The Holyhead Road Vol 2 by Charles G Harper

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Title: The Holyhead Road, Vol 2
The Mail-coach road to Dublin

Author: Charles G. Harper

Release Date: February 8, 2019 [EBook #58841]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

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THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

EARLY DAYS ON THE LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM RAILWAY.

The Holyhead Road: THE MAIL-COACH ROAD TO

DUBLIN

By Charles G. Harper

Author of “The Brighton Road,” “The Portsmouth Road,” “The Dover Road,” “The Bath Road,” “The

Exeter Road,” “The Great North Road,” and “The Norwich Road”

Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time Prints and Pictures

Vol. II. BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD

London: Chapman & Hall

ltd. 1902

[All rights reserved]

PRINTED BY

HAZELL, WATSON, AND VINEY, LD.

LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

List of ILLUSTRATIONS

SEPARATE PLATES

PAGE

Early Days on the London and Birmingham Railway.
Frontispiece

Bull Ring. (From a Print after David Cox)
5

Old Birmingham Coaching Bill.
13

Dudley. (After J. M. W. Turner, R.A.)
31

High Green, Wolverhampton, 1797. (After Rowlandson)
47

High Green, Wolverhampton, 1826. (From an Old Print)
51

High Green, Wolverhampton, 1860. (From a Contemporary Photograph)
55

Shiffnal.
67

The Council House.
141

The Honourable Thomas Kenyon. (From an Old Print)
153

The Vale of Llangollen.
177

Llangollen.
183

Llangollen. (After J. M. W. Turner, R. A.)
187

Valle Crucis Abbey. (After J. M. W. Turner, R.A.)
207

Cernioge.
227

The Swallow Falls. (From an Old Print)
247

Llyn Ogwen and Trifaen Mountain.
255

Penmaenmawr. (After J. M. W. Turner, R.A.)
275

The Old Landing-Place on the Anglesey Shore.
283

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

Vignette: Prince Rupert
Title Page

List of Illustrations: The Black Country
vii

The Holyhead Road
1

The “Hen and Chickens,” 1830
18

The “Old Royal”
24

Wednesbury
37

Old Hill, Tettenhall
59

vii

viii

ix

The Sabbath-breaking Seamstress
60

Snedshill Furnaces
71

Haygate Inn
76

The Wrekin
79

The “Old Wall”
84

Wroxeter Church
85

Atcham Bridge
91

Lord Hill’s Monument
92

The English Bridge
97

Wyle Cop and the “Lion”
107

The “Lion” Yard
132

The Market-Place, Shrewsbury
138

Shelton Oak
144

The Breidden Hills
147

Queen’s Head
156

Offa’s Dyke
176

The Ladies of Llangollen. (From an Old Print)
198

Plas Newydd
203

Owain Glyndwr’s Mount
211

Cerrig-y-Druidion
224

The Waterloo Bridge
232

The Old Church, Bettws-y-Coed
234

Sign of the “Royal Oak”
238

Pont-y-Pair
245

Cyfyng Falls
250

Capel Curig
252

The Falls of Ogwen
257

Nant Ffrancon. (After David Cox)
258

Nant Ffrancon
260

Penrhyn Castle
263

Lonisaf Toll-House
264

x

The Penrhyn Arms
266

Penrhyn Castle and Snowdonia, from Beaumaris. (After David Cox)
278

Deserted Stables, Menai Village
290

The Menai Bridge and the Isle of Benglas
291

The Anglesey Column
296

The Britannia Bridge
299

Near Mona Inn
303

Llangristiolus
304

Caer Ceiliog
306

The South Stack. (After T. Creswick, R.A.)
323

Holyhead Mountain
325

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

xi

BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD

MILES

Birmingham (General Post Office)
109¼

Hockley
110½

Soho
111¼

Handsworth
111¾

West Bromwich
114½

Hilltop
116

Wednesbury
117¼

Moxley
118½

Bilston
119½

Wolverhampton
122¼

Chapel Ash
122¾

Tettenhall
124

The Wergs
125¼

Boningale
129½

Whiston Cross
130¼

Shiffnal
134¼

Prior’s Lee
137½

Ketley
139

Ketley Railway Station
139½

(Junction of Watling Street with Holyhead Road.)

Wellington (“Cock”)
140½

Haygate
141½

Burcot Toll-House
143

Norton
146½

Tern Bridge
147½

(Cross River Tern.)

Atcham
148¼

(Cross River Severn.)

Shrewsbury (Abbey Foregate)
151¼

(Cross River Severn.)

Shrewsbury (Market House)
152

Shrewsbury (Welsh Bridge and Frankwell)
152¼

(Cross River Severn.)

Shelton Oak
154

Bicton
154½

Montford Bridge
156¾

(Cross River Severn.)

Nesscliff
160½

West Felton
165¼

Queen’s Head
166¼

Oswestry
170

Gobowen
172¾

Chirk
175

(Cross River Ceiriog.)

