Who among the former feudal owners of Willey built the old hall, is a question which neither history nor tradition serves to solve. Portions of the basement of the old buildings seem to indicate former structures still more ancient, like spurs of some primitive rock cropping up into a subsequent formation. Contrasted with the handsome modern freestone mansion occupied by the Right Hon. Lord Forester close by, the remains shown in our engraving look like a stranded wreck, past which centuries of English life have gone sweeping by. Some of the walls are three feet in thickness, and the buttressed chimneys, and small-paned windows—“set deep in the grey old tower”—make it a fair type of country mansions and a realisation of ideas such as the mind associates with the homes of the early owners of Willey. Although occupying a slight eminence, it really nestles in the hollow, and in its buff-coloured livery it stands pleasingly relieved by the high ground of Shirlot and its woods beyond. In looking upon its quaint gables, shafts, and chimneys, one feels that when it was complete it must have had something of the poetry of ancient art about it. Its irregularities of outline must have fitted in, as it were, with the undulating landscape, with which its walls are now tinted into harmony, by brown and yellow lichens. There was nothing assuming or pretentious about it; it was content to stand close neighbour to the public old coach road, which came winding by from Bridgnorth to Wenlock, and passed beneath the arch which now connects the high-walled gardens with the shaded walk leading to its modern neighbour, the present mansion of the Foresters.