With that decay the road grew more lonely and dangerous. It had always been a wild country, with robbers roaming the open heaths that spread, forbidding and desolate, where enclosed fields now border the road; and as Shrewsbury and Oswestry grew and trade waxed between them, the plunder to be gained grew more and more tempting. Oswestry was then, and for long after, the chief seat of the Welsh flannel market, and every Monday the Shrewsbury drapers were accustomed to ride to it and back on business. So dangerous was the journey that, even so late as Queen Elizabeth’s time, the drapers, not without due cause, had prayers for their safety read in St. Alkmund’s church before they set out, and were “ordered”—no need for being bidden, one would think—always to go together, and to bear arms. Perhaps it was because their prayers, their companionship, and their arms did not suffice to protect them, that, a few years later, we find them insisting that the Welsh cloth-weavers and flannel-makers should bring their goods to Shrewsbury to be sold. XXVIII Along the road, half a mile or so short of West Felton, on the right hand, stands the lodge guarding the entrance to Pradoe, the home for half a century of that famous whip and amateur of coaching, the Honourable Thomas Kenyon. Whether Pradoe be a corruption of the old Welsh word “Braddws,” meaning “Paradise,” none can now say with certainty, but sure it is that the beautiful park in whose recesses the house is secluded, half a mile from the road, has one of the loveliest outlooks upon the distant Welsh mountains of any domain in this fair county of Shropshire. From the tall windows of the noble drawing-room at Pradoe the landscape slopes down towards where the road runs, hid from view; and in the blue distance, glimpsed between the romantic stems of fir trees, rise the steep sides of the Breiddens, their highest point crowned with the Rodney Pillar. The fame of the Honourable Thomas Kenyon—“His Honour,” as he was known in his day—will not readily be forgot between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, whose nineteen miles he drove times innumerable in his coach and four. His was a prominent figure, any time between 1803 and 1851, among those “country gentlemen of England,” of whom Sir Robert Peel once declared he would rather be the political leader than enjoy the confidence of princes. Whether as a sportsman or a magistrate, “His Honour” was held in the greatest esteem. He was the third son of Lord Chief Justice Kenyon, and was born in 1780 at Gredington, a few miles north of Ellesmere. “Nimrod” has a characteristic passage showing how early Thomas Kenyon’s love of horses developed. “Nimrod” was fifteen years of age at the time, and a guest with his father at Gredington:— “Where are Lloyd and George?” asked Lord Kenyon, wishing that my father might see them. “They are in the garden,” was the answer. “And where is Tom?”