It is here, five miles and a half from Dunchurch, that the famous “Knightlow Cross” stands. Just past a group of cottages, and an inn called Frog Hall, that mark the neighbourhood of Stretton-upon-Dunsmore, and where Knightlow Hill begins to tip downwards, this mysterious relic is found, in a meadow. The so-called “Knightlow Cross” is a square block of red sandstone, standing on the summit of a prehistoric grassy tumulus. It measures thirty inches square, and has a deep square cavity sunk in it. From its appearance, the stone may once have been the socket of a wayside or boundary cross, possibly marking the limits of the parish of Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, extending thus far. Here, from time immemorial, on the morning of St. Martin’s Day, November 11th, has been collected the “wroth-money” annually due to the Lord of the Manor of Knightlow Hundred: a district comprising some twenty-eight villages. These tributary communities pay sums ranging from one penny to two shillings and threepence-halfpenny each, with the exception of Ryton, which pays nothing. The whole amounts to nine shillings and threepence-halfpenny, the forfeit for non-payment in each case being either one pound for every penny not forthcoming, or “a white bull with pink nose and ears.” This tribute is said to be paid for the privilege of using certain roads, but it probably was originally “rother money,” or fees payable in very ancient days to the Lord of Manor for the privilege of grazing cattle and swine in the great forests that then overspread the district, and for having all such animals officially branded by the Lord’s verderer; strange and unmarked beasts being liable to confiscation.

At the beginning of last century the “Wroth Money” custom was discontinued, but revived after some years. The Duke of Buccleuch, the present Lord of the Manor, upholds what the villagers call “the old charter”; and still with every recurring Martinmas, at the shivery hour of sunrise, the Steward of the Manor attends and duly checks the coins thrown into the hollow by the representatives of the subject parishes. The tribute, and perhaps a good deal more, is expended in drinks of rum and milk for the party, and breakfast at the “Oak,” at Stretton. The “initiation of the colts” is a humorous contribution levied upon those who have never before been present.

Of the four fir-trees that once guarded the tumulus, locally supposed to mark the spot where four knights were buried, only one now remains; sycamore saplings have taken the places of the others.

Through Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, and past pretty Willenhall, with the Warwickshire Avon crossing under the road and seven tall poplars fringing it, Coventry is reached, over Whitley Common, once a lonely spot, horrific by reason of being Coventry’s place of execution. Old maps give the picture of a structure like a football goal at this point, ominously permanent, and labelled “Gallows.” It was not until shortly after 1831, when Mary Anne Higgins was hanged here for poisoning her uncle, that “Whitley Common” lost its old notoriety. Even so, the present directions to the stranger enquiring the way into Coventry are scarcely cheerful, the cemetery being the guiding landmark. Beyond that evidence of the populous nature of Coventry, commence the outskirts of that city; the road still with a kind of a furtive back door approach, with many twists and turns and narrow passes through picturesque slums as far as the very centre of the place. The entrance from London, in fact, remains the most difficult and crooked of any town all the way to Holyhead, and this although it stands as an improvement upon what had been before 1827, when Telford cut a new length of road here. The only good entrance to Coventry is from the railway station and along Hertford Street, an improvement made in 1812 in place of Greyfriars Lane; a steep, narrow, and cobble-stoned way that was once the only road in that direction.

Coventry’s lanes possessing every possible disability and inconvenience from the coachman’s point of view, it was, when the question of reforming the Holyhead Road was being debated, seriously proposed that a new route should be adopted, avoiding the city altogether. The proposition failed, and resulted in a compromise that did little real good, even though it cost £11,000. As an indignant writer of that period remarks: “Individual interest was allowed to have its weight, and the traveller is still jolted through the long and narrow streets, uttering imprecations at every yard of his progress.” It is a thrilling picture thus presented to the imagination, the traveller cursing as he goes, and recalls Swift’s proposition for a Swearers’ Bank, enriched by funded damns. If he could have estimated a good income from the number of good, hearty oaths uttered in one day at a little Connaught fair, riches surely beyond the dreams of avarice would have accrued to a branch of the Bank at Coventry.

These “private interests” were, of course. those of the innkeepers and the tradesmen, and they secured the continuance of the old route into the city, while permitting the not so urgent alteration of the exit toward Birmingham, where no trade would be disturbed by making what is now the so-called “Holyhead Road,” and deserting the “Old Allesley Road.”

The maze of Much Park Street, Earl Street, and High Street, brings one to the centre of Coventry at the intersection of that last-named thoroughfare with Hertford Street, Broadgate, and Smithford Street, and directly opposite the “King’s Head,” once a famous old coaching inn, but rebuilt these later years. The great Duke of Wellington breakfasted in the old house, November 28th, 1823, on returning from a shooting party at Beaudesert, the Staffordshire seat of the Marquis of Anglesey, with whom he had been at shooting parties of a very different character, in the Peninsula and at Waterloo.