THE BREIDDEN HILLS.
The red rock that rises, tall, rugged, and precipitous behind Nesscliff village, and gives that place its name, was the fastness of one of the last of these gentry, Wild Humphry Kynaston, who, when forced from his seat at Middle Castle and outlawed, lived in a cave here and began a career as wildly romantic as that of Robin Hood.
The Ness gave a name not only to Nesscliff, but to the neighbouring villages of Great and Little Ness, in lonely and sequestered spots at a little distance from the road. Nesscliff itself has put off the outward trappings of romance, and has but a few unremarkable cottages, the very ugly old red-brick “Nesscliff Hotel” of coaching days, and the older and, dazzlingly whitewashed “Old Three Pigeons.” Telford’s fine road, too, disclaims any memories of lawless times, and except where the branch road goes off to Knockin, is in itself as safe and commonplace as any in England. At that point, however, just at the fork, a deep and foul horse-pond offers a likely snare for the outward-bound stranger on dark winter nights; although its sides are guarded by breast-walls as old as Telford’s day, to the traveller making towards Shrewsbury. Gallows-tree Bank, one of the rises on the way, now a name only, and not well known at that, had its significance in the old days, together with another of the same name a mile short of Oswestry; better known because it gives its grim title to “Gallows-tree Gate,” an old toll-house built beside that Golgotha. The especial need for these engines of retributive justice, placed here in old times, is seen in the peculiar political and social condition of the Marches. Nineteen miles separate the towns of Shrewsbury and Oswestry, and only the smallest of villages are found between. There had once been an attempt to establish a town—with markets and fairs and municipal life—midway, but it failed, and the site of that enterprise may be sought at the quite insignificant village of Ruyton, to which a finger-post, pointing along a bye-road, directs. “Ruyton-of-the-Eleven-Towns” is the name of that place, and one that whets curiosity. “Towns,” however, is a misleading term in this connection, and never meant more than the eleven “townships,” or petty subdivisions of land, into which the manor of Ruyton was subdivided. The Earls of Arundel were anciently lords of this manor, as also of that of Oswestry. One of them granted in 1308 a full market charter to Ruyton, with right of scot and lot, and of assize of criminals, and many other privileges, and it is possible that the place would have thrived, only for the fact that another Earl of Arundel, ninety-nine years later, rendered these privileges useless by an arbitrary ordinance that none of the tenants of his various manors were to offer anything for sale at any fair or market until they had first offered it at Oswestry. The penalty for disobeying was a fine of six shillings and eightpence. There is an eloquent piece of fifteenth-century protection! The result, of course, was that Oswestry had the “pick of the market,” and Ruyton decayed.
With that decay the road grew more lonely and dangerous. It had always been a wild country, with robbers roaming the open heaths that spread, forbidding and desolate, where enclosed fields now border the road; and as Shrewsbury and Oswestry grew and trade waxed between them, the plunder to be gained grew more and more tempting. Oswestry was then, and for long after, the chief seat of the Welsh flannel market, and every Monday the Shrewsbury drapers were accustomed to ride to it and back on business. So dangerous was the journey that, even so late as Queen Elizabeth’s time, the drapers, not without due cause, had prayers for their safety read in St. Alkmund’s church before they set out, and were “ordered”—no need for being bidden, one would think—always to go together, and to bear arms. Perhaps it was because their prayers, their companionship, and their arms did not suffice to protect them, that, a few years later, we find them insisting that the Welsh cloth-weavers and flannel-makers should bring their goods to Shrewsbury to be sold.
XXVIII
Along the road, half a mile or so short of West Felton, on the right hand, stands the lodge guarding the entrance to Pradoe, the home for half a century of that famous whip and amateur of coaching, the Honourable Thomas Kenyon. Whether Pradoe be a corruption of the old Welsh word “Braddws,” meaning “Paradise,” none can now say with certainty, but sure it is that the beautiful park in whose recesses the house is secluded, half a mile from the road, has one of the loveliest outlooks upon the distant Welsh mountains of any domain in this fair county of Shropshire. From the tall windows of the noble drawing-room at Pradoe the landscape slopes down towards where the road runs, hid from view; and in the blue distance, glimpsed between the romantic stems of fir trees, rise the steep sides of the Breiddens, their highest point crowned with the Rodney Pillar. The fame of the Honourable Thomas Kenyon—“His Honour,” as he was known in his day—will not readily be forgot between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, whose nineteen miles he drove times innumerable in his coach and four. His was a prominent figure, any time between 1803 and 1851, among those “country gentlemen of England,” of whom Sir Robert Peel once declared he would rather be the political leader than enjoy the confidence of princes. Whether as a sportsman or a magistrate, “His Honour” was held in the greatest esteem. He was the third son of Lord Chief Justice Kenyon, and was born in 1780 at Gredington, a few miles north of Ellesmere. “Nimrod” has a characteristic passage showing how early Thomas Kenyon’s love of horses developed. “Nimrod” was fifteen years of age at the time, and a guest with his father at Gredington:—
“Where are Lloyd and George?” asked Lord Kenyon, wishing that my father might see them.
“They are in the garden,” was the answer.
“And where is Tom?”