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