Indeed, when you have descended Mardol, and so across the Welsh Bridge—the “reddie way to Wales”—have left the town on the way to Holyhead, you are not yet clear of streets and houses. There, on the further shore of Severn, outside Shrewsbury altogether, is the long, steep street of Frankwell, all old houses and tottering tenements, dirty and crazy, and so picturesque that surely some top-hatted, frock-coated smeller of drains will presently level it with the ground and build some sanitary and abominably ugly successor. The pity of these reforms that must needs be so destructive! Not many places are more charming to the artistic eye than Frankwell. There, among many other old houses is the timbered “String of Horses” inn, that perhaps got its name when the road was a steeper ascent even than now, and eight and ten horses in line toiled up the rugged way to Wales.

In those old days, going back many centuries ago, the “Frankwell” of to-day was the Franche ville, or “Free-town,” where the outlanders might squat; the “beggarly and turbulent” Welsh, for example, who might by no means come and live or ply their trades within the walls, and must go forth from the town every night. Partly as a defence against more threatening dangers, and partly to keep the Frankwell aliens, and other unauthorised and undesirable rabble, outside for the night hours, when the powers of evil are exalted, the gatehouse was long maintained across the Welsh Bridge and the gates duly shut at sundown.

Darwin, who by his doctrine of evolution and heterodox reading of accepted phenomena caused many flutterings of episcopal skirts, uprooted much placid belief, and gave many a simple soul anxious times, was born in that great house, the Mount, on Frankwell hill-top, so long ago as 1809. The house stands in its own grounds, surrounded by high walls, just the same now as then; only the toll-gate, spoken of in Telford’s reports as “Dr. Darwin’s”—although Dr. Darwin had nothing to do with it and probably wished it at the devil, with the shouts of “Gate!” all night long—is gone. Here the old houses begin to thin out, and beyond, to Shelton, one mile and three-quarters from the town, suburban villas line the way.

At Shelton Gate, where the road branches to Welshpool, still stands that battered and riven monarch, Shelton Oak, just within the garden-wall of one of these modern villas, but readily to be inspected. “Glyndwr’s Oak” it is often named, from the persistent legend that Owain Glyndwr from its branches watched his ally, Harry Hotspur, being defeated at the Battle of Shrewsbury, on that fatal day, July 21st, 1403. But, unfortunately for the credibility of that legend, the battle was fought three miles away, at a spot not visible from here, and Glyndwr was very far distant on that particular day. This has been proved again and again, and it saves something of Glyndwr’s reputation to accord him a decent alibi; but the myth is immortal. It has brought no good to the old oak, for, what with the relic-hunters who have hacked pieces away, and their fellow-sinners who have carved their own names on its giant trunk, it is in sorry case. Age, of course, is responsible for its hollow body and dead limbs, but the kindly ivy wraps it fondly round and hides many a scar. The trunk has a girth of 45 feet, a measurement that goes far to prove an age going a hundred years or more back beyond Shrewsbury Fight, and that if Glyndwr had been here he could have, indeed, climbed its branches. Had he desired to see the battle, he should have taken his courage in his hands and gone down the road to Shrewsbury, beyond, to get a good view. But there were those at Shrewsbury who could have desired nothing better, and Glyndwr, if again he had been here, would perhaps have remembered too keenly what they did down there to the rebel Prince Dafydd when they caught him, more than a hundred years before. What they did was to draw him on a hurdle, hang and quarter him, and divide the pieces among the clamorous towns. Greedy London got his head, and, crowning it with a tinsel crown, spiked it upon Temple Bar, or London Bridge, or some similarly prominent place.

Passing the outlying houses of Bicton village, the road comes to Montford Bridge, where we take our last look at the Severn from Telford’s sturdy red sandstone bridge.

