No fires, however destructive, warned our Elizabethan forbears that timber was a dangerous material to build with, and Shiffnal arose, one mass of timbered houses, and by a happy chance they most of them remain to this day; so that, whether one comes into the town by road, or is swept swiftly over it by train on the Great Western Railway that looks down from a lofty embankment upon the queer old Market-place, the effect is charming indeed. But, lest this magpie architecture should, or ever could, look monotonous, there have been introduced, from time to time, buildings in other styles and materials. Down the street, and seen, in fact, before one arrives at the Market-place itself, is, for example, the “Jerningham Arms,” stucco-fronted and thrusting forth the elaborate quarterings of the Jerninghams, Lords Stafford, and lords of the manor, ensigned with the Bloody Hand of Ulster, which leads the ignorant to suppose that Allsopp’s ales are obtainable within. The “Jerningham Arms” was a coaching inn, and the “Star” (prominent in the illustration, with a skylight on its roof) another, and a handsomer. Behind the fine old red-brick front of that house, and through the archway, the stable yard runs down; the beam over the arch rich in the badges of old fire insurance offices, and above them the sculptured armorial shield of some forgotten county family.
Shiffnal church stands a little apart: a fine red sandstone building with a central tower crowned with a low pyramidical red-tiled roof that only by a little overtops the battlements. Does that sound like a depreciation of it? I hope not, for it is a type characteristically English, and very lovable. One may trace many architectural periods in Shiffnal church, from the Norman when they could not build too heavily, to the Perpendicular, when lightness was coming in. Not that lightness has part or lot here, for the church is stately rather in the massive masculine way. Within a recess of the chancel wall lies the monumental effigy of Thomas Forster, “sometime Prior of Wombridge, Warden of Tongue and Vicar of Idsall,” 1526. In that inscription the old name of the parish is preserved, as it is also on a tablet giving an account of a much more interesting person; a certain William Wakley. It recounts how he “was baptised at Idsall, otherwise Shiffnal, May 1st, 1590, and was buried at Adbaston, November 28th, 1714. His age was 124 years and upwards. He lived in the Reign of eight Kings and Queens.” But this ancient’s record is surpassed, for the tablet goes on to tell of “Mary, the wife of Joseph Yates, of Lizard Common,” who died August 7th, 1776, aged 127 years. “She walked to London just after the fire in 1666, was hearty and strong 120 years, and married a third husband at ninety-two.”
Two other curiosities, and we are done with Shiffnal church. The first is the odd Christian name of a woman—“Kerenhapputh”—on a stone in the churchyard: the second a Latin inscription of 1691 on the churchyard wall. It may be Englished thus (the wall supposed to be speaking): “At length I rise again, at the sole expense of William Walford, the kindest of men.”
XV
Breasting a long incline of nearly three miles, the road comes to Prior’s Lee and Snedshill, and, reaching a commanding crest, looks down upon the industry and turmoil of Lilleshall on the one side, and the equally busy and industrious Coalbrookdale on the other. The prettiness of Prior’s Lee is in name alone. It and Snedshill are wastes of slag and cinder-heaps—some a century old, others the still smoking refuse from the blast-furnaces that roar and whizz and vomit smoke on the left.
SNEDSHILL FURNACES.
But the great iron furnaces of Snedshill are seen at their most impressive at night. The strange cyclist who has never before known the road sees the reflection of their flames a long way off, and comes upon the scene bewildered by the rising and falling of the lurid light that glows intensely in one direction and sinks all other quarters in an impenetrable obscurity. It is the weirdest of scenes, the surrounding house-fronts and the tower of Prior’s Lee church standing out in the radiated glare against the blackest of backgrounds: spouting flames an angry red, turning the white light of arc-lamps down at the ironworks a wicked and debauched-looking blue. Sighings of escaping steam, like the groans of some weary Titan exhausted with labour, rise now and again, and are succeeded by thunderous crashings and huge clouds of steam and smoke, mingled with millions of sparks, as the molten metal is now and again discharged.
To this is added the clattering of coal-waggons where Oakengates and the collieries lie, deep down in the valley, brilliant at night with constellations of lights. In strange contrast with all this, the benighted wayfarer sees roadside cottages whose open doors disclose housewives going about the business of their homes with all the world, as it were, for a background. The sight enforces the thought—how great the little home, how small the vast outside world!
Passing Ketley Station and rising Potter Bank, great banks loom mystically on the left, and bars of light from wayside inns streak the road. If it be summer night, sounds of glee-singing rise by the way, for the colliers, although this is not Wales, have got musical culture.