History of Madeley / including Ironbridge, Coalbrookdale, and Coalport

by John Randall

THE WELLINGTON AND SEVERN JUNCTION RAILWAY

Was authorized in 1853, but a portion only of this Railway (from Wellington to Lightmoor) was constructed and the powers of the Act lapsed. It was worked by the Great Western Company in connexion with their line from Lightmoor to Shifnal and Wolverhampton.

The Great Western Company and the West Midland and Severn Valley Railway Companies promoted Bills for Leasing this Railway in the Session of 1861. The Great Western Bill also proposed for the extension of their existing Line ending at Lightmoor, from Lightmoor to Coalbrookdale. The West Midland and Severn Valley (joint) bill in addition to its provisions for leasing the Wellington line to Lightmoor provided for the construction of a Railway from the Ironbridge Station on the Severn Valley Railway over the river Severn through Coalbrookdale to the Lightmoor Station of the Wellington line at Lightmoor. There were in fact three Bills before Parliament for constructing Railways from Lightmoor to Coalbrookdale, two crossing the river Severn, one joining the Severn Valley Railway at Ironbridge, and the other joining the Severn Valley and the Much Wenlock and Severn Junction Railway at New Barn. The Much Wenlock & Severn Junction Railway was authorized in 1859 by 22nd. and 23rd. Vict. entitled “An Act for making a Railway from Much Wenlock, in the County of Salop to communicate with the Severn Valley Railway and the River Severn in the same County.”

These railways conferred great advantages upon the town of Ironbridge both as a means of sending and receiving goods, and also as enabling tradesmen to economise time in attending markets or fairs, and in bringing men of business into the neighbourhood.

They also bring numerous visitors in summer time, who are attracted by the scenery in the neighbourhood. It may indeed be taken as a fact, as we have said before, that there are nooks and corners just outside and along the Severn Valley now better known to strangers than to the inhabitants; and which natives themselves have never seen. With eyes to watch the till and see their way along the beaten track of business, men not unfrequently lose sight of intellectual pleasures within their reach; in their hurry to secure gain they forget items that might serve much to swell the sum of human happiness at which they aim. Like Wordsworth’s clay, cold, potter; to whom

A primrose by a river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more,—

so, insensible to the life that is within them and the glories which surround them, they feel not that flow of which Milton speaks, that—

Vernal joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair!

Coleridge too has said,

In Nature there is nothing melancholy.

And some one else, speaking lovingly of the Author of Nature, has written:

“Not content with every kind of food to nourish man,
Thou makest all Nature beauty to his eye
And music to his ear.”

There are no bolts, bars, or boundary walls, and there need be

“No calling left, no duty broke,”

in making ourselves more acquainted than we are, by holiday rambles and dignifying investigations, with wonders which constantly surround us.

Few more interesting spots could be chosen than Ironbridge, with its woods, and cliffs, and river, which from tourists, and all lovers of the beautiful, never fail at once to secure attention and admiration. You may travel far and not meet a page so interesting in nature’s history. Many are the occasional visits—many are the stated pilgrimages, made from distances—by devotees of science, desirous of here reading the “testimony of the rocks.” To such, this natural rent in the earth’s crust; this rocky cleft, the severed sides of which, like simple sections of a puzzle, afford the clue to its original outline and primæval features, and prove full of interest. Like some excavated ruin, flooring above flooring, there are platforms and stages where in rearing the old world’s structure the workers rested. Coins of that far off period are plentiful where human habitations now stand, terrace above terrace. Other than these, the little town has no antiquities older than its bridge; other than the hunting lodge and half-timber-houses previously mentioned; there are no castle keeps, cathedral aisles, or moss-crowned ruins; no suggestive monuments of the past save those already noticed and such as nature furnishes. ’Tis rich in these; these it has mature and undecayed: and in such mute eloquence as no work of man can boast. Massive and motionless there are around the most interesting and instructive specimens of the world’s architecture. Not a winding path threads the hill side but conducts to some such memorial, but opens some page written within and without. Take the favourite summer’s walk of the inhabitants, that leading to the Rotunda, on the crest of the hill; and you stand upon the mute relics of a former world! Beneath is the upturned bed of a former sea, and around is the storied mausoleum where hundreds of the world’s lost species lie entombed. Few places boast a more suggestive or more romantic scene. Lower still, just at

