens and waterfalls abound down below in those dense
woods, and on still summer days, when the winds are hushed, one may hear
the voices of those confluent streams and falls, mingled in a hoarse
whisper. The pilgrim, strange to this road, adventuring afoot or awheel
from these commanding heights onward and downwards to Bettws, is
presently possessed with a curiosity to know how much further the
descent goes. Downward and still down, meeting cyclists, carriages, and
waggonettes crawling up, he goes and, passing another toll-house, comes
at last to the valley, beside the Conway again. Here, where the road
turns with a singular abruptness to the left, Telford has spanned that
stream with the Waterloo Bridge, a single cast-iron arch, beautiful in
itself, and, decorated with emblematic and symbolic representations of
the Rose, Thistle, Shamrock, and Leek—the floral and vegetable badges of
our composite kingdoms and principalities—proving that Telford had
something of the artistic sense, as well as engineering genius.
Cast-iron lettering, pierced and easily to be read, follows the course
of the arch and explains why “Waterloo” Bridge was so named. “This
arch,” it says, “was constructed in the same year the battle of Waterloo
was fought.” The names of Telford, of the iron-founder, and of the
foreman of works, are all recorded in cast iron.
XLII
Across the bridge and we are in Bettws-y-Coed: “Bettws in the Wood.”
Exactly how that name fits the situation of the place is instantly seen.
It occupies the floor of a tiny valley hemmed in by great hills covered
with trees, chiefly dwarf oaks. Through this valley runs the Conway,
joined in its midst by the Llugwy. Close by this confluence still
remains the old church, the “Bettws” that preceded the village itself,
and whence the village obtains its name. Bettws is the Cymric corruption
of the Anglo-Saxon bêd-hûs, or “house of prayer”; signifying a minor
chapelry; and the ancient and quite humble building fully bears out that
character. When a branch railway was made to Bettws from Llandudno some
twenty years ago, the station was built beside the old church, robbing
it of not a little of that quiet seclusion which belongs to the spot
chosen by David Cox as the scene of his “Welsh Funeral.” Since then the
primitive little place that served the simple needs of many generations
of Welsh folk has been found neither good enough nor large enough for
the fine flower of civilisation that now makes holiday at Bettws. Just
as the long, long row of hotels and lodging-houses has replaced the
original whitewashed granite cottages of the village, so a quite new,
quite magnificent, and absolutely cathedral-like church in the
Transitional-Norman style has been erected to serve the needs of the
modern resort. It is an altogether admirable building, too, and could
contain, perhaps, ten or twelve churches of the size of the old one;
but——!
[Illustration: THE OLD CHURCH, BETTWS-Y-COED.]
The old church remains, but little used. One enters the churchyard over
a rugged stile of granite, and passing through a grave of yews of a
peculiarly sombre shade—the yews that Cox painted—comes upon the
neglected building with reverence. Across the way, the railway trucks
are slamming and hanging in the goods-yard, and the shunters swearing in
Welsh; in the “Royal Oak” and the other hotels the visitors are feeding
as they would in London; on the road the waggonettes are plying with
their loads to the Fairy Glen or the Swallow Waterfall: only in this
little churchyard is there complete solitude.
The building is plain to barrenness within, and is more like some
secular room than a church. The sole monument, or inscription, of any
period, is the stone effigy of Grufyd ap Davyd Gôch, with his nose duly
knocked off; his hands in prayer:—
For past omissions to atone
By saying endless prayers in stone.
XLIII
The fame of Bettws was made by David Cox, that unassuming landscape
painter who, appreciated inadequately in his lifetime, now keeps company
with the Old Masters in the estimation of the discerning, and in the
prices his works command at public auction. David Cox well knew the
Holyhead Road: few so well, and perhaps none better. He was born beside
it, in a cottage at Heath Mill Lane, Deritend, in 1783, and his
favourite sketching grounds in North Wales lay along, or within sight
of, the old highway. When he came to Bettws—when he, in the artistic
sense, “discovered” it—the village was not a tenth part of the size it
is now. No one ever thought of staying here in those days, and had
travellers by any chance been compelled to halt at either of the two
primitive inns, the “Royal Oak” or the “Waterloo,” the plainest country
fare and the homeliest accommodation would have been theirs. No baronial
dining-rooms, no odious German waiters whom one longs to wipe one’s feet
upon, no wine lists then: just a simple choice between the parlour or
the rustic kitchen; between _cwrw da_ (that is to say, good ale), and
bread and cheese and eggs and bacon served by a Welsh lass, who probably
understood not a word of English, but possessed cheeks like a rose, a
waist some thirty inches round, and great flat feet—very trying to
amateur poets given to rhyming about gazelles, Hebes, and tripping
Phyllises.
To the then tiny whitewashed inn, the “Royal Oak,” came David Cox during
a long series of years, almost, indeed, until 1859, the year of his
death. It must not be supposed that Cox was a neglected or unsuccessful
genius. It is true that his greatness has only been realised to the full
since his death, but he was prosperous throughout almost the whole of
his career, and the legends that tell how he painted the sign of the
“Royal Oak” in order to pay his score are absolutely without foundation.
At no time after his youthful days was Cox poor, and he never possessed
those Bohemian habits that left many a successful but dissolute artist
of those times stranded for lack of money.
Cox himself has told how he came to paint the sign. It was done in 1847,
at a time when his art and his reputation were ripe. The old painted
board, fixed against the wall of the house, had become faded with long
exposure to the weather, and he volunteered to repaint it for his old
friend the landlady. The long street of Bettws was infinitely quieter in
1847 than now. The houses were few and scattered, the railway had done
away with the coaches, and tourists were uncommon, so that he not
unreasonably expected to do the work without interruption. He had
ascended a short ladder, and was working away with palette on thumb, and
heaps of pigments and the largest brushes he could lay hands on, when it
suddenly occurred to him that he was not in a very dignified position
for a man of his standing; and that, should he be seen by any one
passing through Bettws, a very ridiculous story might be put into
circulation, not at all to his advantage. However, he summoned up
courage, and comforted himself with the reflection that he would not be
observed, or, if seen, would be taken for a common house-painter. But,
when in the midst of his work, to his horror he heard a carriage
approaching. “Now,” he thought, “I’m done for! Perhaps, though, it will
pass by.” But, instead of passing, it halted beneath, a pretty face
looked up at him from it, and a voice exclaimed: “Why, it _is_ Mr. Cox,
I declare!” The lady was a former pupil of his who, recently married,
was travelling in Wales on her honeymoon. “That is not the ladder of
Fame you are on now,” she said.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “ROYAL OAK.”]
Poor Cox was horrified. If he explained the why and the how of his work
that day, it evidently did not make the impression of sincerity, for the
stories of his painting the sign to wipe off a debt obviously derive
from this chance meeting.
Two years later the painter retouched his work. In 1861, two years after
his death, it was, at the request of many admirers, removed from the
outside and placed in the hall of the house, then become a “hotel,” and
beginning that series of rebuildings and extensions that have made it
what it is to-day. In 1880 the then landlady became bankrupt, and the
trustees of the estate claimed the old sign as a valuable asset, stating
that a connoisseur had offered £1,000 for it, a statement that moved the
late Cuthbert Bede to scandalised incredulity. It, however, would
certainly bring bids of more than double that amount if put up to
auction to-day.
The claim of the trustees was disputed by the freeholder, the Baroness
Willoughby De Eresby, and the matter was decided in her favour, with
costs. The famous sign was judged to be a fixture, and may yet be seen
in the hall of the hotel, handsomely enshrined behind glass in a
decorative overmantel.
It is a fine, bold piece of work, virile in its dashing brushmarks and
impasto, and in a pleasing low key of colour; altogether very Old
Masterish. An inscription beneath states that it “forms part of the
freehold of the Hotel belonging to the Baroness Howard de Walden.” It
now belongs to the Earl of Ancaster. Let those who will, and have the
curiosity to it, trace the why and the wherefore of this devolution of
property and titles from a De Eresby, through a Howard de Walden, to an
Ancaster.
XLIV
If there were not so many dishonest people, and so many vulgar people,
in the world, the visitors-books of the “Royal Oak” would be a delight
to present-day travellers. Those books begin in 1855, and have in their
time been filled with a very miscellaneous collection of autographs,
criticisms, and sketches. In the old days, before the house was rebuilt,
and its new magnificence and crowds of vulgar and artless rich
frightened away the majority of artists, thoughtless fellows who had not
“arrived” endowed these books with many signed sketches which in after
years, when they had achieved reputations, became valuable in a
commercial sense. Pencil sketches there were, pen-drawings, and
water-colours; and autographs of other men since known to fame were
scattered plentifully through those pages. Among and between them were
many of the silly, offensive, and downright infamous things that one
finds in every visitors-book; for the Howling Cad is a large and
plentiful leaven. The productions of the Cad are there still, and later
generations of cads and thieves have added their own sillinesses with
one hand, while with the other they have cut out the things that really
interested. As, according to Tennyson, “the lie that is half a lie is
ever the blackest of lies,” so the Cad that has got sufficient culture
to appreciate the worth of a thing, and then steals it, must be the
caddiest of cads. It is as demonstrable a thing as a theorem in Euclid.
The visitors-books of the “Royal Oak” are therefore things of tatters
and fragments, but in these remains the spirit of old-time touring may
here and there be found. They walked mostly, those tourists, and
sketches of them in peg-top trousers—very baggy in the upper part of the
leg, tight at the foot, and very braidy at the seams—show how they
roamed the country. Often they wore “Jemimas”—the brutes!
It is quite certain that the tourist who in these times should tour in
that quaint guise would be mobbed, for, in addition to his weird nether
garments, the gay young man of 1860 or thereabouts wore a felt hat like
a pudding basin, with a flat brim and a button on the crown. Complete
the picture with an eyeglass and a pair of “Piccadilly weepers,” and
there you are. Yet they were consummate lady-killers, or so imagined
themselves to be, and a reflection of their deathly oglings is found in
these pages. “Look out for the girl in the village, just beyond the
gate—such a stunner!” says one. (“Stunner” was a word characteristic of
the sixties.) It is quite evident that those who followed took this
amatory pilgrim’s advice, for “Not equal to our Mary Ann, though,” is
appended by some disappointed swain.
Girl, gate, and pilgrims, where are they, and where is the Bettws of
that era? Gone, my friends, and only the immemorial hills and these
ragged visitors-books remain. For Bettws has been entirely rebuilt since
then, and the “gate” referred to was brutally swept away some ten years
since. Brutally, because it was an ivy and creeper-clad old toll-house,
one of the charmingest landmarks in the place. It stood at the corner
leading to Pont-y-Pair, where a boarding-house called “Carleton House”
may now be seen.
But to return to our visitors-books. The verses found in them would
scarce grace a poetic garland, but here is a sample, _circa_ 1860:—
Good reader, supposing you’ve looked through this book,
Some fair verses no doubt you have read;
Some good sketches, with bad ones—the latter but few;
But did soliloquy enter your head?
How many are left who their names have inscribed
In a mood both happy and free?
How many in Britain, how many abroad?
Some sleep ’neath the old willow tree.
A later scribbler appropriately asks this poet to “Cheer up!” He is
followed by one who rhymes “spruce” with “Bettws,” which is a very close
approximation to the correct pronunciation. Then comes the “Marquis of
Alicampane,” and later a critic who implores some heterographical guest,
“_Do_ cultivate a taste for spelling.” Then comes a shapeless scribble,
signed and priced by some wag, “J. M. W. Turner, £450.”
The fate that follows distinguished visitors who gravely and pompously
enter their names is seen in the comments on the entry, “Sir William
Barlow, K.C.B., and Lady Barlow.” There was at that period a popular
song called “Billy Barlow,” and with the hint thus afforded some idle
artist has drawn in the margin his ideas of Sir William and his lady.
They are not flattering.
David Cox did not live to see his beloved Bettws overrun by artists and
excursionists and exploited to the _n_^{th} degree. It remained
unspotted from the world. To those who only know the Bettws of to-day,
and see the railway station and the hundreds of excursionists that pour
out of it on every summer afternoon, it is incredible that a visitor
who, like some exploring Columbus, or Livingstone, at the least of it,
stumbled upon the place in 1855, at the close of the great struggle in
the Crimea, should have found the villagers quite ignorant of there
having been any war. To-day things are very different. Hotels,
boarding-houses, lodging-houses, and cyclists’ rests, with a sprinkling
of shops where photographs and guide-books are sold, occupy the whole
street; and when lunch-time and the dinner-hour are come, the scent of
other people’s meals wafted down the road is quite oppressive.
But let it not be thought that Bettws is spoilt. It is only changed. If
no longer unsophisticated, it is yet delightful, and if the houses are
all new, they are at least either in good taste, or, at the worst,
inoffensive. And, after all, the glorious scenery remains. The artists,
however, are gone to Trefriw, a village down the Conway, as yet untamed
and unbroken to the harness of convention. Time was when one could not
stir out of doors at Bettws without upsetting an easel. Passing a wall,
you would be startled by a fellow with long hair and a velvet jacket,
and with a portfolio under his arm, jumping over it; looking down a
lane, many easels would be seen there; a glance at the rocks of
Pont-y-Pair would reveal sketch-books and pencils busily at work; and
wandering, hand in hand with your Aminta in the shady bye-ways, you
would not find the seclusion that such romantic occasions demand.
Other times, other manners. The amateur photographer is now in
possession of Bettws. That central spot, the very hub of the place, the
bridge over the Llugwy—called Pont-y-Pair, or the “Bridge of the
Cauldron,” in allusion to the seething water falling over the rocks—is
the favoured shooting-ground, and all day long the excursionists who
bask picturesquely on the sunny stones are the victims of snapshotters,
or with their own cameras pick off the sharpshooters on the bridge.
Under such a terrific cross-fire as this few can hope to escape.
[Illustration: PONT-Y-PAIR.]
