For instance, before reaching Penkridge we pass—on the right hand, Moseley Court, where the ancestors of the proprietors, the Whitgreaves, concealed Charles II. after the Battle of Worcester,—on the left, Wrottesley Hall, the seat of the scientific nobleman of that name, and Chellington Park, the residence of the ancient Roman Catholic family of the Giffords, where an avenue of oaks, the growth of centuries, with a magnificent domain stocked with deer and game, afford the admirers of English scenery delicious vistas of wood, water, and rich undulating pasture.
The contrast between the murky atmosphere and continued roar of the ironmaking country, and the silence of the deer-haunted green glades is most striking, and most grateful to eye and ear.
As we rush along the valley of the Penk, too rapidly to drink in its full beauties; on the right, Teddesley Hall, the mansion of Lord Hatherton, rising above the tops of the trees, reminds us that the noble lord’s farms are well worth a visit from any one taking an interest in agriculture. Poor land has been rendered comparatively fertile, and by a complete system of drainage, mere marshy rush-growing meadows have been made capable of carrying capital root and wheat crops, while the waste water has been carried to a head, and then by a large overshot water wheel, working below the surface of the ground, made useful for thrashing, chaff and root cutting, and other operations of the farm.
At Penkridge, a rural village of considerable antiquity, ten miles from Wolverhampton, adorned by a Gothic Church, and several picturesque houses of the Elizabethan style of domestic architecture, it will be convenient to descend, if an expedition is intended, over Cannock Chase to Beaudesert, the seat of the Marquis of Anglesey.
This Cannock Chase completes the singular variations of soil and occupation to be found in Staffordshire. From the densely-populated iron districts, and the model agriculture of disciples of the same school as Lord Hatherton, we can turn our faces to a vast moorland, forty miles square, stretching from where it is first seen on the banks of the railway to the banks of the Trent, as wild as any part of Wales or Scotland, intersected by steep hills, by deep valleys, covered with gorse and broom, dotted with peat marshes, tenanted by wild deer and feathered game, and fed over by the famous “Kenk” sheep, nearly as wild as deer, and in flavour rivalling the best mountain mutton. This great waste was once covered with dense forests, in which the wolf, the bear, the wild boar, and the wild bull were hunted by our Saxon Kings. It is not among the least wonders effected by the locomotive that a short hour can transport us from the midst of the busiest centres of manufactures to a solitude as complete as is to be found in the prairies of America or Australia, unless we by chance stumble upon a prying gamekeeper or an idle rustic seeking whortle-berries or snaring hares.
On this chase, begged by his ancestors from an easy king as a kitchen garden, the hero of the Light Cavalry at Waterloo annually takes his sport, mounted on a perfect shooting cob, and with eighty years upon his shoulders, can still manage to bring down his birds right and left.
Long may such blanks of solitude and wild nature remain amid the busy hum of commerce to remind us of what all England once was, to afford, at a few holidays in the year, a free breathing place to the hardworking multitude, and to the poet and student that calm delight which the golden fragrance of a gorse-covered moor can bestow.
Before we reach Stafford we leave on the right, although not in sight, Shugborough, the deserted mansion of the Earl of Lichfield, a descendant of the Lord Anson who “sailed round the world but was never in it.”