now reduced in height and stripped of its battlements, forms an useful and agreeable public walk. This and the Walls on the north side of the town, called Roushill Walls, extending from the Castle Gates to the Welsh Bridge, are all the existing remains of our ancient fortifications, which, when entire, could not have been much less than a mile and half in compass.
At the end of the walls, on the left, is
THE ROMAN CATHOLIC MEETING-HOUSE,
a neat building, erected in 1776, and enlarged in 1825. The interior is fitted up with much taste and elegance. The altar rests on a sarcophagus, on the front of which is a painting of the Last Supper, after Leonardi da Vinci. Above is a figure of Christ on the Cross, with the inscription “Thus God loved the world.” The roof is coved and rests on a broad cornice, consisting of angelic figures in relief united by wreaths and garlands of flowers. In the gallery is a small organ, and on each side the entrance an elegant white marble shell for the holy water.
BOWDLER’S CHARITY SCHOOL
next demands our attention; a plain brick building, founded in 1724, pursuant to the will of Mr. Thomas Bowdler, alderman and draper, for the instruction, clothing, and apprenticing poor children of St. Julian’s parish. The dress of the children is blue, whence the school is sometimes called “The Blue School.”
Passing at the bottom of the Wyle a curiously carved timber house, formerly the mansion of the highly respectable family of Sherar, we cross “swift Severn’s flood” by
THE ENGLISH, OR STONE BRIDGE.
This elegant structure was completed in 1774, after a design of Mr. Gwynn, a native of the town, at an expense of £15,710, of which £11,494 was raised by voluntary subscriptions. It is of freestone, 400 feet in length, and comprises seven semicircular arches, the central one being sixty feet in width, and forty in height, and is crowned with a fine balustrade. The fronts are embellished with light and graceful ornaments. The ascent, owing to the height of the central arch, is disagreeably steep, and the breadth of the thoroughfare, (only twenty-five feet,) highly inconvenient to the innumerable carriages and passengers which are continually passing over it.
