Past a group of seventeenth-century Almshouses we travel on to Broseley, home of the Broseley Clays, beloved of fireside smokers. The town, with its mean brick dwellings, has a decayed look about it; but in one of the streets, outside a public-house, we chance upon a rare example of local wrought-iron work, which is illustrated above.
'Fight to the left at the cross-roads, and then you canna miss the way,' remarks a passer-by of whom we now enquire the route to Benthall. Dumpy, pot-bellied pottery kilns, bowered in flowering hawthorn, rise by the roadside, where the brilliant blue Borage is abloom in untended corners.
A fine avenue of forest trees leads us to Benthall Hall, a stately freestone mansion of the sixteenth century, its mullioned windows and projecting porch making a goodly show in the landscape. Close at hand, its only neighbour, appears the parish church, a curious little whitewashed edifice, destroyed and rebuilt at the time of the Great Rebellion, when Benthall was held for the King. Its internal economy is a survival of the churchwarden period, down to the stiff, penitential box-pews, and the faded red curtains in the southward windows.
In olden times an extensive tract of woodland, called the Royal Hay, or Forest, of Shirlot, covered the rough broken country lying to the south of Broseley.
About the centre of this district lies Willey Park, the ancient demesne of the Foresters; an estate which has never, it is said, been bartered for filthy lucre since first it was granted by Henry II. to the Keeper of the Royal Forest.
The Foresters of bygone days seem to have been a free, open-handed race, and keen sportsmen to boot. Tom Moody himself made his name famous amongst the fox-hunting squires and parsons, who rode to hounds in the train of my Lord Forester.
Willey Hall, a solid, substantial stone edifice, stands atop of a gentle rise, overlooking a chain of lake-like pools embosomed amidst shadowy woodlands. Half a mile east, in a nook of the park, lies Willey church: near to which we notice a natural curiosity, an oak and an ash tree enjoying life on the co-operative principle by sharing a single stem between them.
Thenceforward our way lies through a reach of old forest land, full of gnarled timber trees and carpeted with ferns—remains of Shirlot Forest. In the heart of these woodlands we come upon a tall, ruinous stone obelisk, known as the Shirlot Monument; whence, after traversing the gorse-clad uplands of Shirlot Common, we return in due course to Much Wenlock.
Road and rail keep fast company through Farley Dingle, the deep, picturesque defile, by which one descends from Much Wenlock to the vale of Severn. A brawling stream, as it winds adown the dingle, has been ponded in and set to drive some rustic mills upon its banks.