A great feature of Shrewsbury is the Quarry. Now the Quarry is not a quarry at all, but a public park beside the Severn, in whose beautiful grounds is probably the largest and most beautiful avenue of limes in the kingdom; and amidst those noble trees there stands a stone effigy of Hercules, covered over with the green stains of weather until he looks quite the most horrid Hercules the explorer is likely to discover anywhere. Also, his muscles are things of a weird and wonderful fascination, more resembling subcutaneous apple dumplings than mere representations of gristle and sinew. Who is there that lives within a circle of fifty miles from Shrewsbury and has not heard of the Quarry and its flower shows? Do not the railway companies run excursions especially for those who flock there? What Shrewsbury would do without its Quarry it is difficult to imagine, and scarce anything more disastrous could be thought of than that it should ever be improved away; for the town is so placed upon its almost island site that the houses huddle closely up to one another in most directions, and this is one of the very few clear spaces within the circlet that the Severn makes.
THE COUNCIL HOUSE.
XXVII
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.
SHELTON OAK.
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.