XLV
The two miles leading from Bettws along the Holyhead Road to
Rhaiadr-y-Wennol, or the “Swallow Falls,” conduct upwards, out of the
hole in whose kindly shelter Bettws lies. Along this somewhat tiring
incline a long procession of sight-seers may be seen toiling every day,
from April to October, at any time between eight a.m. and seven in the
evening, for the Falls have always been considered one of the sights
best worth seeing in Wales, and even the Holyhead Mail used to pull up
for five minutes to allow passengers to see them. They obtain their
pretty name only, it is sad to reflect, by error, in an old confusion of
“Wennol,” the Welsh word for “swallow,” with “Ewynol,” which means
“foaming,” and is therefore a description merely Saxon in its
unimaginative matter-of-fact. To those who would compare the Swallow
Falls with Niagara or Alpine waterfalls, with intent to disparage this
beautiful spot, we need have nothing to say. Let it be sufficient that
these foaming waters, overhung with rocks and fantastically-rooted
trees, are sufficiently lovely. The Falls are so close to the road as to
be readily seen from it, between the trunks of the little fir plantation
that intervenes, while their roaring can be heard far away. They begin
with a tumbled race of the Llugwy between scattered rocks, developing
into three distinct steps or falls, followed by a long slide. These
masses of water, flung riotously upon one another, produce a curiously
beautiful effect on the river immediately below, the element being so
thoroughly aerated that for many yards onward it is full of air-bubbles
as brilliant as the sparklets in champagne or mineral waters. The
Swallow Falls have, of course, their legend. Beneath them is supposed to
lie the spirit of Sir John Wynn, of Gwydyr, a canny baronet of the early
seventeenth century, who was so “shrewd and successful in his dealings”
that his Welsh neighbours, rightly or wrongly, thought him enriched by
foul means at their expense. Accordingly, here his unhappy shade was
sent “to be punished, purged, spouted upon, and purified from the foul
deeds done in his days of nature.” According to latest advices, it is
here yet, “damned moist, unpleasant.” If all erring shades were banished
to such situations, it is to be feared there would not be waterfalls
sufficient to go round; but, indeed, it is to a roomier and a drier
place that they are generally thought to be consigned.
[Illustration: THE SWALLOW FALLS. _From an Old Print._]
The Llugwy, more and more a mountain stream as we proceed, borders the
road, on one side or the other, as far as Capel Curig. Half a mile
beyond the Swallow Falls, it is crossed at Ty-Hyll bridge, and is
thenceforward on the left-hand. The road still ascends, crosses a wild
tract with an ancient fir-crowned tumulus, and comes steeply up to
Pont-y-Cyfyng and the Cyfyng Falls, a pretty scene, among scrub oaks and
silver birches, with one of Telford’s happily placed little alcoves, for
the amateurs of the picturesque, built out from the breastwork
protecting the road.
[Illustration: CYFYNG FALLS.]
Here the great road enters upon its wildest and most impressive
stretches, but not without such compensations to the traveller as the
pretty, artist-haunted inns of Tan-y-Bwlch afford. Another
toll-gate—never, surely, was there a great highway to vie with this in
the number of them—blocked the way until the close of 1890, and the old
house remains. Just beyond it, and full in view of the trim peaks of
Snowdon, of Moel Siabod, and their great cloud-capped brethren, is the
little village, or rather hamlet, of Capel Curig, lying in the valley
where roads go off left to the stormy pass of Llanberis and so on to
Carnarvon; and on the right to Holyhead. Capel Curig was, like Bettws,
never more than a chapelry in the wilds; but, unlike Bettws, it has not
grown with modern times. One may seek the reason with success in the
fact that no railway comes near it. A contributory reason is perhaps
found in the nature of its surroundings. Grandeur of scenery, and purity
of air do not compensate holiday-folks for the mists, the furious
storms, and the frequent rains that haunt the spot. Visitors to Capel
Curig have been known to drive into it through the rain, to stay as
indoor prisoners to stress of weather for a week; departing without ever
once having seen the mists disperse that cling so fondly about Snowdon,
and veil his majesty from many eyes.
A thunderstorm here is a terrific and appalling thing, with the
encircling mountains acting as sounding-boards to the demoniacal peals
of thunder that crash with ear-rending reverberations along the valleys.
Fortunately for those who are unwilling witnesses of this elemental
strife, Capel Curig possesses a very large and resourceful hotel,
standing off the Holyhead Road, by the twin lakes in the valley. It was
built about 1802 by the then Lord Penrhyn, one of the first to urge the
improvement of the Holyhead Road and the adoption of this route, instead
of the older and more circuitous one by Chester. He probably could not,
with the best will in the world, have erected a plainer building.
When Borrow, tramping eighteen miles on a hot and dusty day, came here,
he found the fashionable company in the grand saloon surveying him with
looks of the most supercilious disdain. They thought him some poor
fellow, tramping from motives of economy.
[Illustration: CAPEL CURIG.]
The poor little whitewashed church of Capel Curig—the original Chapel of
St. Curig that gives the place its name—stands quite near the big hotel.
It was dedicated to Curig and to Julitta, his mother. The missionary
zeal that impelled them to come here, a thousand years or so ago, must
have been at fever heat, for this was then a place of unutterable
loneliness: not as now with a fine road running by, but a trackless
country, deeply shadowed by the almost impenetrable oak woods that
covered the mountain sides and the moorlands, now almost entirely
innocent of trees of any sort. A mild specimen of what even eighteenth
century roads were like will give some notion of the difficulties of
approach that remained until 1820. This “awful example” is the four-mile
length of deserted road between Capel Curig and Llyn Ogwen. It was once
the only way, and the modern Holyhead Road between these two points is
wholly of Telford’s making. The beginning of this track—for it was
little better—may be sought between the Post Office and the whitewashed
cottage that was once the “Tap” of the hotel down yonder. Passing
immediately over a rugged bridge spanning a waterfall on the Llugwy, it
mounts across the rising moorland, and climbs a boulder-strewn ridge; to
descend to the shores of Ogwen under the beetling crags of Trifaen
mountain. There is sufficient evidence that it is little less than the
bed of a mountain torrent in winter-time, and even to pedestrians the
exploration of it is difficult.
XLVI
Telford’s road takes an infinitely better course, although, to be sure,
the four miles onward to Lake Ogwen are on a steady and uninterrupted
rise, almost impossible to face with a steady head-wind, and wholly so
when storms scour through the pass. Here is the summit-level of the
road, 957 feet above the sea, with mountains 3,000 feet higher
surrounding the lonely moorland. Infrequent farmsteads of the smallest
and most cabin-like kind are scattered about the almost barren space,
among the bogs and the tremendous boulders that have at some time or
other come hurtling down from the mountain-sides, where there remain
many more of the same sort, ready to descend. Peat-stacks to every farm
tell of what fuel they use here, just as the great stones placed on the
roofs of stacks and cabins alike hint of the fury of the winds.
Llyn Ogwen comes at the end of this moor, where the mountains close in
and narrow the passage. It borders the road for a mile; a shuddery lake
of ice-cold water, sombre and austere as Trifaen the three-headed
himself, or Braich Du and Carnedd Dafydd on the opposite shores; all of
them mountains of the most craggy and stupendous sort.
Trifaen, an abrupt mountain of 3010 feet, is incomparably the finest in
Wales, after Snowdon. Its three peaks, with tattered shreds of mists
clinging about them, seem to hang immediately overhead, and the huge
fissures up its mighty sides, with moisture sparkling here and there on
the slaty rocks, like jewels in the sunshine, forbid all but the most
determined climbers.
[Illustration: LLYN OGWEN AND TRIFAEN MOUNTAIN.]
[Illustration: THE FALLS OF OGWEN.]
The anglers who fish for trout in Ogwen, the cyclists, and the
brake-parties from Bangor, all help to make the little refreshment house
that was once a toll-house, a busy enough place. It stands where the
overflow from the Llyn dashes down more than a hundred feet, in a series
of cascades, into a deep valley. These are the Falls of Ogwen, and the
valley that opens out below and stretches for miles onward, with a
glimpse of the sea in the distance, is the far famed Nant Ffrancon—“the
Glen of Beavers.” Until Telford reconstructed the road from this point,
the way—“the most dreadful horse-path in Wales” as Pennant describes it
in 1759—led over the Falls by an extremely narrow bridge without
parapets, and descended in break-neck fashion into the other side of the
valley. Telford wholly abandoned that suicidal drop and set his workmen
to quarry and blast out a gradual three miles’ descent on the hither
side, along the shoulders of the hills: a gradient so gentle that,
although the road is situated in the midst of the most rugged scenery,
it never exceeds 1 in 22. He built a new bridge over the Falls, and
propped up his road from falling into the valley by a massive length of
retaining-wall; carrying underneath the carriage-way by cross drains,
the little spouts of water that fall at every few yards from the
mountain sides.
[Illustration: NANT FFRANCON. _After David Cox._]
The old bridge may still be seen, a moss-grown and decrepit arch, beside
the modern, and the old road still descends the vale; but no one save
the peasants and the wandering shepherds ever trace the deserted way.
David Cox has left a line view of the modern road, with Carnedd Dafydd
and Trifaen in the background, and the scenery to the right, where the
black and frightful precipice called the “Devil’s Kitchen” gapes;
vapours overhanging it like the steam of some infernal cookery.
XLVII
The Glen of Beavers is a beautiful spot from the standpoint of the
tourist, if not of the farmers, who have with infinite labour collected
the scattered boulders, and built boundary walls with them; and essay to
grow corn and hay in the bottom, where the Ogwen stream goes prattling
in summer on its winding course. The Ogwen is no friend to the farmer,
for walls and stacks and earth are often carried away in winter by the
innocent looking brook, that arises at such times and, clearing the
fields far and wide in an irresistible flood, deposits stones where the
good earth bad been, and carries the earth itself in solution down to
Bangor, and so out to sea. Before agriculture can feel secure here,
locks and dams should regulate the tricksy watercourse, just as was done
by the dams the beavers built in the unrecorded ages, before ever the
farmer came.
[Illustration: NANT FFRANCON.]
At the foot of the descent is Tyn-y-Maes——the House in the Meadow, a
hamlet where an inn stood in coaching days to supply relays for the last
stage into Bangor, and where, one may be quite sure, the coachmen and
passengers coming down or going up, partook of those creature comforts
the rigours of the journey demanded. A coachman was said to have lost
his eyesight from the effects of a snowstorm at Nant Ffrancon.
It is a woeful exchange from the quiet streams and the rural sights of
the last few miles to Bethesda and the hideous slate quarries that gash
the hillsides. “A Scriptural name,” said Borrow, when a chance
acquaintance on the road told him the name of the village.
“Is it?” said he; “well, if its name is Scriptural, the manners of its
people are by no means so.”
If the appearance of Bethesda (now a town, and a very mean and ugly one)
were any criterion of the character of its inhabitants, then, the
Bethesda people would be past praying for. It is a long, long street of
the most furiously ugly houses that ever roof was put to, and the whole
of its surroundings are pitifully sordid. Whether cheap stucco or slate
be the building materials, the result is the same, and the generations
of quarrymen who have laboured to enrich Lord Penrhyn and his ancestors
are doomed to dwell in a most squalid place, within sight of some of the
most beautiful scenery in the world.
For Lord Penrhyn is the owner of land far and near. Not, for the most
part, land that would enrich its possessor, but in the slate quarries of
Bethesda a veritable mine of wealth, far surpassing the riches derived
from many a goldfield. Slate rock that can be quarried and split into
the thin sections required for roofing is of the rarest occurrence, and
most of it is situated within the bounds of the Penrhryn estates, that
for centuries have produced more than three-quarters of the slates
coming into the market. Not only the home market is supplied from here,
but foreign also. Unlike the working of most mineral estates, the
quarries are not let out to some middleman, but worked direct for Lord
Penrhyn, and have been notorious from time to time for the bitter and
long-drawn strikes that have taken place. The middleman is not generally
regarded with favour, but it is safe to say, without following the
wretched story of the Bethesda quarrymen, that if such an one had the
control of the quarries, such occurrences, although possible, would not
have been of so protracted a character. A man who should lease the
quarries could not afford to lock them up, and, putting the key in his
pocket, let the strike go on for ever, or until the workmen and their
families were starved into accepting terms; but the Lords Penrhyn can.
The Penrhyns have been so greatly enriched by the quarries that their
wealth is colossal, and current income from that source can be cut off
without any discomfort. The whole pitiful business would be impossible
under that enlightened statesmanship which some day will make all
mineral wealth public property.
The chief features of the Bethesda scenery are the long series of
rubbish-heaps, or rubbish-mountains, and the terraced clefts in the
hills whence the slates have come. Whole hillsides have been cut and
blasted away, to be fashioned into slates that have roofed half the
little suburban villas of the world. The great success of Welsh slates
is due to their cheapness, and to the thinness to which it is possible
to split them, so that the cheap builder of cheap houses need not
provide a very substantial roof to bear their weight. It is very
different with the Cumberland slates; smaller and thicker and a great
deal more expensive, they are only to be found on buildings where
cheapness has not been the first object. Between the Welsh and the
Cumbrian products there can only be one choice on the score of
appearance and strength. Welsh slates have a disagreeable colour,
something between a blackish-blue and dark purple: those from Cumberland
are a delicate grey-green, beautiful when new, and improving with age.
Their comparative thickness, too, is an advantage from many points of
view.
[Illustration: PENRHYN CASTLE.]
[Illustration: LONISAF TOLL-HOUSE.]
The gates of Penrhyn Park confront the traveller when he has at last
left Bethesda in his wake. They are appropriately feudal and
threatening, in a revival of the old castellated style, just as though
the owner of the quarries had shut himself within, and was prepared to
defend himself and his hoards to the last extremity against the starving
thousands of the quarry-town. The little village of Llandegai stands
near, and beyond stretches the Park, with Penrhyn Castle in its midst: a
lovely scene of dense woodlands falling towards a blue expanse of sea,
with an island and a lighthouse and white-winged yachts. The Castle
turrets dominate the whole, an elaborate and highly successful piece of
make-believe, compelling the reverence of the wayfarer, until he draws
near and discovers that the Norman keep, own brother in appearance to
that of Rochester Castle, was built about a hundred years ago by a
certain “judicious Hopper” (not our old theological friend, the
judicious Hooker), “who with his usual taste and science has preserved
in his improvements the characteristic style of the military Gothic.”
