Beautiful as is Ingestre Hall, its situation is hardly less attractive. The ground swells up from the old-fashioned garden into low hills, carpeted with grass, and shaded by fine old trees and clustering copses, which at last sink down into the rich meadows, through which the Trent winds slowly on. Rather below Ingestre it receives its first important affluent, which bears the prosaic name of the Sow. It is a stream of hardly less magnitude, but of less beauty and interest, which comes down a broad and well-marked valley from Stafford; this, though the chief town of the county, possesses little to interest the traveller; it is, however, an important railway junction, and is, besides, busied in shoemaking. The Sow also, before reaching the Trent, receives an affluent which is hardly less than itself. This is the Penk, which rises on the edge of the industrial district of South Staffordshire, and follows a northerly course through pleasant scenery on the western border of Cannock Chase until it meets the Sow. Between the latter river and the Trent lies the estate of Tixall, once the property of the Astons and then of the Cliffords, but purchased some forty years since by the Talbots. The house, which stands nearer to the Sow, is a comparatively modern stone structure, plain and heavy in style, very inferior to the picturesque old dwelling which is represented by Plot, and of which he remarks that "the windows, though very numerous, are scarce two alike;" but the grey and ivy-clad old gateway "a curious piece of stone-work," built in 1589, though dismantled, still remains much as it was when his plate was engraved. It stands just at the foot of the slope, where the low hills die away to the river plain, which here is perhaps half a mile in width; fine old trees cluster thickly in the neighbourhood of the house and around the little village, almost masking its cottages and its tiny church. Down the valley we see the woods of Shugborough closing the view and clothing the opposite slope beyond the union of the two rivers, and above them rises a triumphal arch, a memorial of a former owner of the hall, who was a man of note in his day and generation. [Illustration: RUGELEY, FROM THE STONE QUARRY.]