The Severn is no sooner left behind than the Breidden Hills, first glimpsed ten miles away and then lost, come again into view. They rise suddenly from the level with even more dramatic effect than the Wrekin; not of a greater height, rising only to 1200 feet, but of true mountainous character. The distance of seven miles separating them from the road, while not obscuring them, has the grand effect of blotting out all petty detail and giving the appearance of a huge, blue-black, and apparently unscalable mass. To give the last touch of theatrical effect, a monument tops the highest point; perhaps, the traveller thinks, the memorial of some hardy mountaineer who essayed to climb these heights and perished in his rashness. But it is nothing of the sort; only a pillar erected to keep green the memory of Rodney’s naval victories. “Colofn Rodney,” as the Welsh call it, otherwise “Rodney’s Pillar,” is inscribed in Welsh to the effect that

From behind “the Breidden,” as Salopians call the Hills, came the Welsh in olden times to plunder and commit outrages on these exposed frontiers; and the whole district remained a veritable Alsatia until the beginning of the seventeenth century; outlaws and freebooters, both in Shropshire and Montgomeryshire, the real authorities, who usually slew, but in their lighter moments and more kindly vein contented themselves with making sheriffs’ officers eat the writs they carried, seal and all; or just stripped the traveller and with an oath and the prick of a sword bade him begone.

The red rock that rises, tall, rugged, and precipitous behind Nesscliff village, and gives that place its name, was the fastness of one of the last of these gentry, Wild Humphry Kynaston, who, when forced from his seat at Middle Castle and outlawed, lived in a cave here and began a career as wildly romantic as that of Robin Hood.

The Ness gave a name not only to Nesscliff, but to the neighbouring villages of Great and Little Ness, in lonely and sequestered spots at a little distance from the road. Nesscliff itself has put off the outward trappings of romance, and has but a few unremarkable cottages, the very ugly old red-brick “Nesscliff Hotel” of coaching days, and the older and, dazzlingly whitewashed “Old Three Pigeons.” Telford’s fine road, too, disclaims any memories of lawless times, and except where the branch road goes off to Knockin, is in itself as safe and commonplace as any in England. At that point, however, just at the fork, a deep and foul horse-pond offers a likely snare for the outward-bound stranger on dark winter nights; although its sides are guarded by breast-walls as old as Telford’s day, to the traveller making towards Shrewsbury. Gallows-tree Bank, one of the rises on the way, now a name only, and not well known at that, had its significance in the old days, together with another of the same name a mile short of Oswestry; better known because it gives its grim title to “Gallows-tree Gate,” an old toll-house built beside that Golgotha. The especial need for these engines of retributive justice, placed here in old times, is seen in the peculiar political and social condition of the Marches. Nineteen miles separate the towns of Shrewsbury and Oswestry, and only the smallest of villages are found between. There had once been an attempt to establish a town—with markets and fairs and municipal life—midway, but it failed, and the site of that enterprise may be sought at the quite insignificant village of Ruyton, to which a finger-post, pointing along a bye-road, directs. “Ruyton-of-the-Eleven-Towns” is the name of that place, and one that whets curiosity. “Towns,” however, is a misleading term in this connection, and never meant more than the eleven “townships,” or petty subdivisions of land, into which the manor of Ruyton was subdivided. The Earls of Arundel were anciently lords of this manor, as also of that of Oswestry. One of them granted in 1308 a full market charter to Ruyton, with right of scot and lot, and of assize of criminals, and many other privileges, and it is possible that the place would have thrived, only for the fact that another Earl of Arundel, ninety-nine years later, rendered these privileges useless by an arbitrary ordinance that none of the tenants of his various manors were to offer anything for sale at any fair or market until they had first offered it at Oswestry. The penalty for disobeying was a fine of six shillings and eightpence. There is an eloquent piece of fifteenth-century protection! The result, of course, was that Oswestry had the “pick of the market,” and Ruyton decayed.

With that decay the road grew more lonely and dangerous. It had always been a wild country, with robbers roaming the open heaths that spread, forbidding and desolate, where enclosed fields now border the road; and as Shrewsbury and Oswestry grew and trade waxed between them, the plunder to be gained grew more and more tempting. Oswestry was then, and for long after, the chief seat of the Welsh flannel market, and every Monday the Shrewsbury drapers were accustomed to ride to it and back on business. So dangerous was the journey that, even so late as Queen Elizabeth’s time, the drapers, not without due cause, had prayers for their safety read in St. Alkmund’s church before they set out, and were “ordered”—no need for being bidden, one would think—always to go together, and to bear arms. Perhaps it was because their prayers, their companionship, and their arms did not suffice to protect them, that, a few years later, we find them insisting that the Welsh cloth-weavers and flannel-makers should bring their goods to Shrewsbury to be sold.