Whitehurst Toll-House
177

Vron Cysylltan
179¾

Llangollen
182½

Berwyn Railway Station
184¼

Glyndyfrdwy
188

Carrog
189

Corwen
192½

(Cross River Dee.)

Maerdy Post Office
196

Pont-y-Glyn
197¾

Tynant
198¼

Cerrig-y-Druidion
202

Glasfryn
204½

Cernioge
205¾

Pentre Voelas
207¾

xii

xiii

Bettws-y-Coed
214½

(Cross River Conway)

Swallow Falls
216

Cyfyng Falls
218½

Tan-y-Bwlch
219

Capel Curig
220

Llyn Ogwen
224

Ogwen Falls}
225

Pass of Nant Ffrancon}
Tyn-y-Maes
228

Bethesda
229¼

Llandegai
232¾

Bangor (Cathedral)
234½

Upper Bangor
236

Menai Bridge
237

(Cross Menai Straits)

Menai Village
237¼

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerchwyrndrobwlltysiliogogogoch
239¼

Gaerwen
242½

Pentre Berw (Holland Arms)
243

Llangristiolus
245½

Mona
247½

Gwalchmai
249¾

Bryngwran
252½

Caer Ceiliog
255

Valley
256

Stanley Sands
256¼

(Cross Stanley Sands Viaduct to Holy Island)

Holyhead (Admiralty Pier)
260½

xiv

THE OLD ROAD FROM MENAI VILLAGE TO HOLYHEAD

MILES

Menai Village
237¼

Braint
239½

Ceint
242½

Llangefni
244¾

Bodffordd
247

Gwyndû and Glanyrafon
249¾

Llynfaes
250¼

Trefor
251¼

Bodedern
254

Llanyngenedl
255¼

Valley and Four-Mile Bridge
258¼

Trearddur Bay
261½

(Cross Causeway over Straits to Holy Island)

Holyhead
263½

The Holyhead Road
1

BIRMINGHAM TO HOLYHEAD

I

There are said to be no fewer than a hundred and forty different ways of spelling the name of

Birmingham, all duly vouched for by old usage; but it is not proposed in these pages to recount them, or
to follow the arguments of those who have contended for its derivation from “Bromwicham.” It is
singular that in the first mention we have of the place, in Domesday Book, it is spelt “Bermingham,”
almost exactly as it is to-day, and this lends much authority to the view that we get the place-name from
an ancient Saxon tribe or family of Beormingas.

When the original Beormingas, the Sons of Beorm (whoever he may have been), settled here, in the

dim Saxon past, they founded better than they knew; but they chose a hill-top, a place where no river
runs, unless we choose thus to dignify the little stream called the Rea. This lack of watercourses
mattered nothing at all to mediæval Birmingham, but when, in spite of all disabilities, the place rose into
commercial importance, the want began to be severely felt, and herculean have been the efforts in
modern times to effect a proper water-supply.

Little but scattered mention is heard of Birmingham and its smiths before the Civil War, but when that

struggle broke out, they were heard of to some purpose. Its 4000 inhabitants in 1643 were Puritans to a
man, and warlike. They furnished 15,000 sword-blades for Cromwell’s troops, and at a convenient
opportunity waylaid the King’s carriage and seized it, his furniture, and his plate. For these enormities
Prince Rupert came later from Daventry and punished them severely in a battle on Camp Hill,
overlooking the town. Many Birmingham men were slain that day, and eighty houses burnt; the whole
affair piteously related in a tract of that time called “The Bloody Prince; or, a Declaration of the Most
Cruell Practises of Prince Rupert and the rest of the Cavaliers, in fighting against God and the true
Ministers of his Church.” A woodcut intended to portray that sanguinary Prince appears on the cover,
with Birmingham flaming furiously in the background; Daventry in the rear. The rest of the Cavaliers
appear to be manœuvring somewhere else; at any rate, Rupert is alone, on horseback, with a mild
expression of countenance and a big pistol.

Twenty-two years later the Plague depopulated the town, but in another twenty-three years it had

grown to double its former size, and by 1791 numbered between 70,000 and 80,000. Yet it had no
Parliamentary representation until 1832.

That Birmingham is seated on a hill is not so evident to railway travellers, but he who comes to it by

road is well advised of the fact at Bull Ring, where the hilly entrance confronts him. Bull Ring is old
Birmingham of a hundred years and more ago; the nucleus of the town, and little altered since David Cox
drew his picture of the market there. The market remains, but there has come about since his day an
extraordinary popular appreciation of the beauty of flowers, so that, instead of the fowls pictured largely
in his view, the crowded stalls are radiant with blooms of every sort; cut flowers, and growing plants.

Here stands, as ever, St. Martin’s, the mother-church of Birmingham, where the ancient manorial

lords of the place lie; those de Berminghams whose last representative was choused out of his rights in
1545. Here is that statue of Nelson for whose proper cleansing a patriotic tradesman left by will sixpence
a week; and here occurred the Wesley riots of 1742 and the Chartist Riot of 1839. When Charles Wesley
sought to preach, the people set the church bells a-ringing to drown his voice, and then began to pelt him
with dirt and turnips; but the political riot was a much more serious affair, resulting in the pillaging of
shops and houses, and immense damage.