Positively the last toll-house before Bangor is found at Lonisaf,
standing not far from the spot where the old road from Ogwen Falls joins
the modern. Some toll-gates were provided with weighbridges, and Lonisaf
was one of them, the little weigh-house still remaining. The especial
function of these weighbridges was to detect overloading. Fines for
carts and waggons laden beyond their proper weight were very heavy, and
their severity and frequent application fully reimbursed the trustees
the cost of installing a check of this kind.
XLVIII
The road makes an abrupt turn to the left to enter the city of Bangor.
The grim stone walls on either side of the forbidding edifice in front
do not represent a prison, workhouse, or lunatic asylum, but have at
present the honour of housing the University College of North Wales,
founded in 1884. Years before that date this was the “Penrhyn Arms”
hotel, one of the largest and best on the road, with great resources in
the way of reception-rooms, extensive private suites for the
considerable personages who travelled to and from Ireland, and stabling
for over a hundred horses. A private inclined road leads up to the
pillared doorway, and an arch over the public road conducted in those
days to the hotel farm and dairy. It is frequently found to be too low
to permit the passage of hay and straw waggons and other mountainous
loads, with the result that the so-called “private” road is used, and is
almost as public as the other. The best side of the building is turned
away from the road, and looks from amid wide lawns and beautiful gardens
across the Menai Straits to Beaumaris. Here they show with reverence the
stump of a fir tree planted by the Princess Victoria in 1832. The tree
died in 1899. The interior of the house is, of course, divided into
class-rooms, lecture-rooms, and the like. The kitchen and scullery are
now a library, and students now swat where fat cooks once sweated before
roasting fires. The change is one that would have horrified Colonel
Birch-Reynardson, equally with the coachmen and guards of the Holyhead
Mail that used to change here in the palmy days of Host Bicknell.
[Illustration: THE PENRHYN ARMS.]
The Colonel, as an amateur whip, often drove the Mail between Oswestry
and Bangor, and tells how others occasionally did the same. There was,
for example, one who took a glass or a bottle too much at the “Owen
Glendower” at Corwen, and wrought havoc with the mail and other things
along the road, with the result that the bags were too late for the
packet at Holyhead, and the Post Office authorities heard of it. Result
number two was that horse proprietors were severely admonished not to
allow any one but the authorised coachman to drive. They did so all the
same, but the reins were prudently made to change hands when nearing
“the change.” Charlie Harper, who about that time had been promoted from
the slower Chester and Holyhead to the fast direct Holyhead Mail, had
resigned his ribbons one day to the Colonel, but took them over on
nearing Bangor. The Colonel, however, good-humouredly took Bicknell to
task for giving _him_ the sack. The hotel-keeper was sorry, but no
amateur could drive the Mail again after the wigging he had got from the
Post Office.
Some little while later, one stormy evening, the Colonel was on the Mail
at Bangor. Harper, at the end of his day’s work, got down and went home;
the new team was put to, and the Mail stood waiting for Jack Williams,
the coachman who was to take it across the bridge and on to Holyhead.
Five minutes passed; time was up, and no coachman appeared. “What the
devil are you waiting for?” asked Hodgson, the guard, coming back from
the Post Office with the bags. “Where is Jack Williams?”
No one had seen Jack Williams, and no one seemed to know whether he was
dead or alive. At last one of the horsekeepers seemed to remember all of
a sudden that Williams had been summoned to attend a magistrates’
meeting on the other side of the Menai Bridge; that Harper was to have
taken the Mail over the bridge, and Williams to get up at the
public-house where the worthy beaks who had summoned him were to hold
their conclave. “Yess, inteet, I remember it wass summoned to attend the
magistrates’ meeting” (_it_ standing, of course, for ‘Chack’ Williams).
“Now then,” said Hodgson, growing impatient, “we can’t wait here all
day; somebody must drive. Mr. Reynardson, will you be so good? We shall
be late for the packet.”
“I don’t care,” said the Colonel, “whether you are late or not; I am
thankful to say I am not going to cross such a day as this. Jump up and
drive yourself, and I’ll take charge of your bags. Bicknell has said
that I am not to drive his horses, and if you take root here I don’t
care; I’ll not touch them.” “Well, sir, we shall be late for the packet
if you _won’t_,” said Hodgson. “I don’t care,” he replied, “I dare say I
shall be able to get to where I am going in time for dinner, or at all
events before bedtime, so I’ll have nothing to do with either the mail
or Mr. Bicknell’s horses, and if the mail stays here all night it’s
nothing to me.” “Now, Hodgson,” said Bicknell, who just then appeared at
the door, “what’s the Mail standing there for.” “That’s _just_ what I
should like to know,” answered Hodgson; “but the Mail can’t go, sir,
without some one to drive it. Jack Williams is not to be found, Charlie
Harper has gone home long ago, and Mr. Reynardson says you said he was
not to drive your horses any more, and he won’t have anything to do with
them; so what’s to be done I don’t know. We shall be late for the
packet, and then you know there’ll be a row again with the Post Office
people.”
Things seemed to be in something of a fix, and Hodgson, though in a fuss
to be off, was rather enjoying the joke, which began to be a serious
one; for there seemed to be no chance of any one to drive. It was
blowing great guns, and the Menai Bridge would be rocking about like a
cradle, and the team of greys were not the handiest in the world, if
they had not got up the right way in the morning, and if things went a
little wrong.
“Well,” said Bicknell, “this won’t do. Will you drive them, Mr.
Reynardson, till you find Jack Williams on the other side of the
bridge?” “No,” said the obstinate Colonel, “you may drive them yourself,
if you like; I won’t touch them.” Things looked bad; Bicknell was no
coachman; Hodgson said he could not, and Reynardson that he would not,
drive, and there seemed none of the horsekeepers competent to perform
the feat. So at last, Mr. Bicknell, putting on his most affable face,
said: “Mr. Reynardson, Sir, will you be so kind as to take them across
the bridge? I shall be very much obliged to you if you will.” “Oh! Oh!”
said the pacified amateur, “if you are going to be obliged, or anything
of that kind, I don’t mind obliging you, Mr. Bicknell,” and the thing
was done.
XLIX
Bangor is a forbidding place—a squalid and uninteresting mile-length of
street, extending from this spot to the railway station, where a more
recent and less objectionable continuation of it, called Upper Bangor,
climbs for another half-mile towards the Menai Bridge. The long, long
street of Bangor, narrow and dirty, gives an indescribably second-hand
appearance to everything exposed for sale in its shop-windows; and the
stranger, newly arrived from the champagne-like air of Capel Curig, has
not been in Bangor half an hour before he, too, feels second-hand and
soiled. He goes weak at the knees, totters, and feels utterly undone.
The town lies as it were in the bottom of a funnel, and, tucked away
from actual contact with the vivifying breezes of the Menai Strait, has
air neither from one side nor the other. It is, by consequence, a town
of the sickliest. Let these things, however, be said rather in sorrow
than contempt, for of contempt Bangor has already had sufficient at the
hands of generations of travellers. Many are attracted to Bangor by
reason of its cathedral, but it were better the building had not that
proud title, because those who have already made acquaintance with the
famous cathedrals of England see a lack of proportion in thus dignifying
a church that, for both size and beauty, is surpassed times without
number by parish churches in the shires. For its present want of
interest, such individually remote and entirely dissimilar persons as
Owain Glyndwr and Sir Gilbert Scott are responsible. Owain in 1402 laid
it in ruins; and Scott, who, at a cost of £35,000, was engaged from 1866
to 1875 in “restoring” the debased Perpendicular building he found here,
has impressed his own architectural nostrums upon it in a very
disastrous manner. It is a long, low structure, with a dwarf central
tower, and its own inherent disadvantages are greatly worsened by its
site being in a hollow beside the shabby street.
Doctor Johnson, who, touring North Wales in 1774, found the “quire” of
Bangor to be “mean,” could quite honestly repeat that criticism to-day.
The service in his time was also “ill-read.” A “very mean inn” in the
town further helped to jaundice his views—an inn with little
accommodation, for he records: “I lay in a room where the other bed had
two men.”
De Quincey is one of the very many who have not liked Bangor. He says it
has “fewer attractions than any other spot in Carnarvonshire”—a very
mild and negative way of putting Bangor’s disabilities, and much milder
than it might have been, considering the provocation received. It was in
1802 he was here, following his “elopement” from school at Manchester.
With the weekly allowance of a guinea, he was free for a while to roam
Wales as he pleased, and came (of all places!) to Bangor, where he hired
“a very miniature set of apartments—one room and a closet.” His landlady
had been a servant in the household of the Bishop of Bangor, and, one
day, calling at the Palace, happened to mention to the Bight Reverend
how she had let her rooms. Thereupon that dignified cleric thought it
incumbent upon him to caution her as to her selection of inmates. “You
must recollect, Betty,” he said, “that Bangor is the high road to the
Head (_the Head_ was the common colloquial expression for Holyhead); so
that multitudes of Irish swindlers, running away from their debts into
England; and of English swindlers, running away from their debts to the
Isle of Man, are likely to take this place in their route.”
This was excellent advice for judicious ears; but Betty unhappily
repeated the Bishop’s words to De Quincey, together with her reply,
which was, “Oh, my lord, I really don’t think this young gentleman is a
swindler, because——” But the clause that was to have justified him that
young gentleman never knew. “You don’t _think_ me a swindler,” he
interposed; “I shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it”; and so
departed, in a righteous fury.
L
It is at Bangor that the old Chester route to Holyhead, by way of
Penmaenmawr, falls into the great Holyhead Road. Although we have not
come by Chester, it may be worth while to glance at Penmaenmawr, that
gigantic headland over whose perilous heights old-time travellers went,
trembling for their safety. Its Welsh name, meaning literally the “great
stone head,” sufficiently describes this old obstacle and
stumbling-block, looking over the water to Anglesey. Nowadays the
railway tunnels through it, and travellers by the Wild Irishman, warned
by the locomotive’s shriek, are plunged into a momentary darkness,
fifteen hundred feet beneath the windy height where the horsemen of two
hundred years ago stumbled along an indistinct track. Swift was of that
company, and it is still told how the inns at either end of this
laborious route used to display on their signs the couplets written by
him:—
Before you venture here to pass,
Take a good refreshing glass.
And—
Now this hill you’re safely over,
Drink, your spirits to recover.
By 1774, when Dr. Johnson toured in Wales, matters had somewhat
improved. “We came to Penmaenmawr,” he says, “by daylight, and found a
way, lately made very easy and very safe. It was cut smooth and enclosed
between parallel walls, the outer of which secures the passenger from
the precipice, which is deep and dreadful. This wall is here and there
broken by mischievous wantonness. The inner wall preserves the road from
the loose slates, which the shattered steep above it would pour down.
That side of the mountain seems to have a surface of loose stones which
every accident may crumble. The old road runs higher, and must have been
very formidable. _The sea beats at the bottom of the way._”
[Illustration: PENMAENMAWR. _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._]
Those italics are not due to Johnson, but are placed here to duly
emphasise the romantic note struck, perhaps unconsciously, by him at the
close of those too-staccato sentences, studded all too plentifully with
that often necessary but harsh word “which.” “The sea beats at the
bottom of the way:” there you have a picture of the place that hints in
a sentence all manner of disasters; ships blown against the rocky coast,
coaches swept off the road into the waves, and obscure catastrophes, the
more dreadful because left to the imagination.
But not every one found Penmaenmawr so safe, even though the new road
had replaced the old. They had not Johnson’s robust nature, or else
desired to make some literary capital out of the scene. Thus, more than
twenty years later, the Rev. Richard Warner describes “the rocky
mountain of Penmaenmawr,” in what he evidently intends to be
blood-curdling terms. “Formerly extremely rude and dangerous,” he says,
“it has been entirely altered and divested of a considerable degree of
its horror. Still, however, it cannot be travelled without shuddering.
Creeping round the side of the mountain, it hangs, as it were, in
mid-air, with a frowning precipice above and a steep descent immediately
under it. The rocks on the right are nearly perpendicular, sometimes
beetling over the road in a terrific manner, at others retiring into
deep declivities of nine hundred or a thousand feet, from whose rugged
sides project fragments of incalculable magnitude, so capriciously
placed, and having such a disjoined appearance that it is impossible for
the traveller to lose the perpetual dread of his being every moment
crushed to atoms under a torrent of huge stones.” That such stormy
torrents _did_ sometimes flow is evident from Wigstead, who, coming to
“where Penmaenmawr awfully raises its aspiring head,” found a mass of
rock recently fallen into the road in a storm; a huge fragment of cliff
that, if broken up, could not have been cleared away by ten large
waggons.
[Illustration: PENRHYN CASTLE AND SNOWDONIA, PROM BEAUMARIS.
_After David Cox._]
When the union of Great Britain and Ireland was effected, the Irish
members clamoured for the immediate improvement of this dangerous road.
Indeed, the city of Dublin had already contributed something towards
such a work, but the present fine highway round the base of the headland
did not come into existence until Telford came upon the scene, blasting
and levelling the way that Turner has pictured so well.
Having passed Penmaenmawr, the old travellers to Holyhead often crossed
into Anglesey by the Lavan Sands to Beaumaris: a dangerous passage only
to be attempted by those correctly informed of the tides. Horsemen would
ride the three-mile stretch of sands exposed at low water, and, hailing
the Beaumaris ferry, be readily landed on the island; but if they by any
chance ventured out half an hour too late, the rising tide swept them
away, or the treacherous sands engulfed them. It was here that Sir John
Bramston and his son were nearly lost in 1641. They had ridden across
the sands to the verge of the channel and hailed the ferry; but the
ferrymen were drunk, and it was long before any notice was taken of
them. Meanwhile, the tide was rising fast, and was swirling about them
before aid arrived, and they were rescued in the nick of time.
LI
The ferries into Anglesey, five in all, from end to end of the Straits,
were all more or less perilous. Crossing by them, according to evidence
produced at an enquiry on the subject, 180 persons lost their lives
between 1664 and 1842. The mail route was by Bangor Ferry, called by the
Welsh Porthaethwy, or the “Ferry of the Narrow Waters,” close by where
Telford’s suspension bridge now spans the channel. Up out of Bangor
drove the Mails, and many of the stage-coaches, post-chaises, and
chariots, to the ferry-house. Thence passengers and their luggage were
ferried across to the opposite side in boats and lighters, each manned
by four ferrymen. Coaches and chaises were in waiting when they landed,
to whisk them off to Mona and Holyhead. Swift crossed here in 1727, and
refers to the inn, “which, if it be well kept, will break Bangor.” There
he lay the night, and was up at four o’clock the next morning. This inn
was the “George,” still standing, with an addition built on, in what was
intended to be a grand and imposing style, about 1850. The huge,
buff-coloured pile, standing in midst of lovely gardens, faces the
Strait. There still hangs on the wall of the coffee-room an autograph of
the Duke of Wellington, taken from the visitors-book and proudly framed:
“I passed the night of the 21st August, 1851, at the George Inn, and was
very well accommodated. Wellington.”
