The Holyhead Road: The Mail-coach Road to Dublin. Vol. 2Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Holyhead Road: The Mail-coach Road to Dublin. Vol. 2
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
A5 Road (England and Wales); England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
Electric tramways now run through Queen Square to all parts of this
modern and progressive borough, and new streets and new buildings of
both a business and a public character have changed the squalid and
formless character of the town into something very different; while
pleasant suburbs extend far into the country districts.
XII
At Tettenhall the borough of Wolverhampton ends, and with it the Black
Country. Crossing over the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, the
road makes direct for Tettenhall Hill, eased in its course by a long
embankment in the hollow, and by a deep cutting through the red rocks of
the hill-top, but still a formidable rise. The old road, however, was
infinitely worse. Its course may still be traced branching off to the
left by the “Newbridge Inn,” where the old toll-house used to stand, and
plunging down into the hollow where Wolverhampton’s only watercourse,
the Smestow brook, trickles under a narrow bridge, thought to enshrine
among its stones some remains of Roman masonry. Thence the old way rose
steeply, and went partly through grounds now private, and up “Old Hill,”
where a bye-road still zig-zags with an extravagant steepness between
sheer rocks. Here is the chief part of old Tettenhall village, much the
same as it was a hundred years ago, and, with the exception of an ugly
modern hotel built on the summit of the rocks, untouched by the life and
changes of all the revolutionary years that have passed since Telford
cut the new road and left this in a quiet backwater of life.
Tettenhall church and pretty churchyard are cut off from the rest of the
village by the modern Holyhead Road. Half-way up the hillside, and
overhung with trees, the old-fashioned rural spot overlooks
Wolverhampton, seated in smoky majesty on its ridge.
[Illustration: OLD HILL, TETTENHALL.]
In the crowded churchyard they show the confiding stranger a stone with
the much flattened and battered figure of a woman, and recount the
legend of it being the memorial of a seamstress who worked on Sundays,
and when reproached for it replied that if it were wrong she hoped her
arms would drop off. Her arms dropped off accordingly the next Sunday,
when plying her needle! The stone is really a much mutilated effigy from
some ancient tomb, cast out of the church so long ago that every feature
has been worn away; but it will be noticed that the arms have been
hacked off at the shoulders.
[Illustration: THE SABBATH-BREAKING SEAMSTRESS.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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