“The swelling instep of the hill,”

winds the silvery thread woven by the Severn through the valley, interlacing meads, woods, upland swells, and round-topped grassy knolls. Amid pasture land sloping to the water’s edge and relieved by grazing cattle, rise the ivy-topped ruins of Buildwas Abbey; beyond is a pleasing interchange of land and water, the whole bounded by hills scarcely distinguishable from the azure sky. Mingled sounds of birds and men and running water strike strangely on the ear; and often in the calm twilight fogs move slowly on the river. How these rocks and caverns echo and reverberate during a thunder-peal, when loud and long-continued. The inhabitants tell, too, of curious acoustic effects produced along the valley; how in under tones from one side the river to a point of equal elevation on the other neighbours may whisper to each other, the atmosphere acting as a sounding-board for the voice. This is so in a rent in the rocks above the Bower-yard, known to natives as the Bower Yord.

“Up the bower, and through the Edge,
That’s the way to Buildwas bridge,”

is a local ditty with no other merit than antiquity; but it has served as a lullaby to generations cradled long ere the bridge below was reared. Over-looking the Bower is Bath-wood—minus now the bath. Tych’s-nest comes next, where the kite formerly squealed, and had its eyrie; and still later—as the oldest inhabitant is ready to testify—where badgers were caught, and made sport of at Ironbridge Wake.

Ironbridge abounds in pleasant walks and sunny spots; and right pleasant ’tis to view from some eminence on the opposite bank—Lady-wood or Benthall-edge, the prospect spread out before you. Clustering cottages are seen to perch themselves on ridges, or to nestle pleasantly in shady nooks half hid by rocks and knolls and trees; while bits of nature’s carpet, garden plots and orchards, add interest to the scene. On points commanding panoramic sweeps of country, of winding dales and wooded hills, have sprung up villa-looking residences and verandahed cottages that tell of competence, retirement, and those calm sweet joys that fringe the eventide of prosperous life. There are no formal streets or rigid red brick lines to offend the eye: but that pleasing irregularity an artist would desire. Looking east or west, fronting or turning their backs upon each other, many gabled, tall chimneyed, just as their owners pleased; there is a freedom and rusticity of style that gratifies the sight and harmonises well with the winding roads that meets the poet’s fancy and goes beyond the limner’s skill. To mention severally these suburban hill or tree-embosomed retreats would be sufficient by the name itself to indicate the faithful picture we have drawn. From the Severn to the summit, the hill is dotted over with villas, Gothic and fanciful, fronted by grottoed gardens, flanked by castellated walls and orchards, with ornamental hedge-rows and shady sycamores; whilst in mid-air, lower down, like a gossamer on a November morn, appears the iron net-work of the bridge. We have written so much and so often of these scenes that we are tempted here to hand in copy to the printer of what we have previously said on the subject.

However beautiful these rocks and hills are by day, the view of Ironbridge assumes a character equally sublime when the glare of the sun is gone, when the hills cast their shadows deep and the river gathering the few rays left of the straggling light gives them back in feeble pencils to the eye. At sunset when the hills are bathed in purple light, and the god of day before his final exit between Lincoln Hill and Benthall-edge a second time appears; by moonlight, when rosy tints have given way to hues of misty grey, when familiar objects grow grotesque and queer, and minor features melt away amid the deep calm quiet that reigns below, serial pictures of quaint perspective and inspiring beauty present themselves. To the stranger entering the valley at night for the first time the scene is novel and impressive. Silence,

Faithful attendant on the ebon throne,

sways her sceptre over dim outlines which imagination shapes at will, and the river, toned down to the duskiest hue, whispers mournfully to each smooth pebble as it passes.