In the terraced gardens is preserved the ferrymen’s horn, but the
ferrymen are dead and gone, and even their huts, built on the rocks of
the Anglesey shore, are in ruins. There stands on that rocky
landing-place an old inn, now called the “Cambria,” but in the days of
the ferry known as the “Three Tuns.” It is a romantic spot, romantic
with all the pathos of a tale that is told. From the wrought-iron
bracket of the inn, long without a sign, to the deserted and roofless
huts and the slippery, sea-weedy rocks, everything tells of a vanished
order of things. A few ancients gossip of what their fathers and
grandfathers told them of the times when exhausted passengers climbed
from the slimy rocks at the water’s edge to the shelter of the inn, and
of the old custom of swimming the cattle across the Straits at low
water, from the island of Ynys-y-Moch that now supports one of the
bridge-towers; but even the bridge is now become something of an
antiquity, and the ferry well-nigh forgot. A well-authenticated story of
it is still remembered. It tells how an attorney, on the ground of
having booked through to London, refused to pay the penny demanded by
the ferrymen for taking his portmanteau across, and how it was
accordingly detained until the Mail had left. The lawyer then paid the
disputed penny and ordered out a chaise and four to London. Arrived
there, he brought an action against the proprietors of the Mail, and
recovered all his expenses and compensation for loss of time. The Judge
expressed his opinion that the plaintiff was a benefactor to his
country, a view not likely to be taken in these times of one who would
spend £50 and perhaps five times that amount in litigation rather than
pay a penny.
The ferry was not superseded without some little contention. It had been
the property, time out of mind, of the Williams family, of Plas Issa,
Conway. Leased to an ancestral John Williams by Queen Elizabeth, for £3
6_s._ 8_d._ a year, there is no knowing how far back beyond that time
the family interest had reached. Government offered a sum in
compensation when the bridge was building, but the amount was not
considered sufficient, and the question was referred to the Beaumaris
Assizes, where the average takings of the last twelve years were stated
to have been £885 18_s._ per annum. In the result, Miss Williams, the
representative of the family, was awarded £26,557, representing thirty
years’ purchase, and she, or rather her husband, for she married in the
meanwhile, was paid that sum on the day the Bridge was opened.
[Illustration: THE OLD LANDING-PLACE ON THE ANGLESEY SHORE.]
Telford was not the first who had proposed to bridge the Menai.
Forty-two years before he had prepared his plans a Mr. Golborne sketched
a design, and Rennie had at a later period proposed a cast-iron bridge
to span the water in one arch. Even Telford’s first proposals differed
wholly from the design he eventually adopted; and he, like Rennie,
favoured more than any other type of bridge the single cast-iron arch.
Difficulties in the way of construction, in some degree, but in greater
measure the objections of the seafaring interest engaged in navigating
the Straits, led to this type being abandoned and the suspension
principle adopted. A legend, much in favour at Llangollen, tells how the
engineer, at a loss for ideas, obtained the suggestion for his Menai
Bridge from a small bridge on the suspension principle that then crossed
the Dee at Berwyn. However that may be, suspension bridges of practical
use, if of no very great size or scientific construction, were already
known to the world. Telford produced his design in 1818, and it was
submitted to the Commissioners and authorised by Parliament in the
following year. The design, carried out exactly as proposed, was to
provide a level roadway across the Straits at a height of 100 feet above
high water, with a clear opening between the main suspension towers of
579 feet, thus providing an ample fairway for mariners, and silencing
the objections of the shipping interest. The spot chosen was at a
narrowing of the channel, where the rocky shores, rising on either side
abruptly to a considerable height, afforded this clearance, and where an
island called Ynys-y-Moch gave a ready site for one of the great towers.
Between these main supports of the chains and the shores, a series of
arches—four on the Anglesey side and three on the Carnarvonshire
approach—were to support the rest of the roadway, to be 52 feet wide,
divided into two carriage ways of 12 feet each, with a central footpath
between of 4 feet width. The total height of the two great towers, above
high water mark, was to be 153 feet, and the entire length of the bridge
1000 feet.
The first stone of this great work was laid on the 10th of August, 1819,
when the tower on Ynys-y-Moch, on the Anglesey side, was begun. In the
course of four years the whole of the masonry work was completed, and
the series of piers and arches, built of Anglesey limestone, ready to
receive the iron chains, weighing close upon 2,200 tons. The first of
these was hauled up to its place on the 26th of April, 1825, in the
presence of thousands of spectators, come, many of them, in expectation
of seeing a colossal failure. When the hauling was completed, and the
first of the sixteen great chains that carry the central span safely
bolted in position, the friends who rushed to congratulate the anxious
engineer found him on his knees, in prayer.
The last chain was in position by the 9th of July, the driving home of
the final bolt, followed by the playing of “God Save the King” by a
brass band placed in the centre of the bridge, and a triumphal march
across it of workmen, amid volleys of cheers from those assembled
thousands who seem to have been constantly on the spot for more than two
months, and were still there on the following 30th of January, when
“this stupendous, pre-eminent, and singularly unique structure,” as an
old writer calls it, was opened “at thirty-five minutes after one
o’clock a.m., to allow the Royal London and Holyhead Mail coach,
conveying the London mail-bags for Dublin, to pass; David Davies,
coachman, Wm. Read, guard.” The Mail was followed by the Bangor Pilot,
and the London, Oxford and Holyhead “Oxonian”; the Holyhead Road
Commissioners, the engineer, and several thousands of persons.
The total cost of the bridge and approaches was £120,000; a very
moderate sum in comparison with many other bridge-building works, and
something less than one-fifth the cost of its huge neighbour, the
Britannia railway bridge, two miles distant, down the Straits. Four
workmen were killed during its progress.
Tolls are still taken at the Bridge. Foot-passengers and cyclists are
alike charged a penny each, and flys and cabs a shilling; the charges
running up curiously to half-a-crown for a stage coach, and three
shillings for a “post-chaise, coach, landau, berlin, or barouche, or
other vehicle with four wheels and four horses.” These charges are
arranged so as not to press too heavily upon the inhabitants of either
side, and one payment frees the bridge for the rest of the day, the
payer of one toll being allowed to come and go as often as he pleases up
to twelve o’clock, midnight.
As a business speculation, if it had been built solely to that end, the
Menai Bridge would be pronounced a failure, for the interest on capital
originally expended comes, at five per cent., to £6,000 per annum, and
the annual income from tolls, returned in 1837 as £1,200, when the
coaches were still running, must now be less rather than more. In
addition to the original cost, the charge for upkeep must be taken into
consideration, although, as the ironwork has not been painted for many
years past, that, perhaps, does not bulk very largely.
Proposals made by the County Councils of Carnarvon and Anglesey to
purchase the bridge from the Government and to open it toll free have
failed, the price asked being beyond the resources of those bodies.
LII
Across this monument of early engineering skill, with roadway swaying
and vibrating to the passage of every vehicle, and bird’s-eye views up
and down the glittering waterway, Anglesey is entered. On its shores to
the right sprawls Menai village, with Beaumaris in the distance, and
down beneath, on the left, lies the Isle of Benglas, with the oddly
placed church of Llantysilio on it.
You cannot unmoved set foot in Mona, as this was called before ever it
obtained its name of Isle of the Angles. It was the last retreat of the
Druids before the advance of the Roman power, and from it they incited
the Welsh tribes to resistance. It was in A.D. 61 that Suetonius
Paulinus, the Roberts of that distant past, made his great march across
Britain, with a resolution to finally crush their mystic power. His line
of march followed the Watling Street, bringing him to the shores of the
Menai Straits at _Segontium_, now identified with Carnarvon. Arrived
there, his first care was to provide a flotilla of flat-bottomed boats
where the Straits narrow, at a point now known as Port Dinorwic. When
this was done, and all in readiness for crossing, he found the passage
energetically disputed, and the unknown shores of the island lined with
a terror-striking army of blue-stained Britons, white-robed Druids, and
shrieking women clad in dark and dismal garments, with hair streaming
wildly over their faces, and carrying torches. These ministering angels
ran like furies up and down the rocks, and cursed; while the Druids
prayed and cursed in one breath. These unusual sights and sounds so
astonished the Roman soldiery that they gaped with dismay, and stood
unnerved, an excellent mark for the javelins the enemy began to throw at
them. They would probably have fled had it not been for their own
general, who encouraged them by promising death to all who flinched.
Death, therefore, being rather more of a certainty in the rear, they
made a wild rush, closed with the howling mob, and completely defeated
them. Many Druids were roasted on their own sacrificial altars that day,
as just burnt-offerings to atone for the cruelty of a blood-stained
religion that demanded living victims and divined events from the
inspection of human entrails. The sacred groves of Mona were cut down,
the altars demolished, and the island reduced to a conquered province.
[Illustration: DESERTED STABLES, MENAI VILLAGE.]
Having said thus much, and given the views of the Druids and their
practices popularly received, it is only fair to those ancients and to
the respectable old gentlemen who, in these days of Celtic revivals and
Eisteddfodau, become Arch Druids and things of that sort, and attend
gatherings in mystic garments like nightshirts over their highly
respectable tweed trousers and broadcloth frock-coats—it is only just
and fair to say that Julius Cæsar, in his _Commentaries_, gives the
Druids a very high character. The priests, he says, taught the
immortality of the soul, and held truth to be the highest virtue. They
were sound as priests, as legislators politic, and as philosophers
enlightened and humane. We have nothing in the way of public men so good
as this nowadays, and therefore we cannot but deplore the action of
Suetonius Paulinus in wiping them off the face of the earth; and at the
same time may hope that the Arch Druids and lesser Druids of modern
summer gatherings in Wales, who look so supremely silly with laurel
wreaths round their respectable old bald heads, and white whiskers and
collars beneath—and would certainly not dream of auguring over any
fellow-creature’s entrails—may get equal wisdom and political soundness.
[Illustration: THE MENAI BRIDGE AND THE ISLE OF BENGLAS.]
There is on the Anglesey side, near Llanedwen, a field called “Maes Mawr
Gad,” or the Field of the Great Army, marking the spot where Paulinus
and his victorious host landed. The Roman general rested but a short
while here, for the Druids had scarce been blotted out when the terrible
news reached him of the revolt of the Iceni, and the massacre at
Camulodunum. He hasted back, collecting an army of ten thousand on the
way, and, leaving the young and old and defenceless of Verulamium to
their fate, advanced into Essex and utterly defeated Boadicea.
LIII
Very few are the old travellers or modern writers who have a good word
to say for Anglesey. It is “flat, dull, monotonous, barren, treeless,
wind-swept,” and many more things expressed by adjectives in the
uncomplimentary sort; but will the present historian be credited when,
with his hand upon his heart, and if necessary—should his bare word not
be held to deserve credit when opposed to that bulk of damnatory
evidence—his lips upon the Book he declares that Anglesey is none of
these things? A recent traveller finds in the word “Mona” what he calls
a “soft-sounding name, well suited to the present aspect” of the island.
What does he mean? “In all the bare, flat fields,” he continues, “you
scarcely see a tree.” To this the returned traveller from Anglesey may
reply, in the inelegant but expressive schoolboy phrase, “What rot!” But
then that writer traversed Anglesey by train, as he confesses, and
therefore has no _locus standi_ in topographical criticism. Probably the
others explored the island as little as he.
It is a high table-land of an island, mounted atop of rugged cliffs for
a goodly part of its jagged and irregular circumference, and divided
athwart by the Malldraeth Marsh, a valley almost deep enough to admit
the sea, which would in that case divide the isle in two unequal parts.
Even the modern and easy high road, made by Telford in 1825 for a direct
line from Menai Bridge to Holyhead, is by no means flat; while the old
coach road is not only hilly but mountainous. Along its course lies
Penmynydd, whose very name, meaning “mountain-head,” should have checked
the pen that talked of flatness in Anglesey. This was the place where
the mails and the stages were commonly upset: the place that so alarmed
London coachmen imported for the duty of driving the mails, that they
refused to remain. Penmynydd is the worst spot on that old road, but
hills along its course are the almost invariable rule, and flat
stretches the very infrequent exceptions.
Now as to the barrenness of Anglesey. That is a contention no Anglesey
farmer will support, for the island is a quite celebrated dairying
district; and the best of butter and milk are not usually obtainable
from barren wildernesses. From one or other of the numerous tor-like
granite-crowned hillocks that plentifully stud the Anglesey landscape,
and give it a close resemblance to Cornwall, fertile farms and numerous
scattered white farmsteads and cottages are seen. They paint prosperity
in the mind’s eye, small though many of the holdings and cottages be,
and although in a proportion of them lives a mining class. These
whitewashed granite cottages and the stone walls that fence the fields
render the resemblance to Cornwall very close: and no one yet has been
found to apply such disparaging remarks as those quoted above to that
county. As in Cornwall, too, the myrtle, the hydrangea, and the
tree-fuchsia flourish all the year round in the cottagers’ gardens, and
few sights are so lovely as that of a lowly, granite one-storeyed
cottage, its walls and garden-walls alike whitewashed, and its garden
luxuriating with the myriad red and purple blooms of the fuchsia, the
pale mauve or pink blossoms of the hydrangea, or the more delicate
petals of the myrtle. Wind-swept the hills of Anglesey are in winter,
but in the warm and sheltered valleys these alien creatures of the
garden live unharmed.
Nor even is the isle treeless. So little so is it that the pine-woods of
Menai village might reasonably for their beauty and extent be envied by
Bournemouth itself; while peculiarly characteristic of Anglesey are the
strange groups of trees, looking like lineal descendants of Druidical
groves, that are everywhere to be seen; generally very line umbrageous
trees, and often hiding in their midst some old mansion or farmstead of
the larger kind.
