Before the pits and furnaces of the Lilleshall, Oakengates, and Ketley coal and iron mines are reached, the long street of St. George’s has to be passed through. There was a time, not so long since, when this was merely the hamlet of “Pain’s Lane,” and its local makeshift place of worship simply “Pain’s Lane Chapel.” All this is changed, and though its old prosperity has abated, the place now possesses a fine Gothic church dedicated to St. George, and has changed its name to match. Oakengates also has seen its best days, for many of the mines are exhausted. In these latter circumstances, the neat little houses of “Perseverance Place, 1848,” and others with similarly virtuous titles, look not a little pathetic. Perseverance, indulged in continually, has stripped the district of its mineral wealth, and the miners, living like maggots in a cheese, have eaten their home away. The township, at the very bottom of a steep descent, is busy, but dirty and slatternly, with a railway station and level crossing, and huge cinder heaps, likening it to some domestic dustbin in Brobdingnag. Ascending out of it, Ketley is reached, and with it the junction of Watling Street with the Holyhead Road. XXXIV And now to resume, at Weedon, the modern road. It is a tiring pull up out of Weedon, on the way to Daventry, and anything that may excuse a rest is welcome. That excuse is found in the contemplation of a substantial stone-built farmhouse, with nine windows in a row, half a mile out of the village, on the right of the road, and fronted at this day with a pleasant garden. This, now called the “Grange,” was formerly the “Globe” coaching and posting inn. Beyond it, opposite a group of Georgian red-brick wayside houses, the old road goes over what used to be a water-splash in the deep hollow; but Telford’s road proceeds inflexibly onward. The church in the meads to the right is that of Dodford, the name of the water-splash aforesaid. As for the derivation of that name, Fuller, with some hesitancy, gives “‘Dods,’ water-weeds, commonly called by children ‘cat’s-tails,’ growing thereabouts.”