But daylight strips Ketley of all possible mysticism, for the soaring banks are then found to be just cinder-heaps, and the depth of the deep valley on the right is not so appalling after all. Most of Ketley’s mines are deserted now, but the cinder-heaps are gaunt as ever. Telford drove a new road through the heaps and used vast quantities of the cinders in ballasting and paving it, leaving a portion of the Watling Street, diving down a hollow, on the right. It is still there, with the disreputable roadside cottages beside it, as of old, and the same semisavage class as ever inhabiting them.
Away in the distance, rising majestically over the miners’ rubbish-heaps, comes the whalelike outline of the Wrekin, shaggy and blue-black with pines. Not a great hill, compared with the Stretton Hills and the Welsh mountains presently to come in sight; but its isolated position in the surrounding Shropshire plain gives it a commanding appearance, and has made the Wrekin a centre to which all Salopian hearts fondly turn in response to that old toast, honoured with three times three, “To all friends round the Wrekin.” The toast has not so limited an application as those who are not Salopians, or know not Shropshire, might imagine, for the Wrekin is visible from incredible distances, and the view from it comprises not only the whole of Shropshire, but a radius of distant hills sweeping the horizon round from Malvern, the Warwickshire Edge Hill, the Peak in Derbyshire, the mountains about Llangollen, the Berwyns, Cader Idris, and Plinlimmon, to the Brecon Beacons.
The famous hill rises only 1,260 feet above the surrounding plain, but just because it is a plain, its Protean bulk looms larger and loftier than many a taller eminence. Protean the Wrekin is because the outline of it, viewed from different quarters, varies singularly. Whale-like from Wellington, from the south-west it looks like a truncated sugar-loaf, and seen from the road near Wroxeter resembles a huge and shapely dome.
Wellington lies a mile distant from the road, but straggling outposts of houses extend all the way, and at Cock Corner one may look down the cross-road and clearly perceive the existence of the town and what manner of town it is. To coaching travellers Wellington was but a name and a distant mass of roofs; for, with but two minutes to change horses at the “Cock”—or, if they travelled by the famous Shrewsbury “Wonder,” a minute at Haygate inn, a mile onward—they were gone, and roofs and chimneys sank, as though by magic, beyond the rounded fields and tall hedgerows.
The “Cock” has remained game to the present day, and has witnessed the disappearance of its once prosperous neighbour, the “Hollybush.” That picturesquely named inn was a coaching house of a humbler sort, and carriers and coal-waggoners made it a house of call. Now a private house, brilliantly whitewashed, it seems by that dazzling raiment to have put away, as far as possible, all coaly memories.
XVI
Haygate inn stands, just as does the “Cock,” at the fork of a bye-road leading to Wellington. The “Cock” caught the travellers from London, the “Falcon” (which was really the sign of Haygate inn, although few knew it by any other name than that already mentioned) those from Wales and Shrewsbury. It was intimately connected with the Shrewsbury “Wonder,” being kept by H. J. Taylor, a brother of Isaac Taylor of the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, who put that famous coach upon the road in 1825. Another brother kept the chief inn at Shiffnal, and so between them they kept the hotel and coaching business in the family along the first eighteen miles from Shrewsbury.
When the “Falcon” was rebuilt, in the flush of the coaching age, it was built to outlast the requirements of rich and jovial posting and coaching travellers for at least a century to come. So much is evident at sight of the house, substantially constructed and designed with all the dignity of a private mansion. Alas! for all such anticipations; the first railway train rolled into Shrewsbury Station in 1839, and shortly afterwards the house became what it is now—a farmstead.
HAYGATE INN.