LIV
The first two miles into Anglesey command the whole range of the
Snowdonian mountains; but nothing could be more monumentally
striking than the Anglesey Column that shoots up from the wooded,
rock-strewn hill of Craig-y-Dinas on the way to the village of
“Llanfairpwllgwyngyll,” as a board on the post office amiably
shortens that terrific place-name. The column, itself 100 feet in
height, designed in the Doric style, rises from a crest 260 feet
above the waters of the Straits, and commemorates the first Marquis
of Anglesey; he who, as “Lord Paget” and “Lord Uxbridge,” warred
with Wellington in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, where he left a
leg, shot off towards the close of that famous victory. He was
created Marquis of Anglesey three weeks after the battle, and lived
to enjoy his title until 1854. He saw the column rise, long years
before, but the bronze statue of him was not erected until 1860. It
represents him in hussar uniform, standing with contemplative gaze
across the water, towards England. The curious old uniform and the
green stains with which the storms and rains of over forty years
have coloured the metal give the bronze Marquis quite an awful
Arabian Nights kind of blood-curdling uncanniness in certain
conditions of light and shade. It is possible to make closer
acquaintance with him by climbing the staircase within the column,
and to see from that eyrie the family seat of Plas Newydd down
below, by the waterside—the name of it latterly altered by the
present Marquis, of jewel-robbery fame, to “Anglesey Castle.” It was
there that George IV. stayed in 1821, and heard of the death of his
Queen. Doubtless the bluff Marquis congratulated him on the event,
for he was no adherent of Caroline, having, indeed, the worst
opinion of that more or less injured lady. Time was, indeed, when
his house in London had been assailed by a mob clamouring in her
favour. They insisted upon his drinking the Queen’s health, and he
did. “The Queen,” he said, with bitter sarcasm, “and may all your
wives be like her!” What more could champions desire? Yet it is
possible that they were not satisfied.
[Illustration: THE ANGLESEY COLUMN.]
The full name of the village that now comes in view at a bend of the
road presents an unparalleled array of grotesquely assorted letters to
the bewildered Saxon. It is without doubt by far the longest place-name
in the United Kingdom, and can probably challenge the whole world. It is
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerchwyrndrobwlltysiliogogogoch. The stationers
and booksellers of Bangor and Menai Village sell for the modest price of
one penny what is described as the “Englishman’s cure for lock-jaw”—a
printed sheet with this fearsome word divided into its proper syllables,
and the translation into English underneath. Enterprising tourists, at
pains to master the pronunciation of Welsh, go forth into Anglesey, and,
having caught a Welshman who can be made to understand a little English,
parade their version; but when the native can be induced to pronounce it
at all the name sounds very different. He generally, however, calls it
“Llanfairpwllgwyngyll”; while the signposts, not provided with longer
arms than usual, are models of compression, with “Llanfair P G”; the
London and North-Western Railway recklessly naming the station
“Llanfair,” careless of the fact that Llanfair, meaning “St. Mary’s
Church,” is as common a Welsh place-name as Jones is among Welshmen.
But this astonishing name, like most others in the Principality, is (or
was originally) descriptive, and contained almost as much local
information as a guide-book. Done into English it means “the church of
Saint Mary in the hollow of white hazel, near to the rapid whirlpool of
Saint Tysilio and a red cave.” The church of St. Mary may, indeed, be
found in the deep hollow at the foot of an incredibly steep lane and by
the shores of the Menai, where whirlpools of sorts are created by the
tides that set so strongly through the Straits, and rise and fall over
twenty feet; but the red cave is not now to be discovered, and they are
oaks and elms rather than white hazels that to-day enshroud the hollow.
Llanfair church has been rebuilt and is uninteresting. In its
churchyard, close to the shore and almost in the shadow of the great
Britannia Tubular Bridge that carries the mail trains between Anglesey
and the mainland, one may find the decaying monument, overgrown with
bushes, erected to the memory of fifteen men who lost their lives on the
bridge works between 1846 and 1850. The bridge itself, “that ’ere great,
long, ugly iron thing,” as the coachmen whom it drove off the last
length of road called it, bulks large from this point of view, with an
irrevocable air in its straight, clear-cut lines and massiveness, and a
stern and solemn grandeur—like that of some Egyptian monument; in sharp
contrast with the Menai Suspension Bridge, spanning the waters in the
distance like the product of some fairy wand.
[Illustration: THE BRITANNIA BRIDGE.]
It was in April 1846 that the foundation stone of this great structure
on the then Chester and Holyhead Railway was laid, on the Britannia Rock
in the middle of the Straits. The rock itself obtained its name from the
“Britannia,” a vessel wrecked some years before at this point, and in
its turn suggested the very appropriate title of the bridge. The width
of the Straits, here about 1,100 feet, presented an even graver problem
to Robert Stephenson than had been faced by Telford, over twenty years
before, for not merely a suspended road-bridge, but a rigid structure to
sustain the burden of trains weighing 200 tons had to be designed. The
Admiralty, jealous to preserve the navigation, forbade an arched bridge
of any less height than a clear hundred feet above high water, and
moreover refused to allow the interruption of the passage for a single
day during the construction. Arches were out of the question, and
eventually Stephenson resolved what was then the novelty of a bridge on
the beam principle, consisting of rectangular iron tubes supported at
intervals by giant masonry piers. There are three of these supports: the
Britannia pier and tower, midway, and one on either shore. The two
spans, or main tubes as they are called, across the water are each 472
feet in length, and that of the side spans 230 feet each; the whole
length of the bridge 1841 feet, the weight of iron 10,000 tons, and the
cost £602,000. The idea of this vast mass of riveted iron being elastic,
seems grotesque, but when Stephenson designed the bridge he had
sufficient forethought to allow for the expanding and contracting
properties of iron under extremes of heat and cold. This precaution for
securing free movement of the tubes, that would otherwise have broken
down the supporting piers, took the form of allowing their ends to rest
on cast-iron rollers and balls in a clear space left in the masonry.
Experience has shown the expansion and contraction to be fully twelve
inches. The first train ran through on March 5th, 1850, completing the
present railway route from London to Holyhead; and although the weight
of locomotives and trains has doubled since then, the bridge still
serves its purpose.
A near sight of the Bridge is generally sought for, and when one has
climbed the railway embankment and walked along the line to its gloomy
entrance, it can scarce be denied that the expedition is worth the
while. There are the two parallel tubes for up and down lines, and above
them the masonry of the Anglesey tower; on it deeply carved the name of
Robert Stephenson and the date. On either side the colossal granite
figure of an Egyptian lion crouches on its pedestal, guarding the
approach, and with sphinx-like inscrutable gaze seeming to bide the
coming of an appointed day. The impression of weird mysticism they give
at twilight; the inky blackness of the two railway tubes in between; the
evening mists gathering over the Snowdon heights in the background; and
the last rays of the setting sun flushing the Britannia tower with a
dusky red, is indescribable. Suddenly as one gazes, a hollow rumbling is
heard, gradually increasing until with a hellish clang and the
reverberation of a million echoes, a train dashes out, bringing with it
a taste of the sooty air that lingers in the tubes, the product of fifty
years, and abominably like that of an unswept chimney.
But the curiosities of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll are not yet exhausted. One
other remains, in the shape of a colossal granite statute of Lord
Nelson, claimed to have been “designed” by Lord Clarence Paget, placed
ridiculously on an undersized pedestal on the sea-weedy rocks by the
Menai. It is, as a matter of fact, an exact copy of the well-known
statue crowning the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square, with empty sleeve
pinned across the breast and cocked hat on head. Here, lonely in a
meadow, beside the water he stands, with a very fine view of nothing in
particular, and looking as though left to be called for. The curious who
seek to know all about it may make the circuit of the slippery rocks and
find the date 1873, and, facing the water, Nelson’s famous signal,
“England expects that every man will do his duty.” But why the statue
should find a place here, in so remote a spot, is not revealed.
LV
From the old toll-house at Llanfairpwllgwyngyll to Holyhead it is only
twenty-one miles, but there are no fewer than five toll-houses on the
way, all in as good and sufficient repair as though they had only
retired from business yesterday. And indeed it is not so long since the
gates were swept out of existence, and this remote corner of the country
freed from these irritating taxes on the farmers and villagers. It is a
curious fact that to the Holyhead Road belongs the distinction of having
been under the control of turnpike trusts for a longer period than any
road in the kingdom. That portion of it lying in Bedfordshire and Bucks
was the first road placed in the care of trustees, instead of in the
hands of the parish surveyors, and is described in the Act of 1706,
handing it over to the new jurisdiction, as “now and for many years past
the common post-road towards Ireland.” The greater number of the gates
were swept away from 1860 to 1870, but Shropshire was not rid of them
until November 1st, 1883, nor Denbighshire and Merioneth until a year
later; while, under the Annual Turnpike Continuance Act of 1884, the
Carnarvonshire gates levied toll until November 1st, 1890, and by the
Act of that year the Anglesey gates were continued until November 1st,
1895.
[Illustration: NEAR MONA INN.]
[Illustration: LLANGRISTIOLUS.]
At Gaerwen village the road descends to Pentre Berw, the “Holland Arms,”
and the snipe-haunted Malldraeth Marsh; rising again to where the church
and isolated cottages of Llangristiolus stand overlooking a vast expanse
of mountains, marsh, and sea, from a curious rocky bluff, cleft by a
huge fissure; the effect, perhaps, of some prehistoric earthquake. The
name of Llangristiolus, grotesque though it sounds, means the “church of
the most worshipful Christ.” “Mona,” two miles beyond, the place
mentioned on all the Anglesey milestones, is—or was when such things
were—the half-way house between Bangor and Holyhead. The inn, for such
it was, is referred to by Telford in his reports to the Holyhead Road
Commissioners as having been a part of the work undertaken, and the cost
of building it is included in the estimates. Never anything but ugly, it
is a melancholy enough place in these days of railway travel: remote in
the middle of Anglesey, and now a farmhouse, encircled with trees.
Gwalchmai, by comparison with Mona, is a veritable metropolis, with
inns, aye, and shops, and a post-office. Between this and Bryngwran, a
stone-walled enclosure in midst of hillside fields marks the spot where
some one has chosen to be buried. Why that solitary place was selected
is hid from the Saxon by the Welsh inscription on the tombstone.
Now comes the village of Caer Ceiliog, with windmills and toll-house
overlooking the descent from Anglesey into Holy Island. When the gate
was first erected the Road Commissioners experienced some little trouble
at the hands of a certain Reverend Mr. Griffiths, who had objections
against paying tolls. It seems that when the parish had made all the
necessary legal arrangements with the Commissioners for the new road
constructed just here, the authority required for stopping up the old
one was forgotten and not applied for; so when the old way was abandoned
and fenced in, compelling travellers to pass through the gate and pay
toll, the Reverend Mr. Griffiths, learned in the law, pulled down the
obstructions and passed down the old road, toll free. Naturally, the
neighbours all followed his example, and the horrified lessee of the
tolls, who had bought them at auction for the year, saw his income
going. The trouble had to be remedied by a special Act.
[Illustration: CAER CEILIOG.]
From Caer Ceiliog the crest of Holyhead Mountain, ten miles distant, is
seen; a dark-blue mass suspended, to all appearance, in mid-air, like
some fabled scene of _Arabian Nights_ adventures. It is the original
Holy Head; in Welsh “Pen Caer Cybi,” or the Head of Cybi’s town—Cybi
himself a Welsh saint who somewhere about the year 500 founded a college
where Holyhead town now stands. That rugged mountain rises from the sea
to a height of 719 feet, and is rarely free from the dense sea-fogs that
make the neighbourhood of Holyhead so dangerous to mariners. The billowy
vapours, often leaving the upper part of the mountain clear, create this
startlingly complete illusion of a suspended island, and dispose the
stranger to come into Holyhead expectant of marvels.
Coming, thus expectant, down from Caer Ceiliog, the old road is crossed
at Valley, a modern village with a railway station. A quarter of a mile
beyond, road and rail go side by side across the Stanley Sands, dividing
Anglesey and Holy Island: the road on Telford’s great mile-long
embankment and the rail on the left, hid from sight by a dull masonry
wall some sixteen or twenty feet high. The scene is still as melancholy
as it was when Borrow tramped past, with the broad channel a waste of
sand at low tide, and a furious salt-water stream at the flood, rushing
with great force through the arches in the middle of the embankment. The
winds that boom and buzz across the flat shores and rank grasses, and
the waves lapping about the seaweed and rotting timbers of ancient
wrecks, give the place a sinister and mournful air.
At the Holy Island end of the embankment stands the last toll-house, and
thenceforward the town of Holyhead begins.
LVI
This destination of the Holyhead Road, its sponsor and reason for
existence, makes a very sorry ending to these two hundred and sixty
miles of picturesque and historic scenery. It is a squalid little town,
set down, to all appearance, at the edge of the known world, and only
existing on the traffic of its harbour. Described by Swift so long ago
as 1727 as “a scurvy, unprovided, comfortless place,” and in Ogilby’s
_Roads_, of 1749, as “consisting chiefly of houses for the entertainment
of such persons as are bound for Ireland, or just arrived thence,” it
has not advanced far in all the years that have passed since those
unflattering descriptions were penned.
Swift, to be sure, came to Holyhead in a fury. When, however, was he not
possessed of that “_saeva indignatio_” referred to even in his epitaph?
He had come by Penmynydd, where he had hoped to see Owain Tudor’s tomb,
but missed the place by the knavery of the guide, who wanted to be
moving on. Wearied with riding, he then rested two hours at Llangefni.
“Then I went on, very weary, but in a few miles more Wat’s horse lost
his two fore-shoes, so the horse had to limp after us. The Guide was
less concerned than I. In a few miles more my horse lost a fore-shoe,
and could not go on the rocky ways. I walked about two miles to spare
him. It was Sunday, and no smith to be got. At last there was a smith in
the way; we left the Guide to shoe the horses, and walked to a Hedge Inn
three miles from Holyhead. There I stayed an hour with no ale to be
drunk. A boat offered, and I went by sea, and sailed in it to Holyhead.
The Guide came about the same time. I dined with an old innkeeper, Mrs.
