Beyond Caldecote comes Mancetter—the Roman Manduessedum—on the Warwickshire side, and Witherley, in Leicestershire. Between the two, an earthwork named “Castle Bank,” a rectangle measuring six hundred by four hundred feet, seems to have been the site of the Roman camp. Across the road flows the pretty river Anker, with trees densely overhanging it, and framing with their boughs a charming view of Witherley’s graceful crocketed spire. Mancetter—how nearly it escaped from being another “Manchester”!—is thought to have derived the first syllable of its name in Roman times from some historic or remarkable stone, “maen,” in the British tongue; but, however that may be, no such stone has ever been found. It is now a pretty village, a little distance retired from the road, with a very fine old church, and a churchyard remarkable for its illiterate tombstones and odd epitaphs, from the merely misspelt to the quaintly conceived:—

Here lies the Wife of Joseph Grew, a Tender Parerent And a Vertious Wife. She died February 1782.

Another, weirdly ungrammatical and savagely cynical, hides the identity of those who lie beneath by initials, and by the omission of any date:—

Another, to Sarah and Mary Everitt, 1720, and others of that family, puts a truth in a quaint guise:—

The World is a Caty Full of Crooked Streets Death is ye Markett plass Whereall must meet if life Was merchandise That men Could Buy ye Rich Would Allways live ye poor must Die.

Purchasable immortality would be a much more potent inducement to become a multi-millionaire than any now existing. But what a terrible thing that would be for the Diamond Kings, the Railway, Oil, Steel, and other monarchs to become immortal. As it is, however, a live tramp has the laugh of a dead millionaire—and a better chance of the Elysian Fields than Dives.

The town of Atherstone, a mile long, breaks the loneliness of Watling Street, half a mile beyond Mancetter. It is chiefly one long street, of the miscellaneous character common to the small country town: not unpleasing, nor highly interesting. The exit from the town is marked by a railway level crossing, become famous of late years as a source of contention between the local governing body and the London and North-Western Railway. Beyond, the villages of Merevale and Baddesley Ensor are seen to the left; and Dordon, a mushroom growth called into unlovely existence by the new pits of the Hall End Colliery.

“Stony Delph” is the odd name of a village two miles onward, adjoining Wilnecote. It is a name alluding to some quarry, or “stony digging,” now forgotten. (Compare, “When Adam delved and Eve span.”) Wilnecote, down into whose street the road dips from Stony Delph, is a place of brick, tile, and pottery kilns, with a railway-station, formerly called “Two Gates.” Where Wilnecote ends and Fazeley begins is not easy to tell, save perhaps by reference to the river Tame, here dividing Warwickshire and Staffordshire. Fazeley has that maritime and Dutch-like appearance belonging to all places settled beside some old canal, and the canal here is one of the oldest, with long rows of wharves and equally long rows of cottages opposite. Both have seen their best days.

Now, good-bye for awhile to level roads, for the Watling Street on entering Staffordshire goes straight for the steepest hill in the neighbourhood, and thereby proves its Roman ancestry. This is the hill leading to Hints. When you have reached the top, another hill, abrupt and entrenched, with gloomy woods on its brow, scowls down upon it from the left hand. It had a history, without possibility of a doubt, but it has not come down to us; and those who defended and those others who attacked are alike gone to the shores of the Styx, without leaving any other traces save those dumb and reticent earthworks that loom so provokingly mysterious against the sky.

Beyond Weeford, the next landmark, the Watling Street goes straight for three and a half miles, and then brings up against another dead end, where it is crossed by the Lichfield and Birmingham road. A hedge and a ploughed field forbid further progress, and it is only when armed with large-scale maps, and by comparing antiquarian authorities, that the course of the Watling Street can be traced, straight on to Wall. That village is found by following the road to Lichfield until the first left-hand turning is reached, leading, as a steep lane, uphill for a mile. On the hill-top, Wall is found and the Watling Street regained. The tiny village is built over the site of Etocetum, of whose ruins some fragments were yet to be seen in Pennant’s time, including portions of the ancient Roman wall giving a name to the place. These have long since disappeared, but in 1887 some excavations here laid bare many foundations heaped with the ruins of Roman civilisation, among whose oddments were found roofing-slates from Bangor and lime from Walsall. If thorough search were made, much more might be brought to light, for this was an important station in those times, situated at the intersection of the Icknield Street with Watling Street. Below the hill, and on the line of the Icknield Street, is the hamlet or farm called Chesterfield—a significant name, telling of Roman relics.

