The gently undulating stretch of country from “Four Crosses” to “Spread Eagle,” once dreaded by the name of Calf Heath, is now under cultivation, and the Watling Street, crossing it, broad and well-kept, wears more the look of a high-road. The spreading lakes seen here and there, known as “Gailey Pools,” are reservoirs of the old Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal that presently crosses the road under a hunchbacked bridge and by an old round-house, whose tower stands out prominently for a long distance down the straight perspective. The “Spread Eagle,” an old coaching-inn, once gave a name to the adjoining railway station of Gailey, but where the village hides that now serves sponsor to it is not readily discovered. A mile beyond comes the river Penk, crossed at a pretty spot by a substantial stone bridge, and across the meadows by a red-brick one, where a mill-cut froths and foams, and a cheerful old mill and farmhouse stand. On the other side of the river is the hamlet of Horsebrook, with Stretton down a side lane, supposed to have been the Pennocrucium—the crossing of the Penk—of Roman times.

The ubiquitous Thomas Telford is recalled to mind at a little distance onward by his name in cast-iron on the aqueduct of the Birmingham and Liverpool Canal. Near by is another reservoir, rejoicing in the name of “Stinking Lake.” At that fine old inn, the “Bradford Arms,” Ivetsey Bank, the left-hand road leads in less than two miles to Boscobel, one of the most famous places in our history, for to that hunting-lodge in the forests then thickly overspreading this part of the country came Charles II. in 1651, as a hunted fugitive, after the disastrous defeat at Worcester. Boscobel had been built seventy years before, by the Giffards of Chillington, ostensibly as a hunting-lodge where their guests might rest in the intervals of the chase, and in a sense it was so used, with officers of the law for hunters, and fleeting Papists as quarry; but in the other sense it was a very transparent pretence, when we consider that the family residence at Chillington Hall stands not more than a mile away. For many years it had been used as a refuge for recusant Roman Catholic priests, at a time when that religion was proscribed; for the Giffards were then, as they are still, of that faith, and so were the yeomen Penderels who occupied the house. It was built, too, under the direction of a Jesuit lay-brother, one Nicholas Owen, or “Little John” as his intimates called him, a skilful deviser of priest’s-holes and such like hiding-places under stairways or in the recesses of panellings. No Roman Catholic gentleman’s house was at that time considered to be complete without some of “Little John’s” darkling hutches and inconveniently cramped nooks secreted somewhere between foundation and roof. Truth to tell, however, these supposedly “secret” places are fairly obvious, and, given a search-party convinced that the fugitive was somewhere near, they must have been dull-witted fellows who did not light upon them.

When Worcester Fight ended so badly for “the man Charles Stuart, that Son of Belial,” as the Republicans were pleased to call Charles II., he made at once for Boscobel, the place where, only a few days before, the Earl of Derby had secreted himself. Accompanied by Colonel Carless, he threw himself upon the assured loyalty of the five Penderel brothers and their widowed mother, Dame Joan, who then lived here and at ruined Whiteladies Priory, half a mile away. “Will Jones,” for that was the name he adopted, could have found no more loyal hearts had he searched the realm, and the Penderels had already found the transition from secreting priests to Royalist fugitives an easy one. But Boscobel had become suspect, and the quarry was now so important that rigorous search was made, and Charles and Carless, although hid respectively in the secret recess behind the panelling in the Squire’s room, and in the pit beneath the cheese-loft during the night, were in daytime for greater security secreted in the bushy head of a pollard oak growing in a meadow near the house: the tree afterwards famous as the “Royal Oak.” In that leafy refuge Charles slept, with his head in the faithful Colonel’s lap, and beneath them quested the search-party of Cromwell’s dragoons. The story is well known, how that tree effectually concealed them, and how, after many wanderings, the King fled the country from the sea shore at Brighthelmstone.

The original Royal Oak is gone; hacked to pieces for mementoes in a very short while after the Restoration, and the youthful oak that stands solitary in a field does but mark the spot. But the house stands still, with its old hiding-places, and many are those who come to see; so that the pile of visitors’ books, all closely filled, is a mighty and a growing one. Of the “bosco bello,” the Fair Wood that gave the old house its name, not a trace remains.

Downhill from Ivetsey Bank, the Watling Street presently crosses into Shropshire, and comes to the village of Weston-under-Lizard—or “Weston-subter-Liziard” as it was formerly named—a cheerful little place, clinging like some feudal dependant to the park and Hall, the seat of the Earl of Bradford. The church and mansion stand adjoining, at the end of a short drive: in the church the cross-legged effigies of Sir Hugh and Sir Hamo de Weston, who flourished six or seven hundred years ago; and in the exquisitely fitted Bradford Chapel memorials of that family.

Burlington Pool, a reedy lake on the right hand, is now passed, and Crackley Bank, leading downhill towards another scene of industry and coal-mining, seen from afar by reason of its smoky skies. Close by, at the place called Red Hill, the Roman station of Uxaconium was placed.

Before the pits and furnaces of the Lilleshall, Oakengates, and Ketley coal and iron mines are reached, the long street of St. George’s has to be passed through. There was a time, not so long since, when this was merely the hamlet of “Pain’s Lane,” and its local makeshift place of worship simply “Pain’s Lane Chapel.” All this is changed, and though its old prosperity has abated, the place now possesses a fine Gothic church dedicated to St. George, and has changed its name to match. Oakengates also has seen its best days, for many of the mines are exhausted. In these latter circumstances, the neat little houses of “Perseverance Place, 1848,” and others with similarly virtuous titles, look not a little pathetic. Perseverance, indulged in continually, has stripped the district of its mineral wealth, and the miners, living like maggots in a cheese, have eaten their home away. The township, at the very bottom of a steep descent, is busy, but dirty and slatternly, with a railway station and level crossing, and huge cinder heaps, likening it to some domestic dustbin in Brobdingnag. Ascending out of it, Ketley is reached, and with it the junction of Watling Street with the Holyhead Road.