Conspicuous at the top of the village rises its parish church, on the south side whereof we find the interesting fragment of a Calvary cross depicted in the sketch on p. 213. The broken shaft, which has angle chamfers terminating in small heads, stands upon a massive base edged with bold cable mouldings, and ornamented with sphinx-like faces at the corners. On the west side of the base is the curious crocketed niche seen in the cut; it may conjecturally have been used to display the Paschal light at Easter-tide. The southern side has a hand and the letters I . H . C cut upon it. The adjacent church, though ancient, is somewhat featureless; and the Church-house, an antiquated structure of timber and plaster overlooking the graveyard, seems quite the oldest residence in the village. Southward from Highley, the Severn itself forms for several miles the Shropshire boundary, an outlying elbow of Staffordshire coming in upon the east, and giving a curious local twist to the frontier hereabouts. Until comparatively recent times, there was an isolated cantle of Shropshire lying derelict, so to speak, far away towards the east, upon the confines of Worcester and Stafford. The quiet old townlet of Halesowen, with its ruined Premonstratensian Abbey founded by King John, was formerly included in Shropshire; as was also the curious little chapel of St. Kenelm, on the slopes of the Clent Hills, and the pleasant estate of the Leasowes, with its groves and pseudo-classic ruined temples, in the taste of the last century, and its memories of Shenstone the poet. But we digress, so now, revenons à nos moutons. Laying a south-westerly course from Highley, we set out anon for Kinlet Hall, a place seated in a wild, secluded locality, on the borders of Wyre Forest. Our way lies in the main through a country of low, tumbled hills, thatched with woodland; one or two colliery chimneys, emitting grimy smoke, seeming out of place amid these green, pastoral landscapes. After passing the vicarage we enter Kinlet Park, a tract of undulating country about 500 acres in area, containing bosky dells and sylvan glades, where flourish some of the finest oaks and beeches in the county. [Illustration: Kinlet Hall.] The Hall and church soon come in sight, the former a fine, spacious structure of brick, with stone quoins, built in the year 1729 by an ancestor of the present proprietor; the original half-timbered mansion, which stood nearer the church, having been pulled down at that time. Though lacking the picturesque variety of an earlier style, Kinlet Hall impresses one by a certain serene dignity as it rises, four-square and ruddy, and flanked by large arched gateways, from the smooth, close-cropped greensward of the home-park; a worthy example of an English country residence of the early Georgian period. Some good ancestral portraits lend interest to the interior, including likenesses of the builder of the existing mansion, and his lady. [Illustration: Kinlet.]