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