Muckley Corner, beyond Wall, is the meeting-place of roads from Walsall to Lichfield and Wolverhampton. The Watling Street still goes unflinchingly ahead, and reaches the outskirts of Hammerwich, uphill. At that nail-making and coal-mining place, it becomes somewhat confused, but is well-known locally to every man, woman, and child as the “Watling Street Road.” Here it has reached a very high-lying tract, that abomination of desolation called Brownhills. Words are ineffectually employed to describe the hateful, blighted scene; but imagine a wide, dreary stretch of common land, surrounded by the scattered, dirty, and decrepit cottages of a semi-savage population of nail-makers and pitmen, with here and there a school, a woe-begone brick chapel, a tin tabernacle, and a plentiful sprinkling of public-houses. Further, imagine the grass of this wide-spreading common to be as brown, wiry, and innutritious as it is possible for grass to be, and with an extraordinary wealth of scrap-iron, tin-clippings, broken glass, and brickbats deposited over every square yard, and all around it the ghastly refuse-heaps of long-abandoned mines. Finally, clap a railway embankment and station midway across the common, and there you have a dim adumbration of what Brownhills is like.

The Roman road makes a sudden change of direction here, at a point opposite the “Rising Sun,” where the old Chester road falls in. It is a change that would be inexplicable, were it not for a strange relic that by chance has survived for sixteen hundred years to explain it. This is a mile’s length of deserted road that continues the straight line of Watling Street, and then abruptly ends, as though the Romans had abandoned some contemplated work. It is, as a matter of fact, a monument to the incompetence of the surveyor who had the construction of this division of the Watling Street in his charge. The several changes of direction taken here and there along the whole length of this great military way—as, for example, at High Cross and Gailey—are explained by the work having been in progress from both ends at once, and the surveys being somewhat inaccurate; but the official entrusted with the road from Etocetum seems to have lost his bearings very badly indeed, and to have been road-making at a wide angle from the correct line, when his chief appeared and plotted out the direction afresh from Brownhills.

The road now goes downhill again, past a fine old inn, the “Fleur-de-Lis,” and comes to Wyrley Bank, a busy colliery district on the verge of Cannock Chase. Bridgetown, Great Wyrley, and Churchbridge are lumped together in this coal-getting neighbourhood, and the crash of waggons, the shrieking of engines, and coal-dust everywhere bedevil the scene. But, with all these unlovely details, it is far preferable to the stark and hopeless barrennesss of Brownhills.

In little more than two miles this coalfield is quite out of sight and sound, and the road approaches the beautiful old “Four Crosses” inn at Hatherton. Dean Swift is commonly said to have visited this old house on his journeys, and it is quite likely he did, but it could not—for reasons shown elsewhere in those pages^[1]—have been the house where he wrote his famous epigram on the landlady. But most accounts continue to give this as the scene, and locally it is firmly believed in.

The old house is of two distinct periods: one dating back to the sixteenth century and exquisite in black oak and white plastered and gabled front; the other probably built about 1710, in a handsome “Queen Anne” style. A curious feature is the Latin couplet carved in 1636, on an oak beam outside the older portion of the house:—

which has been translated:

Adjoining is a disused toll-house, and opposite stands another old inn, the “Green Dragon,” the group forming a little oasis of settlement in the surrounding desert of lonely road. It was between this and the “Welsh Harp” inn at Stonnal, on the Castle Bromwich road, that the “Shrewsbury Caravan” was halted and robbed on April 30th, 1751, by “a single Highwayman, who behaved very civilly to the Passengers, told them he was a Tradesman in Distress, and hoped they would contribute to his assistance.” Whereupon, he handed round his hat and each passenger gave him something, making an involuntary contribution of about £4, “with which he was mighty well satisfied,” as indeed he had every reason to be. But he was not so distressed a tradesman that he could condescend to accept coppers, and so “returned some Halfpence to one of them, saying he never took Copper.” After this, informing his victims that there were two other “collectors” on the road (were they also Distressed Tradesmen?) he rode with the Caravan for some distance, until it was out of danger and he almost in it, when he left with much courtesy, begging the passengers that they would not at their next inn mention the affair, nor appear against him should he afterwards be arrested.