Beyond Weeford, the next landmark, the Watling Street goes straight for three and a half miles, and then brings up against another dead end, where it is crossed by the Lichfield and Birmingham road. A hedge and a ploughed field forbid further progress, and it is only when armed with large-scale maps, and by comparing antiquarian authorities, that the course of the Watling Street can be traced, straight on to Wall. That village is found by following the road to Lichfield until the first left-hand turning is reached, leading, as a steep lane, uphill for a mile. On the hill-top, Wall is found and the Watling Street regained. The tiny village is built over the site of _Etocetum_, of whose ruins some fragments were yet to be seen in Pennant’s time, including portions of the ancient Roman wall giving a name to the place. These have long since disappeared, but in 1887 some excavations here laid bare many foundations heaped with the ruins of Roman civilisation, among whose oddments were found roofing-slates from Bangor and lime from Walsall. If thorough search were made, much more might be brought to light, for this was an important station in those times, situated at the intersection of the Icknield Street with Watling Street. Below the hill, and on the line of the Icknield Street, is the hamlet or farm called Chesterfield—a significant name, telling of Roman relics. [Illustration: THE WATLING STREET, NEAR HAMMERWICH.] Muckley Corner, beyond Wall, is the meeting-place of roads from Walsall to Lichfield and Wolverhampton. The Watling Street still goes unflinchingly ahead, and reaches the outskirts of Hammerwich, uphill. At that nail-making and coal-mining place, it becomes somewhat confused, but is well-known locally to every man, woman, and child as the “Watling Street Road.” Here it has reached a very high-lying tract, that abomination of desolation called Brownhills. Words are ineffectually employed to describe the hateful, blighted scene; but imagine a wide, dreary stretch of common land, surrounded by the scattered, dirty, and decrepit cottages of a semi-savage population of nail-makers and pitmen, with here and there a school, a woe-begone brick chapel, a tin tabernacle, and a plentiful sprinkling of public-houses. Further, imagine the grass of this wide-spreading common to be as brown, wiry, and innutritious as it is possible for grass to be, and with an extraordinary wealth of scrap-iron, tin-clippings, broken glass, and brickbats deposited over every square yard, and all around it the ghastly refuse-heaps of long-abandoned mines. Finally, clap a railway embankment and station midway across the common, and there you have a dim adumbration of what Brownhills is like.