Modern Oswestry is a place of engineering shops, foundries, and mining interests, and, as the seat of the Cambrian Railway locomotive and carriage works, is busy and prosperous. Not a vestige of its old trade in Welsh flannel remains, for the mills of Lancashire long ago began to produce a cheaper article than the Welsh could make. Very little of old Oswestry is left, and although the streets are still for the most part narrow and crooked, the greater number of the houses are modern. Inns abound in the grimy and slovenly place; a very different state of things from a hundred years ago, when Rowlandson and Wigstead came here and found it “remarkable for having (though rather a large town) the fewest public-houses we ever witnessed.” No one is at all likely to raise that complaint in these times.

The road out of Oswestry passes close by two grassy hills crowned with trees, the original site, according to legend, of the town, and still known as “Old Oswestry.” The Welsh name them, and the ancient entrenchments that ring their summits, “Hen Dinas,” or “Old Fort.” Hidden away behind is Porkington, a historic estate whose real name is Brogyntyn, but thus vulgarised by the invading Saxon certainly as early as the reign of Henry III. Quite recently Lord Harlech, who now owns the estate, has re-adopted the original name, but “Porkington,” after an existence of six hundred years, is not so readily forgotten.

The Great Western Railway crosses the road on the level, three miles out of the town, at Gobowen, on its way to Chester. Gobowen village itself is utterly commonplace, but marks the beginning of one of Telford’s important alterations in setting out a new line of road, in place of the three miles of steep, circuitous, and narrow old road leading from here to the “Bridge Inn” at the crossing of the river Ceiriog. The old road is still in existence, and can be easily explored. It goes off to the left soon after the “Cross Foxes” is passed, beginning where a narrow lane, entered by a turnstile, runs between the “Railway Tavern” and a hideous Wesleyan Chapel: an atrocity in red and yellow brick and blue slates.

Having found the old road, you “dinna turn none,” as the Shropshire country folks say, but go straight ahead, up hill and down dale, along a track that in every rut proclaims “old road,” and “disused” in the grass and rubbish plentiful everywhere along its course. At its further end, where the Ellesmere Canal is crossed, the rotting quays by the waterside are faced by a row of cottages and a little general shop, pushed suddenly into the background, as it were, when those two successive blows of fate—the making of the new road and the coming of the railway—took away both the wayfaring and the canal traffic. It is a picture of bygone prosperity and present ruin as complete as ever drawn of any deserted mining town in California.

The new road is the model of what a road should be; broad, level, and straight. It passes the estate of Belmont, and was indeed cut through a portion of the Park, sold to the Commissioners for the Parliamentary Road in 1820. To the ground sold for this purpose the Lovetts, who owned Belmont, agreed to add, as a gift, the site for a toll-house, afterwards erected and known as Belmont Bar. One condition was attached to this gift: that if within seventy years the toll-house should no longer be required, the ground should revert to the estate. The Shropshire gates were abolished towards the close of 1883, and the toll-house has, therefore, again become private property.

There is not a single dwelling near, or within sight of, that old toll-house, lonely by the wayside at the edge of a dark plantation: and the life of the old man who lives there rent-free on a small weekly allowance must be dull indeed. It would be lonelier and duller still were it not for the tramps, whose footsteps can be heard stealthily crawling round the house and trying the doors and the shuttered windows at all hours of the night. They add a little spice of excitement to life in such a place; but an occupant who had anything to lose would be nervous. One night the old man discovered two navvies and a woman in his garden, preparing to camp out there. As they seemed to be genuine travellers on the way to a job of work, he brought them in, warmed them at his fire, and let them sleep by the hearth. Early in the morning they prepared to go, and made their breakfast before he rose. “God bless you, Daddy!” said the woman as they went, “we’ve left you something”; and he found a pound of sugar, a loaf, and some tea.

At the “Bridge Inn,” where the old road comes down in a steep bank, all ruts and loose stones, to meet the new, the Ceiriog foams and splashes in its ravine. Across the bridge that spans it, and we are in Denbighshire and Wales. In Wales, after a fashion; but the steep road winding upwards to Chirk has to be traversed before the narrow opening into the valley of the Dee and the Vale of Llangollen is gained; and there were those at this strategic point in olden days who saw to it that unauthorised passengers did not pass. For as the village of Chirk crowns the plateau, so also does the Castle of Chirk command a cleavage in the hills, where Castell Crogen stood in days before the existing fortress and the Norman builders of it were thought of.

Seven hundred years ago, this was just as it is now, the readiest road by which to enter North Wales. Accordingly, when Henry II. set himself to conquer the Welsh, and to stamp their national life out of existence, he led his army to the Ceiriog. There was fought the battle of Crogen, and when Henry had won it he pushed on across the rough country of the Berwyn mountains to Corwen. He had been better advised to advance by the more ample valley of the Dee, and the Vale of Llangollen; but Henry Plantagenet was the Buller of his age, and his rank bad luck and ill generalship combined caused him to lead his army the hardest way. Arrived at Corwen, amid the dense woods and thickets that then covered the hillsides, he found the chieftains of all Wales, having sunk their own quarrels for a time, assembled with a host of followers to bar his passage. They knew their wild country, he did not, and so, in fearful weather, commenced a disastrous retreat, and was not safe from pursuit until the walls of Oswestry were in sight. Not for him was the conquest of Wales. To a greater than he, in a hundred and twenty years’ time, was to fall that achievement, and even when Llewelyn, the last independent Prince of Wales, was slain in 1282, and his country subdued, there yet remained the long-drawn rebellion of Owain Glyndwr that was to break out a hundred and twenty years later, and for ten years to imperil the English rule.

Castell Crogen gave place to the present castle of Chirk, built by Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, who murdered his ward, Gruffydd ap Madoc, to obtain possession. From that time this was one of the strongest fortresses on the Borders. In long years after the Mortimers, and many another family who had held it, had gone their ways, Chirk came into the possession of the Myddeltons. The first was a Sir Thomas, of Queen Elizabeth’s time, who, from being a wealthy London citizen and Lord Mayor, became in 1595 the purchaser of this estate. His brother was the famous Sir Hugh Myddelton who brought the first water supply to London by the New River, and whose paltry stone statue, set up in modern times, stands at the beginning of this very road to Holyhead, on Islington Green. The son of the first Sir Thomas had some stirring experiences in the castle his father had bought. The spacious days of Elizabeth were done, and the bitter years of civil war had come to shake the country from end to end. This Sir Thomas was a man of changeable views. He at first took arms for the Parliament, and in his absence found his castle of Chirk seized and held for the King. He lay siege, and unsuccessfully, to his own house, then changed sides, and was himself besieged in it by his former allies to such effect that he was obliged to surrender. It cost this injudicious trimmer £80,000 to repair the damage done. That Cromwell suffered his fortress to stand is sufficiently remarkable; but here it frowns to-day a splendid specimen of feudal architecture without, and a princely residence within.