Welsh, about three, on a loyn of mutton, very good, but the worst ale in
the world, and no wines, for the day before I came here a vast number
went to Ireland, after having drunk out all the wine. There was stale
beer, and I tryed a receit of Oyster shells, which I got powdered on
purpose, but it was good for nothing. I walked on the rocks in the
evening, and then went to bed, and dreamt that I had got twenty falls
from my horse.”
Swift lay here for seven days waiting for the packet to sail. On the
28th of September it set forth, but was obliged by stress of weather to
return, and it does not appear how much longer he was detained. In these
empty days of waiting he wrote the verses:—
Lo, here I sit at holy head,
With muddy ale and mouldy bread ;
I’m fastened both by wind and tide,
I see the ships at anchor ride.
All Christian vittals stink of fish,
I’m where my enemyes would wish.
Convict of lies is ev’ry sign,
The Inn has not one drop of wine,
The Captain swears the sea’s too rough—
(He has not passengers enough.)
And thus the Dean is forc’d to stay.
Till others come to help the pay.
The room smoked, but it was too cold to be without a fire. “There is,”
he writes, “or should be, a Proverb here:”
When Mrs. Welsh’s chimney smokes,
’Tis a sign she’ll keep her folks;
But when of smoke the room is clear,
It is a sign we shan’t stay here.
Thus his notes run on: “Dined like a king all alone for seven days.
Whoever would wish to live long should live here, for a day is longer
than a week, and, if the weather be foul, as long as a fortnight. Pray
pity poor Wat, for he is called Dunce, Puppy, and Liar five hundred
times an hour; and yet he means not ill, for he means nothing.” Wat he
ordered to wipe his wet gown and cassock, and he did so with a meal-bag,
with the result that it was caked thickly with a kind of meal-plaster.
When at last the Dean did leave Holyhead, he carried with him memories
not likely to be speedily effaced.
Wesley had something like these experiences in 1748, when he was
storm-bound for eleven days. He spent the time mainly in preaching, but
for all practical purposes might just as well have stayed within doors,
for he laments that his congregations did not understand English. It is
difficult to decide whose was the greater foolishness—that of the
preacher who preached in a strange tongue, or that of those who listened
to words they could not comprehend. Two years later he was at Holyhead,
detained for three days, and then, obliged by storms to return for
another eight, he “expounded the story of Dives and Lazarus to a room
full of men daubed with gold and silver.” _They_, at any rate, seemed to
understand, for they “took it in ill part, and went away railing and
blaspheming.” These “sons of Belial,” as he calls them, returned, and
would have seriously injured him, but that he was locked in the room.
They were at last dispersed by a courageous maidservant, who threw a
bucket of water over them.
No longer is it necessary for travellers to wait shivering for days
before winds and weather permit of the Channel being crossed. They
arrive nowadays for the most part at dark and ungodly hours, at railway
terminus or harbour, and are at once whisked away to Dublin or to
London. Some may make acquaintance with the Railway Hotel, but, beyond
that, Holyhead merely stands for a name and an hour in the time-tables.
It was different before the steam packets began from July 1st, 1819, to
make the sixty-four miles passage in 7½ hours. To wait a week at
Holyhead before the crossing could be made was no unusual experience in
the old sailing days, when a good average passage took fifteen hours,
and a very bad one more than double the time. Even the journey by
steamer has been cut down to half its duration, and now takes only from
3½ to 4 hours, so that the passengers who halt at Holyhead are few and
far between, and the town lives only in an indirect way on the traffic
between the kingdoms. It remains no more than a fringe of hilly, gaunt,
and aimless streets gathered round the harbour and railway station, with
the old church of St. Cybi in their midst, its central tower surmounted
by what has been described as “a low, flat spire.” The traveller will
doubtless be as eager to see this curiosity of a flat spire as he would
to discover a round square, a square angle, or anything else equally
unknown to Euclid.
LVII
There still stands, at the entrance to the Pier, the granite archway
erected to commemorate the landing of George IV. in 1821. Severely
classical, in the Doric sort, it resembles (save that it is not so large
and not so black) the funereal entrance to the Euston terminus of the
London and North-Western Railway. It bears an inscription in
Welsh—“Cof-Adail i Ymweliad y Brenin Gior y IV. ag ynys fôn. Awst VII.,
MDCCCXXI.”—which those whose Pentecostal attainments render it possible
may translate.
Holyhead was a proud town that day, August 7th, when George IV. landed,
on his trip to Ireland. He had come, aboard the yacht _Royal George_,
round by St. George’s Channel, escorted by a squadron, and spent five
days in the Isle of Anglesey, detained by contrary winds. “His Majesty,”
says a contemporary report, “was struck with admiration at the
appearance of the town”; and we in our turn might well be struck with
astonishment, were it not that modern monarchs are the best of actors
and can smile approval to order.
But, in spite of this admiration, the King did not stop at Holyhead.
That battered warrior, the Marquis of Anglesey, took him across the
island to Plas Newydd. The next day died Queen Caroline, at Hammersmith,
and the news by incredible efforts reached the squadron lying off
Holyhead the day after. The King was freed at last from the wife he
hated, and his feeling towards her was sufficiently marked by the facts
that the squadron did not fire the salute of minute-guns usual on such
occasions, and that the trip to Ireland, with its attendant banquets and
rejoicings, was not interrupted.
The winds that could in those days detain a fleet, and kept the King’s
yacht and his escort swinging for days idly at their anchorage, made a
vast difference to Holyhead. The _Times_ correspondent on that occasion
tells how scarce provisions grew, and to what extravagant prices
ordinary articles of food rose. Eggs, he wails, were sixpence each, and
for neither love nor money could he obtain any Welsh mutton for his
dinner. He was, accordingly, truly thankful when the squadron sailed and
plenty reigned once more. The King left, however, before his escort. He
had observed how the Dublin new steam-packets crossed, irrespective of
weather, and took passage on the 12th, aboard the _Lightning_, named
afterwards, in honour of the occasion, the _Royal George the Fourth_.
When, in 1851, Borrow walked into Holyhead, he stayed at the “Railway
Hotel,” a “noble and first-rate” house. All others were described to him
as “poor places, where no gent puts up.” What, then, had become of the
several mentioned in the works of Cary and Paterson; the hostelries that
had been sufficient for the needs of coaching times? Only four years had
then passed since the last coach was driven off these ultimate miles,
and yet Maran’s Hotel, the “Royal,” the “Hibernian,” the “Eagle and
Child,” and others, were already dismissed among those unmentionable
“poor places.” Possibly travellers by coach put up with a great deal
more than railway passengers would tolerate. An illuminating side-light
on these matters is shed by Jack Williams’ recommendation of the
Holyhead inns, quoted by Colonel Birch-Reynardson; and certainly Jack
Williams, who drove the Mail between Bangor and Holyhead, should have
been an authority.
“Coachman, do you know Holyhead well?” asked a passenger. “Me know
Holyhead,” said Jack, who spoke with a strong Welsh accent. “Yes,
inteed; I suppose I to; at laste I should to; I’ve lived there all my
life. Yes, inteed; I was pred and porn there.” “Then you can tell me, I
dare say, which is the best inn; for I want to stay a day or two at
Holyhead.” “How should I know the best inn?” said Jack. “Well, if you
know Holyhead so well, surely you must know which is the best inn.”
“Well, inteed, I know that there’s two inns in Holyhead, but I canna say
which is the pest; I never goes to either of ’em.” “Well, but you must
know which of them is called the best, and which would be best for a
gentleman to stay at.” “Well, inteed,” said Jack, at last, “I’ll tell
you how it is. Should you wish to get drunk, go to Spencer’s. Should you
wish to get lousey, go to Moland’s.”
“Maran’s” was probably the house meant. As Colonel Birch-Reynardson
remarks, it is not likely that the landlord or the landlady would have
felt flattered by Jack Williams’ account of what any one going to their
house was to expect.
No one need look to match Borrow’s experience at the “Railway Hotel,”
where “Boots” was a poet and critic of poets. “In those days,” says
Borrow, “there never was such a place for poets as Anglesey; one met a
poet, or came upon the birthplace of a poet, everywhere.” Every one is
now a great deal more matter-of-fact, and railway and steam packet
time-tables, are the forms of literature best known to the modern hotel
staff.
Holyhead, in short, is but a dependency of the London and North-Western
Railway, and wakes up only at those intervals when the steamers and the
trains arrive. Then, just as though it were an ingenious mechanical toy
of a larger growth, like those that used to be—perhaps are now—at the
Crystal Palace, and as though the necessary penny had dropped into the
mechanism, everything begins to work furiously. Trains roll in, electric
lights glare coldly from tall standards in the docks, mountains of
luggage are shot out upon platforms or quay walls; porters, sailors,
passengers, newsboys, and a miscellaneous crowd rush back and forth,
just after the fashion of those little clockwork mannikins in the glass
cases. Then the whistles of the steamer or train blow; the passengers
are all aboard, the porters trundle their trucks back whence they came,
the crowd disperses, the newsboys end in the midst of their shouting,
and out go the lights; all as though the machine had done its allotted
task, but would begin it all over again if another coin were
forthcoming.
Some day, when the oft-discussed project is realised of making Holyhead,
instead of Liverpool, the terminus of the trans-Atlantic voyage, the
melancholy wastes surrounding the town will be built upon or excavated
for docks. Even now, a large proportion of the American passenger
traffic comes this way: travellers landing from the great liners at
Queenstown saving time and escaping the tedious up-channel voyage and
delays at Liverpool by taking train from Queenstown for Dublin, and so
across to Holyhead.
More than five millions sterling have been sunk in harbour, lighthouse,
and railway works at this bleak port. Close under the sheltering hills
behind the town are the original harbour and the railway company’s
improvements upon it; and away in the distance the great breakwater of
the Harbour of Refuge, that occupied twenty-eight years in building, and
was completed in 1873. The breakwater stretches half way across Holyhead
Bay, a distance of nearly a mile and a half, with a lighthouse at its
seaward end; the greater lighthouses of the Skerries, seven miles away,
and the South Stack, on the other side of Holyhead Mountain, guarding
the approaches to this perilous coast.
LVIII
But to end the Holyhead Road in the mean streets of Holyhead, or by
merely tracing Telford’s modern highway, would be to conclude on a very
feeble and inadequate note. Fortunately, the “old post road” across
Anglesey still remains. It is three miles longer than Telford’s, and is
especially interesting because it affords an excellent means of seeing
with our own eyes what were the difficulties travellers had to contend
with in the days before road reform. The twists and turns, and hills and
hollows, remain just as they were, but as the road is still in use as a
means of communication between several villages, with one town midway,
the surface, it is safe to assume, is in better condition than in old
times. It branches off to the right from the modern road, half a mile
beyond Menai Bridge, and gives a taste of its quality at the outset, in
making straight for a steep hill. Having climbed this, and passed
through Braint and Ceint, up and down and to right and left, it climbs
the hill of Penmynydd, whose very name is significant. Here the
stage-coaches and the mails were accustomed to be overturned, and it was
at sight of this portion of the road that some London coachmen, imported
to work this stage, threw up their engagement and went home again.
Travellers were not so much interested in Penmynydd being the historic
place whence sprang the Tydyrs (“Tiddir” in the Welsh pronunciation and
“Tudor” in English), as they were concerned in getting over the ground
without broken bones; and the horsemen who preceded coach-travelling
looked dismayed in each other’s faces at such a wild spot as this;
reassured, however, on descending the rough and stony hill by a sight of
a gallows that then overhung the roadway. Cheered by this evidence of
law and order extending to the uttermost verge of the land, they removed
their hands from their pistol holsters and spurred onward with renewed
assurance.
Llangefni, beyond Penmynydd, has grown into a town since those times,
with a big “Bull” hotel. At Gwyndû or Glanyrafon, half-way across the
Island, an old coachman, not so handy as most of his fellows, failed to
steer so neatly as he should between the great stones that in the good
old days lay loosely about the road; with the result that the jolt
knocked him off his box and he suffered a broken leg. Gwyndû in those
times was a noted inn. It is now, like many another, a farmhouse, and
all the historian can glean of its history is found in the fugitive
notes of century-old tourists. Thus, a Mr. Hucks, pedestrianising in
1795, says he dined at Gwyndû inn, and that the hostess, a “fine old
lady,” paid him and his companion “the utmost attention, and appeared
particularly solicitous; gave us her blessing at our departure, with a
thousand admonitions not to lose ourselves,” which of course they did.
Rain and storm beset them, and they gladly quitted the “inauspicious
island.”
There is little difficulty in losing one’s way on this old road, for
when maps fail there is not a soul here who can understand the English
tongue. One might talk Hindustani with equal chance of being understood.
Welsh is the only language spoken, for the bi-lingual Welshman is left
behind when crossing the Menai. Anglesey is the great stronghold of the
Welsh language, and in many of its villages it is impossible to find a
single person who understands a word of English. _Dim saesoneg_ is the
sole reply the traveller is likely to meet with on the road, or if by
chance, in some more civilised townlet, he makes himself understood, the
broken and grotesque English of the replies he obtains is likely to be
quite unintelligible. Even those who can command a little “Saxon” are
chary of using it, and not a few of those who gruffly grunt _Dim
saesoneg_ do so because they are shy of their attempts at an unfamiliar
tongue being laughed at.
The scenery on the high ground near Gwyndû may be commended to the
attention of those who describe Anglesey as flat, dull, and featureless.
Here the road, to the backward glance, looks down towards Bodffordd, in
a deep hollow, and away across the island into a charmingly wooded
valley, with great bosses of granite cropping out here and there, and in
the distance the inevitable background to Anglesey scenery, the
Snowdonian mountains. The hamlet of Llynfaes, with whitewashed granite
cottages, very quaint and homely, and very like Cornwall, is pleasing,
and at Trefor there is a stretch of tree-shaded road whose like is not
often found. Bodedern only is somewhat commonplace, and even that is
transfigured by glimpses of the dark Holyhead Mountain and shining sea
unfolded as the road goes downhill to Llanyngenedl, and thence to
Valley. When it has crossed Telford’s road at this last place, the old
way enters upon quite another kind of scenery; very beautiful in its
sort. Hills, it is true, are not wholly left behind, but the prevailing
landscape is flat, with wide, wild stretches of gorsy and heathery moor,
threaded with salt-water creeks and pools. Holy Island is entered at
Four-Mile Bridge, a causeway spanning the tidal channel. Windmills, seen
in long perspective across the flats, shrilly piping gulls, salt pools,
lichened granite rocks, and the ruins of Druidical cromlechs, make up
the sum total of foreground and middle distance; with the sea at Penrhos
and Trearddur Bay on the left, and a long line of roofs and chimneys in
the background under Holyhead Mountain, standing for Holyhead town.
