Returning from Wroxeter and passing the tiny hamlet of Norton, the way lies flat to Shrewsbury. Flat, because we are now come beside the Severn (which no Welshman calls anything else than Sivern). Away across the watery plain as we advance are the Stretton Hills on the left, volcanic and mountainous in outline, blue and beautiful in colour; and, more distant, ahead, far beyond Shrewsbury, the Breidden Hills, a great bulk starting from the level without any disguise of foothills or preliminary rises to detract from their dramatic effect.

The Tern, a tributary of the Severn, crosses the road beneath a handsome stone balustraded bridge, with views to the right over Attingham Park and along the road, through a mass of overarching trees, toward the village of Atcham. There, in the Park, stands the classical stone building of Attingham Hall, one of those places built a century or more ago at incredible expense, and only to be maintained at a cost far exceeding the resources available to-day. Corn at 50s. and 60s. a quarter built many fine mansions, and nowadays corn at 25s. keeps them empty. Attingham Hall lacks a tenant. It belongs to Lord Berwick, whose title does not, by the way, come from the only Berwick commonly known—the town of Berwick-on-Tweed—but from Berwick Maviston, close by Atcham, the old home of the extinct Malvoisin or Mayvesin family.

The chief entrance to Attingham Park is through the great archway in Atcham village. One side of the village street is made up of church, school-house, post office, a deserted coaching inn, and a number of rustic cottages; the other is the long brick wall of the Park, densely overhung with trees, on to which the village blankly looks. The only opening in this wall is the great archway aforesaid; very tall, Doric, and stony. With a spinal shiver the stranger, who stands wondering awhile where he has seen its like, suddenly realises the resemblance it bears to the entrance of certain great London cemeteries. The arch is flanked by a stag on one side and by a pegasus on the other, with the inscription in gigantic lettering in between: “Qui uti scit ei bona.” A very proper aspiration; but it is just as well that tramps are innocent as a rule of Latin, or they might not inaptly call and ask for something on account.

Opposite this gateway stands what was once the “Talbot,” a first-class posting-house. It looks on to the church in one direction, the entrance to the Park in another, and down upon the Severn in a third, so that its situation is by no means commonplace. When the altered conditions of travelling rendered it no longer possible to carry on a remunerative business here, the hotel was converted into a private mansion, and the gravelled drive walled in and turfed, but it has only been occupied for short periods and has long stood empty. Like the Princess in the fairy tale, it waits and still waits, looking up the road and down the road and over the bridge for the expected. It is weary waiting, and even the rats and mice who lived royally in old times, and were reduced at last to the pitiful expedient of subsisting on the faint smell of what had been, gave it up and lived on one another. The ultimate survivor is believed to have committed suicide in the Severn.

It is a noble bridge that spans the river here, and, built before the art—no, not the art, the science—of constructing bridges in iron was understood, is of stone, and very steep. This steepness added to its narrow proportions was a terror to those nervous coach-passengers whose faith in Sam Hayward of the “Wonder” was not what it should have been, considering the consummate art he displayed as a whip. But possibly they thought that all the artistry in the world would be of little use to save them and the coach if, on one of the wintry nights and mornings when the Severn mists had obscured the road, they came into collision with the parapets and so were hurled into the swirling river; and, moreover, the hours—5.30 in the morning and 10 at night—when the “Wonder” passed this dangerous spot, are not those when courage is high and confidence greatest.

It is a gentle rise from here to Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, passing on the way the old toll-house of Emstrey Bank. On the hill-top, and looking down the Foregate from the summit of his Doric column, stands the statue of “old Rowley.” The personage owning that nickname was Sir Rowland, afterwards Lord Hill, Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief in succession to Wellington. As a Peninsula and Waterloo hero, and a brother-in-arms of Wellington, Shropshire people held him in great honour, for was he not also a Salopian—one of the Hills of Hawkstone—and a fine representative of the county? It was left to a descendant to bankrupt the estate and disperse the medals, warlike relics, and trophies of Hawkstone Park.

It is perhaps not the sculptor’s fault, but a result of distance and acute perspective, that the gallant general on his elevated post bears an extraordinary likeness to Pecksniff, as pictured by Phiz.

Abbey Foregate must have been the place where Benjamin Disraeli, travelling post to Shrewsbury in June 1839, in company with Sir Philip Rose, to fight for one of the two Parliamentary seats the borough then retained, had his attention drawn by his companion to a huge poster, displayed on the walls of a roadside barn. Disraeli was standing in the Conservative interest, and was at the time head over ears in debt.

“Something about you,” said Rose to his companion, as his eye lighted on the poster. The chaise was stopped, and Disraeli, deliberately adjusting an unnecessary eyeglass—for the bill was set in the boldest and blackest of “display” type—slowly read it from beginning to end.

It began, “Judgment Debts of Benjamin Disraeli, Tory Candidate for Shrewsbury,” and unfolded a long, long list of creditors and the amounts due to them. After long and careful consideration of the lengthy roll, Disraeli turned to his friend, and calmly said: “How accurate they are. Now let us go on.”

Shrewsbury was apparently not so scandalised as it should have been by this revelation of Disraeli’s financial straits, for the electors returned both himself and the other Conservative candidate by thumping majorities.

The Foregate, a broad thoroughfare outside the town walls, was an early suburb on the hither shore of the Severn, which comes winding again athwart the road, presenting, when such things were matters of the first importance, a defence that not the boldest might pass. Whoever held Shrewsbury, girdled by river and ramparted walls for fully seven-eighths of a circle, and with the remaining eighth, the only easy approach, blocked by the frowning dark red turrets of its great castle, was master of the situation. Hence that race between Henry IV. and Hotspur for possession of the town in 1403; a race won by the King, who flung his army into it a day before Hotspur’s Northumbrians and Scots came in sight; hence, too, the repeated attempts of the Welsh to gain possession.

Foregate still keeps something of its old suburban character, the old-fashioned houses partaking both of town and country; curious old inns neighbouring stately mansions, and village shops shouldering the doctor’s or the lawyer’s staid Queen Anne and Georgian residences. But the great feature is the Abbey Church, great even though only a fragment of its former self. Ruddy sandstone of a particularly deep, almost blood-red, hue gives its massive and time-worn tower a suggestion of Shrewsbury’s sanguinary history; just as the great bulk of the Abbey may have been the measure of the sins of that Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, who founded it and died, a world-renouncing monk, within these walls in 1094. Close upon two hundred years later, in 1283, the first English Parliament was held in the Chapter House; and that would be a place of much historic interest to-day, but, like most of the monastery buildings, it has been destroyed.