The Great Western Railway crosses the road on the level, three miles out of the town, at Gobowen, on its way to Chester. Gobowen village itself is utterly commonplace, but marks the beginning of one of Telford’s important alterations in setting out a new line of road, in place of the three miles of steep, circuitous, and narrow old road leading from here to the “Bridge Inn” at the crossing of the river Ceiriog. The old road is still in existence, and can be easily explored. It goes off to the left soon after the “Cross Foxes” is passed, beginning where a narrow lane, entered by a turnstile, runs between the “Railway Tavern” and a hideous Wesleyan Chapel: an atrocity in red and yellow brick and blue slates. Having found the old road, you “dinna turn none,” as the Shropshire country folks say, but go straight ahead, up hill and down dale, along a track that in every rut proclaims “old road,” and “disused” in the grass and rubbish plentiful everywhere along its course. At its further end, where the Ellesmere Canal is crossed, the rotting quays by the waterside are faced by a row of cottages and a little general shop, pushed suddenly into the background, as it were, when those two successive blows of fate—the making of the new road and the coming of the railway—took away both the wayfaring and the canal traffic. It is a picture of bygone prosperity and present ruin as complete as ever drawn of any deserted mining town in California. The new road is the model of what a road should be; broad, level, and straight. It passes the estate of Belmont, and was indeed cut through a portion of the Park, sold to the Commissioners for the Parliamentary Road in 1820. To the ground sold for this purpose the Lovetts, who owned Belmont, agreed to add, as a gift, the site for a toll-house, afterwards erected and known as Belmont Bar. One condition was attached to this gift: that if within seventy years the toll-house should no longer be required, the ground should revert to the estate. The Shropshire gates were abolished towards the close of 1883, and the toll-house has, therefore, again become private property.