LIX
If a grand and awe-inspiring finish to the Holyhead Road be sought, let
the pilgrim, instead of making for the town, ascend the misty steeps of
Holyhead Mountain, and make his rugged and circuitous way to the South
Stack. The road runs past some peculiarly depressing outskirts, and by a
long row of empty and forlorn cottages offered to be let at fourpence a
week, and not finding tenants even at that modest sum. These desolate
dwellings were built for the use of the men employed on the Holyhead
Harbour Works, and have not been occupied since the Harbour was
completed.
The South Stack, at the rocky edge of Holy Island, cannot be gained
under four miles of wandering by winding roads across the heathery
uplands: the way traced by whitewashed stones placed at intervals to
mark the track in foggy weather. Long before the traveller gains the
cliff’s edge, he will perhaps be suddenly overtaken by one of the sea
fogs, and at last come to the place unawares. Then he may be grateful
indeed for the strong breast-wall of masonry that saves the strayed
visitor from walking over the precipices into the sea some five hundred
feet below.
A sea-fog is a ghastly and chilling phenomenon, but in no other
circumstances does the South Stack rock appear so impressive, or the
fog-horn of its lighthouse seem so uncanny. As a light wind springs up
and gradually clears away the fog, like clouds of white smoke, the first
object looming in ghostly fashion out of the absolute void is the
lighthouse lantern, apparently detached and swimming in air; while the
strange bellowing, like that of a dyspeptic cow, that has been coming at
half-minute intervals from some unknown quarter, is located from it. The
distant wail, throbbing in a higher key across the invisible water, is
the fog-horn on the Skerries.
[Illustration: THE SOUTH STACK. _After T. Creswick, R.A._]
As the fog gradually dies away, the lighthouse becomes revealed with the
island rock it stands upon. This is the South Stack: a great mass of
seamed and crannied rock torn off from the cliffs and standing as an
island, itself rising to a height of 212 feet above high water, and
looked down upon by sheer granite cliffs three hundred feet taller. In
the narrow chasm below the sea dashes savagely in and out of the gloomy
caverns, with a sound like muffled thunder. The grandeur and scale of
this terrific scene—a fitting climax to all the varied scenery of the
Holyhead Road—are not fully realised when looking down upon it. There,
on the island rock, stands the white lighthouse, with whitewashed stone
walls zigzagging along the verge of its cliffs, and forming a little
compound where the store-houses and the cottages of the staff are
situated; and the whole looks so neat and toy-like that its dimensions
are not at first grasped. But when the slow and winding descent to it
down the face of the cliff by 381 rude rocky steps has been cautiously
accomplished, the awful savagery of the spot is realised. There may
possibly be a few places on these coasts to approach the grimly
bristling rocks of the South Stack in their wild beauty, but none can
surpass them.
At the foot of the long descent, but still perched high above the
fearful waves that even in calm weather run and recede, hissing and
foaming, for a distance of thirty or forty feet up and down the face of
the cliffs, is the entrance to a suspension-bridge hung from side to
side of the channel. Before this was built, the only means of access was
by a line and basket, followed at a little later period by a rope
bridge; but the risk was so great that the present one, a miniature
reproduction of the Menai Bridge was constructed.
Perhaps as remarkable a feature of this strange place as anything else
to be seen is the vast concourse of sea-birds inhabiting the
rocks—shags, penguins, guillemots, cormorants, sea-gulls, puffins,
razor-bills, and even peregrine falcons, screaming and chattering loud
enough to drown even the sound of the waves. The lighthouse-keepers and
other observers tell how the gulls all migrate to other and warmer
climes on or about every 12th of August, returning in a body about
February 10th. The keepers state that in midst of the February night
they are advised of the birds’ arrival by a great noise, as though it
were a mutual greeting and cheering. These feathered inhabitants of the
South Stack are under the protection of the Government, and are as
useful to the Trinity House as any of the lighthouses, buoys, beacons,
or fog-horns on the coast; their incredible numbers and deafening noise
warning mariners just as effectually as any mechanical devices. As no
sportsmen (so-called) are allowed to disturb the birds, they are
wonderfully tame, and present an odd sight, row upon row of them perched
upon the ledges like some vast and patient audience. The cliffs for long
distances are populous with them, and one particularly noisy and
turbulent place near the North Stack has acquired the name of the
“Parliament House.”
[Illustration: HOLYHEAD MOUNTAIN.]
Here, then, where the sea-birds scream and fly, on the rocky ramparts of
this wild land, overlooking that broad belt of water known by choice
either as St. George’s Channel or the Irish Sea, shall the Holyhead Road
most fittingly end. From this outlook one may watch the great liners
coming by, bound for America, or within an hour of ending their voyage
at Liverpool, and may see the packets set forth or come in from Ireland.
Whether Ireland itself, or that other Mona, known better by its modern
name of the Isle of Man, can be seen, lying afar off, like cloudbanks
upon the horizon, is a matter for the most favourable weather, the
keenest eyesight, and the most robust faith to decide in the
affirmative, or for scepticism to deny.
INDEX
Allesley, i. 301
Anglesey, Isle of, i. 20; ii. 288, 292–295, 320
—— Marquis of, i. 165; ii. 295–297, 313
Ashby St. Ledgers, i. 241–243, 251
Atcham, ii. 89–91
Atherstone, i. 210–217
Baddesley Ensor, i. 217
Bangor, i. 20, 22, 219; ii. 112, 265, 273
Barnet, i. 27, 34, 38, 65, 66–79, 96
—— Fair, i. 69–72
Battlesden, i. 156, 162
_Beneventa_, i. 232
Berwyn, ii. 209
Bethesda, ii. 260–262
Bettws-y-Coed, ii. 87, 112, 218, 232–245
Bickenhill, i. 307–311
Bicton, ii. 145
Bilston, ii. 36–38
Birmingham, i. 4, 10, 11, 15, 24, 27, 188, 277, 307, 312–314; ii. 1–27,
109
Bodedern, ii. 320
Bodffordd, ii. 320
Boningale, ii. 64
Bordesley, i. 313
Boscobel, i. 225–227
Braint, ii. 318
Braunston, i. 182, 240
—— Hill, i. 239
Breidden Hills, ii. 88, 145–147, 151
Bridgetown, i. 221
Britannia Bridge, The, ii. 298–302
Brownhills, i. 5, 220
Brown’s Wells, i. 58
Brunsford Bridge, i. 208
Burcot, ii. 78
Caer Ceiliog, ii. 305–307
Caldecote, i. 213, 215
Capel Curig, ii. 108, 112, 249–253, 271
Catesby, Robert, i. 243, 252
Catthorpe, i. 205, 207
Cave’s Inn, i. 205, 207
Ceint, ii. 318
Cernioge, ii. 225–230
Cerrig-y-Druidion, ii. 223–225
Chirk, i. 2; ii. 162, 171–175
Churchbridge, i. 221
Coaches:—
“Accommodation,” St. Albans, i. 121
“Albion,” Birmingham, i. 37
“Balloon,” Birmingham Post Coach, i. 28
Birmingham Mail, i. 157; ii. 12
Birmingham and Lichfield Flying Coach, i. 291
—— Stage, ii. 12
Birmingham and Shrewsbury Mail, i. 16, 31; ii. 112, 129
—— and Holyhead Mail, i. 16, 40
“Caravan,” the, London and Shrewsbury, ii. 104
Chester and Holyhead Mail, i. 16, 81, 102, 157, 162; ii. 113
—— Stage, i. 3, 6, 12, 291
—— and Shrewsbury Stage, i. 5
“Coburg,” Manchester, i. 85
“Coventry Flying Machine,” i. 291
—— Stage, i. 205; ii. 101
“Defiance,” Worcester and Shrewsbury, ii. 110
Diligence, Shrewsbury Stage, i. 32; ii. 107
“Eclipse,” Birmingham, i. 261–263, 291
“Economist,” Birmingham, i. 27, 32
“Emerald,” Birmingham, i. 31; ii. 16, 118
“Gee-ho,” Shrewsbury stage waggon, i. 32; ii. 102
“Greyhound,” Birmingham and Shrewsbury coach, i. 27, 32, 37, 152,
157; ii. 39
“Hero,” Manchester and Coventry, i. 292
“Highflyer,” Shrewsbury and Chester, ii. 120
Holyhead stage, i. 15
—— Mail (see “New Holyhead Mail”)
—— Post Coaches, ii. 113
“Hope,” Halifax, i. 156
“Independent Tally-ho,” Birmingham, i. 24, 28, 29; ii. 14
“Little Wonder,” Coventry and Birmingham, i. 292
Liverpool Mail, i. 311
Manchester Mail, i. 193
New Holyhead Mail, i. 16, 22, 31, 81, 87, 102, 152, 157, 193; ii.
14–16, 98, 112, 113, 210, 223, 246, 267–270, 281
“New Shrewsbury Flying Machine,” or “London and Shrewsbury New Fly,”
ii. 105
“Nimrod,” Shrewsbury, i. 27, 30; ii. 116–118, 133
“No Wonder,” Birmingham, i. 27
“Old Times,” St. Albans, i. 119
“Original London and Salop Machine,” ii. 106
“Original Tally-ho,” Birmingham, i. 24, 29
“Oxonian Express,” Holyhead, ii. 113
“Patent Tally-ho,” Birmingham, ii. 14
“Peeping Tom,” Manchester and Coventry, i. 292
“Prince of Wales,” or “Prince Regent,” Holyhead, i. 32; ii. 53, 113
“Real Tally-ho,” Birmingham, i. 24; ii. 14
“Shrewsbury Flying Machine,” ii. 105
—— —— Stage-waggon, ii. 103
—— Long Coach, ii. 104, 107
—— Machine, ii. 105
—— Stage, ii. 104, 107
“Stag,” Shrewsbury, i. 27; ii. 117
“Tally-ho,” Birmingham, i. 23, 24, 28, 44, 155, 192; ii. 12, 19
“Union,” Shrewsbury, i. 30; ii. 113
“Wolverhampton and Birmingham Flying stage,” i. 6
“Wonder,” Shrewsbury, i. 24, 27, 32; ii. 64, 74, 75, 91, 97–100,
114–119, 122, 155, 223
—— St. Albans i. 116–119
Coaching, i. 2–6, 12–18, 23–37, 43, 81–91, 98–102, 116–119, 121,
156–162, 192–194, 261–263, 291–298, 311; ii. 11–26, 39, 46, 91,
99–122, 152–155, 210, 223, 267–270, 280–282, 318
—— Accidents, i. 30–32, 81–88, 156, 192–194; ii. 39
—— Notabilities:—
Chaplin, William, i. 82, 169
Clarke, Thomas, i. 293
Evans, Richard, ii. 46–49
Harper, Charles, ii. 267–269
Hassall, Robert, i. 263
Hayward, Sam, ii. 91, 97–100
Horne, B. W., i. 24, 29, 37; ii. 116
Jobson, John, ii. 116, 133
Kenyon, Hon. Thos., ii. 121, 150–155, 164, 223
Lawrence, Robert, i. 15; ii. 105, 108–113
Lee, Harry, ii. 16
Lloyd, Mrs. Sarah, ii. 19
Mountain, Mrs., i. 23; ii. 19
Peck, Tom, i. 263, 293
Pinner, Tom, i. 249–292
Rothwell, Nicholas, ii. 12
Rumney, P.J., i. 119
Sherman, Edward, i. 37; ii. 16
Taylor, Isaac, ii. 75, 114, 117, 133, 155
Tresslove, Harry, ii. 14
Vickers, Dick, ii. 223
Waddell, William, ii. 12, 20
Williams, Jack, ii. 268–270, 314
Williams, William, ii. 120–122
Corwen, i. 15, 18, 20; ii. 109, 211–218
Cosford, ii. 65
Coventry, i. 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 15, 29, 34, 210, 214, 266–301, 307; ii.
109.
Cox, David, ii. 234–239, 243
Crackley Bank, i. 228
Crick, i. 205; ii. 224
Cross-in-Hand, i. 208
Cycling, Historical sketch of, i. 278–291
Cycling Notabilities:—
Drais, Baron von, i. 281
Dunlop, J. B., i. 287
Johnson, Dennis, i. 281
Lallemont, P., i. 282
Lawson, Harry, i. 286
Macmillan, Kirkpatrick, i. 282
Marriott, Jas., i. 280
Mayall, John, junr., i. 282
Niepce, M., i. 281
Spencer, C., i. 282
Starley, J. K., i. 286
Turner, R. B. i. 282
Cyfyng Falls, ii. 249
Dancer’s Hill, i. 81
Daventry, i. 29, 182, 188, 193, 210, 229, 232–239, 244, 245, 249
Denbigh Hall, i. 36, 169–171
Deodand, Law of, i. 86–88
Deritend, i. 313; ii. 236
Digbeth, i. 313
Dinas Hill, i. 18; ii. 231
Dirt House Hill, i. 193
Dodford, i. 230–232
Dordon, i. 217
Dove Bridge, i. 205
Dudley, ii. 9, 29, 37
Dunchurch, i. 188, 249–259; ii. 14
Dunsmore, i. 250, 251, 254, 259–263
Dunstable, i. 6, 101, 136, 139, 140–146, 204
—— Downs, i. 146–150
_Durocobrivæ_, i. 142, 204
Dyrham Park, i. 79
East Finchley, i. 58
Easton Neston, i. 185
Elmdon, i. 312
_Etocetum_, i. 218, 221
Fawkes, Guy, i. 250
Fazeley, i. 217
Fenny Stratford, i. 167–169
Finchley Common, i. 8, 58, 61–63
Flamstead, i. 134
_Forum Dianæ_, i. 204
Foster’s Booth, i. 194
Frankwell, ii. 142
Friar’s Wash, i. 133
Gaerwen, ii. 304
Gailey, i. 221, 224
Gibbet, i. 208
Glanyrafon, ii. 319
Glasfryn, ii. 225
Glyndwr, Owain, ii. 144, 172, 214–216, 271
Glyndyffws, ii. 221
Glyndyfrdwy, ii. 210
Gobowen, ii. 156, 169
Godiva, i. 270–273
Great Wyrley, i. 221
Gunpowder Plot, i. 241–243, 250–253
Gwalchmai, ii. 305
Gwyndû, ii. 319
Hadley Green, i. 79
Hammerwich, i. 219
Handsworth, ii. 27
Hatherton, i. 221, 246
Havencote Houses, i. 184
Hay Mills, i. 313
High Cross, i. 209–213
Highgate, i. 44–59
—— Archway, i. 44–54
Highwaymen, i. 5, 61–64, 93–96, 124–127, 137–140, 142, 223, 261; ii. 28
—— : ——
Cady, William, i. 61
Garrett, Tom, i. 125
Simms, Harry, i. 137–140
Simpson, Jonathan, i. 261
Whitney, Captain James, i. 96
Hilltop, ii. 30
Hints, i. 217
Hockley, ii. 27
Hockliffe, i. 27, 28, 29, 102, 139, 140, 151–162
Holloway Bank, ii. 30
Holyhead, i. 10, 11, 18, 19, 20, 37, 38; ii. 273, 307–317, 321
Holyhead Mountain, ii. 306, 317, 320–326
Holywell Hill, i. 111, 115–117
Horsebrook, i. 224.