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In Birmingham, close upon four hundred years ago, Leland found but one street, yet that street was

full of smiths, making knives and “all manner of cuttinge tooles, and many loriners that make bittes, and
a great many naylors. Soe that a great part of the towne is maintained by smithes, who have their iron
and sea-cole out of Staffordshire.”

Not only has Birmingham grown out of all knowledge since that time, but it has largely changed its

trades. Sheffield has taken away the pick of the cutlery trade, and that of the loriners has its chief seat at
Walsall; but Birmingham now makes everything, from a monster engine to a pin’s head, and in the
murderous art of manufacturing fire-arms is pre-eminent.

“She is,” observed an enthusiastic writer, “in the truest sense the benefactress of the universal man,

from the crowned head to the savage of the wilderness.” To the crowned heads, for example—or to their
governments—Birmingham supplies stands of arms and ammunition; and to the savage, guns warranted
to hurt no one but he who uses them. Civilisation is thus heavily indebted to Birmingham, and religion
too; for if the heathen, who “in his blindness bows down to wood and stone,” is no longer restricted to
those two materials, by reason of Birmingham industriously supplying little tin and brass gods by
wholesale, and at extremely low prices, to Africa or India, yet on Sundays the godly folks of her hundred
churches and chapels liberally subscribe to missionary funds for spreading Christianity in strange lands,
and thus help to discredit the heathen Vishnus, Sivas, Hanumans, and assorted Mumbo-Jumbos they
export.

BULL RING. From a Print after David Cox.

“Birmingham,” said Burke, a hundred years ago, “is the toyshop of Europe.” Fancy articles in steel and

paste; buckles, sword-hilts, buttons, and a thousand other trifles were made, for home or export; among
them the sham, or “Brummagem” jewellery, and the base coin that long cast a slur upon the town.
Things coming from Birmingham were in those times rightly suspect. One of its industries was the
making of “silver” buckles of a villainous kind of cheap white metal, called from its nature “soft tommy.”
A tale is told of the owner of the factory where this precious stuff was made up, going through one of the
workshops and hearing a workman cursing the man who would chance to wear the pair of buckles he was
making.

“Why,” asked the astonished employer, “do you do that?”
“Well,” replied the workman, “whoever wears these buckles is bound to curse the man that made

them, and so I thought I would be the first.”

Those were the days when it was said that if you gave a guinea and a copper kettle to a Birmingham

manufacturing jeweller he would turn you out a hundred guineas’ worth of jewellery!

Things are very different now. The trades of Birmingham seem almost countless in their number;

many of them conducted on a scale large enough for each one to suffice a small township of workers.
Brass-founding, tube-making, gun-smithing, pin-making, wire-drawing, screw-turning, gold-smithing,
electro-plating, tinplate working, coining (in the legitimate kind), steel pen-making—these are but a few
of the countless industries to whose skirts clings for livelihood a population of half a million.

When Mr. Pickwick visited Birmingham, he repaired to the “Old Royal” hotel. Where is the “Old

Royal” now? Ask of the winds—nay, consult the histories of Birmingham, and you shall learn. But if the
old hotel and many of its fellows be gone, at least the description of the entrance to the town holds good,
and “the dingy hue of every object visible, the murky atmosphere, the paths of cinders and brick-dust”
are phrases that awake echoes of recollection in the breasts of those who know the town of old: but “the
dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything
around,” is not so descriptive of the Birmingham of to-day. For fully realising that picture, and the added
touches of the “deep red glow of furnace fires, the glare of distant lights, the ponderous wagons laden
with clashing rods of iron, or piled with heavy goods,” one must journey to Dudley, where such things
may be seen and heard in a hellish crescendo: Birmingham has largely put those things in the
background. In Mr. Pickwick’s time “the hum of labour resounded from every house, lights gleamed
from the long casement windows in the attic storeys, and the whirr of wheels and noise of machinery
shook the trembling walls, and the din of hammers, the rushing of steam, and the dead, heavy clanking of
engines was the harsh music that arose from every quarter”; but most of these things are nowadays
decently hid in purlieus remote, or masked from the chief streets by the towering modern buildings of
hotels, banks, assurance offices, and all the hundred-and-one parasitical things of a limited liability age,
that fasten like vermin on the producing body.

Birmingham became a City on January 11th, 1889. It is a City of two fine streets, surrounded by many

miles of formless, featureless, dull and commonplace (or, at their worst, hideous and squalid) houses,
workshops, and factories of every size and description. New Street was only new at a period over a
century ago. Corporation Street was formed in 1871 by boldly cutting through a mass of slums. In those
two thoroughfares, and the open space by the Town Hall to which they both lead, is included almost
everything of architectural note. In their course are to be found the best and most attractive shops, and
the principal banks and commercial offices. The rest is merely of a local and provincial character.

The geographical, municipal, and political centre is, of course, that spot where the Town Hall stands, a

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