Inns (mentioned at length):—
“Angel,” Islington, i. 27, 38–40
“Berwyn Arms,” Glyndyfrdwy, ii. 210
“Blue Ball,” Potterspury, i. 183
“—— Boar,” Dunsmore, i. 261
“Bull,” Weedon Beck, i. 199
“Bull and Mouth,” St. Martin’s-le-Grand, i. 24; ii. 114, 117, 119
“Bull’s Head,” Meriden, i. 303–305
“Cambria,” Menai Village, ii. 281
“Cave’s Inn,” i. 207
“Cock,” Stony Stratford, i. 172
“Craven Arms,” Coventry, i. 292
“Cross Foxes,” Oswestry, ii. 165
“Crown,” Holloway Road, i. 24
“Denbigh Hall,” i. 36, 169–171
“Druid’s Head,” ii. 219
“Dun Cow,” Dunchurch, i. 253, 254
“Fighting Cocks,” St. Albans, i. 122–124
“Four Crosses,” Hatherton, i. 221, 246
—— —— Willoughby, i. 244–247
“Gatehouse Tavern,” Highgate, i. 57
“George,” Bangor Ferry, ii. 280
“George,” Little Brickhill, i. 165
—— St. Albans, i. 120, 127
“Globe,” Weedon Beck, i. 198, 229
“Goat,” Maes Mawr, ii. 219
“Green Man,” Barnet, i. 78
“Haygate Inn” (“Falcon”), i. 30; ii. 74–76
“Hand,” Llangollen, ii. 194, 196, 205
“Hen and Chickens,” Birmingham, ii. 18–23, 99
“Hollybush,” Wellington, ii. 75
“Jerningham Arms,” Shiffnal, ii. 69
“King’s Head,” Coventry, i. 268, 272
—— —— Llangollen, ii. 106
“Lion,” Dunchurch, i. 253
—— Shrewsbury, ii. 41, 46–49, 75, 98–100, 103, 104, 107–109, 111,
114, 123–133, 155, 223
—— Wolverhampton, ii. 46–49
“—— and Pheasant,” Shrewsbury, ii. 102, 134
“Mad Tom,” Redbourne, i. 131–133
“Mitre,” Barnet, i. 73
“Mona,” ii. 304
“New” Weedon Beck, i. 198
“—— Royal,” Birmingham, ii. 24
“Old Royal,” Birmingham, ii. 8, 23
“—— Salisbury,” Barnet, i. 78
“—— White Lion,” Finchley, i. 58
“Owen Glendower,” Corwen, ii. 217, 267
“Peacock,” Islington, i. 43, 44
—— Sandhill, i. 31, 163
—— Wolverhampton, ii. 40
“Peahen,” St. Albans, i. 82, 116, 119
“Penrhyn Arms,” Bangor, ii. 265–267
“Pomfret Arms,” Towcester, i. 188–191
“Prince Llewelyn,” Cernioge, ii. 225–230
“Queen’s Head,” ii. 156, 159
“Raven and Bell,” Shrewsbury, ii. 100, 104, 108, 109, 134
“Red Lion,” Barnet, i. 74–78
“Royal,” Capel Curig, ii. 251
—— Llangollen, ii. 106
“—— Oak,” Bettws-y-Coed, ii. 235–239, 243
“Saracen’s Head,” Daventry, i. 239
—— —— Towcester, i. 188–191
“Spread Eagle,” Gailey, i. 224
“Star,” Shiffnal, ii. 69
“—— and Garter,” Wolverhampton, ii. 50
“Stonebridge Hotel,” i. 307
“Stork,” Birmingham, ii. 24
“Struggler,” Moxley, ii. 36
“Sun,” Glyndyfrdwy, ii. 210
—— Markyate, i. 136
“Swan,” Birmingham, ii. 12, 20, 23
—— Wolverhampton, ii. 45, 49
“—— and Peacock,” Wolverhampton, ii. 40
“—— with-Two-Necks,” Lad Lane, i. 82
“Talbot,” Atcham, ii. 90
—— Shrewsbury, ii. 116, 133
—— Towcester, i. 187
“Up and Down Post,” Meriden Heath, i. 306
“Verulam Arms,” St. Albans, i. 122
“Voelas Arms,” Pentre Voelas, ii. 230
“Wheatsheaf,” Daventry, i. 233
“White Horse,” Hockliffe, i. 152–156
“—— Lion,” Allesley, i. 301
“Woodman,” Finchley, i. 54
“Wynnstay Arms,” Oswestry, ii. 165
_Isannavaria_, i. 233
Islington, i. 39–44; ii. 173
Ivetsey Bank, i. 225, 227; ii. 103
Kensworth, i. 137
Ketley, i. 204, 228; ii. 72
Kitt’s End, i. 81
Knightlow Cross, i. 263–266
_Lactodorum_, i. 186, 204
Lilbourne, i. 205–207
Little Brickhill, i. 31, 164–167
Llandegai, ii. 264
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerchwyrndrobwlltysiliogogogoch, ii. 295–302
Llangefni, ii. 308, 319
Llangollen, i. 15, 18; ii. 108, 109, 162, 180–209, 215
—— Ladies of, ii. 191, 193–206
Llangristiolus, ii. 304
Llanyngenedl, ii. 320
Llyn Ogwen, i. 19, 20; ii. 254–257
Llynfaes, ii. 320
London Colney, i. 29, 95, 98–102, 125
Lonisaf, ii. 264
Maerdy, i. 18; ii. 220
Maes Mawr, ii. 219
_Magiovintum_, i. 204
Mancetter, i. 215
_Manduessedum_, i. 215
Markyate i. 136
Menai Bridge, i. 22; ii. 269, 282–288, 291, 318, 324
—— Straits, i. 20, 271, 280–289, 298, 302, 319
—— Village, ii. 288, 290, 295, 297
Merevale, i. 217
Meriden, i. 6, 302–306
Mimms Wash, i. 81, 85, 96
Mona, ii. 304
Monmore Green, ii. 39
Montford Bridge, ii. 145
Morland, George, i. 65
Moxley, ii. 36
Muckley Corner, i. 219
Mytton, John, ii. 123–125, 157–161
Nant Ffrancon, i. 20; ii. 257–260
Nesscliff, ii. 147
North Finchley, i. 64
Norton, ii. 88
Oakengates, i. 204, 228; ii. 72
Offa’s Dyke, ii. 162, 175
Ogwen Falls, ii. 257
—— Pool, i. 19, 20; ii. 254–257
Old Stratford, i. 182
Old-time Travellers:—
Borrow, George, ii. 218, 219, 221, 225, 226, 251, 307, 315
Cobbett, Richard, i. 133
De Quincey, Thomas, ii. 14–19, 125–131, 272
Disraeli, Benjamin, ii. 93
Dugdale, Sir William, i. 5, 12, 205; ii. 11, 101
Evans, Rev., ii. 217
Fiennes, Celia, i. 151
George IV., ii. 297, 312–314
Johnson, Dr., ii. 272, 274–277
Leland, John, i. 197, 313
Marlborough, Duke of, i. 95
Monk, General, i. 74
O’Connell, Daniel, ii. 50, 206
Ogilby, John, i. 7, 10, 146, 151, 186, 198, 250, 278, 308
Pennant, Thos., i. 2, 6, 61, 152, 194, 218, 230, 259, 302, 303; ii.
102, 257
Swift, Dean, i. 8, 12, 188, 221, 245–247, 267, 274, 280; ii. 308–310
Victoria, Princess, i. 122; ii. 164, 206, 267
Warner, Rev. Richard, ii. 205, 277
Wesley, Rev. John, ii. 310
Wigstead, Henry, i. 314; ii. 168, 181, 216, 278
Wynn, Sir Watkin Williams, ii. 166–168
Oswestry, ii. 14, 149, 157, 162–169
Overley Hill, i. 30; ii. 79
Owain Glyndwr, ii. 144, 172, 211–216, 271
Packington Park, i. 311
Pain’s Lane, i. 228.
Paulerspury, i. 182
Penmaenmawr, ii. 273–279
Penmynydd, ii. 293, 318
_Pennocrucium_, i. 224
Penrhyn Castle, ii. 263–265
Pentre Berw, ii. 304
—— Voelas, ii. 112, 230
_Pickwick Papers_, i. 188–191, 297; ii. 8, 23
Plumb Park Hill, i. 31, 184
Pont-y-Glyn, i. 18; ii. 220–222
—— —— Pair, ii. 244
Potterspury, i. 182
Prickler’s Hill, i. 66
Prior’s Lee, ii. 71
Queen’s Head, ii. 156
—— Oak, i. 175, 184
Railways:—
Grand Junction, i. 37; ii. 25
Great Central, i. 207, 244
London and Birmingham, i. 34–38, 169–171; ii. 24–26, 118, 155
—— and North Western, i. 38, 169, 196
Rain’s Bridge, i. 249
Redbourne, i. 29, 85, 131, 135, 138
Ridge Hill, i. 97–101
Ripley, James, i. 75–78
Royal Oak, i. 227
Ruyton-of-the-Eleven-Towns, ii. 148
Ryton-upon-Dunsmore. i. 259, 264, 266
St. Albans, i. 81, 82, 101, 102, 105–131, 138, 176, 204
St. George’s, i. 228
St. Michael’s, i. 128–131
Sandhill, i. 163
Sheep Lane, i. 163
Shelton Oak, ii. 144
Shenley, i. 29
Shiffnal, ii. 66–70, 75
Shrewsbury, i. 2, 4, 5, 15, 19, 20, 21, 24, 27; ii. 14, 62–64, 75, 82,
88, 91–143, 149, 155, 212, 214
Small Heath, i. 313
Snedshill, ii. 71
Soho, ii. 27
South Mimms, i. 44, 79, 87, 91–96
South Stack Rock, ii. 317, 321–326
Steam Carriages, i. 33
Stonebridge, i. 2, 306, 311
Stony Delph, i. 217
—— Stratford, i. 28, 163, 169, 172–175, 178, 180, 204
Stowe Hill, i. 194, 196
—— Nine Churches, i. 194–196
Stretton, i. 224
—— -upon-Dunsmore, i. 264,; ii. 14
Swallow Falls, ii. 235, 246–249
Tally-ho Corner, i. 65
Tan-y-Bwlch, ii. 250
Telford, Thomas, i. 18–21, 127, 151, 184, 194, 224, 230, 240; ii. 30,
73, 79, 112, 145, 148, 169, 209, 220, 232, 250, 253, 257, 282–287,
293, 305, 317
Tettenhall, i. 303, 312; ii. 43, 58–60
Tilsworth, i. 150
_Tom Brown’s Schooldays_, i. 44, 155, 191, 254
Trifaen Mountain, ii. 254
_Tripontium_, i. 205, 206
Turnpike Trusts, i. 9; ii. 303
—— Gates and Tolls, i. 33–47, 65, 69, 90, 137, 223, 248, 293, 301; ii.
27, 39, 58, 78, 91, 143, 144, 149, 159, 164, 170, 174, 175, 210,
219, 225, 230, 242, 250, 254, 264, 287, 302–307
Tynant, ii. 222
Tyn-y-Maes, ii. 260
Upper Bangor, ii. 270
_Uriconium_, ii. 83–87
_Uxaconium_, i. 228
Valley, ii. 307
_Vennonæ_, i. 211–213
_Verulamium_, i. 100, 112–115, 204
Vron Cysylltan, ii. 175, 179, 180.
Wall, i. 218, 219
Watford Gap, i. 204
Watling Street, i. 5, 111, 119, 197, 201–229; 232, ii. 73, 81, 84, 87,
289
Wednesbury, ii. 30–37
Weedon Beck, i. 194, 196–204, 229, 231
Weeford, i. 218
Welford, i. 204
Wellington, i. 5, 204; ii. 74, 76–78, 82
Wells Green, i. 312
Wergs, The, ii. 60
West Bromwich, ii. 28
West Felton, ii. 150, 155
Weston-under-Lizard, i. 228
Whetstone, i. 44, 05
Whiston Cross, ii. 64
Whitley Common, i. 266
Wibtoft, i. 209, 213
Willenhall, i. 31, 266
Willey Crossing, i. 208
Willoughby, i. 244–248
Wilnecote, i. 217
Witherley, i. 215
Wolverhampton, i. 15, 31, 32, 219, 312; ii. 40–58, 65, 109
Woolscot, i. 248
Wrekin, The, ii. 73, 76, 78, 80
Wroxeter, ii. 81, 83–87
Wyrley Bank, i. 221
Yardley, i. 312
THE END.
PRINTED BY
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=The Bath Road=: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an old Highway.
=The Exeter Road=: The Story of the West of England Highway.
=The Great North Road=: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. 2 Vols.
=The Norwich Road=: An East Anglian Highway.
=The Oxford Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road.=
[_In the Press._
=Cycle Rides Round London.=
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