In the park of Shugborough, and for a short distance below this, Trent approaches nearest to the edge of Cannock Chase. Indeed, for rather more than a mile above Wolseley Bridge, opposite the villages of Great Heywood and Colwich, a walk of a furlong, through a mere belt of cultivated land, leads on to an open moor which in some directions extends without a break for miles. The Chase is an undulating upland rising some three or four hundred feet above the valley of the Trent, and often not far from six hundred feet above sea level, a plateau consisting of rolling hills and narrow valleys with steeply shelving sides, composed almost wholly of the "pebble beds"--thick masses of a rather hard and sandy gravel containing pebbles which often are three or four inches in diameter. There is practically no surface soil, and thus the moors offers little temptation to the "land-grabbers." Of late years indeed its area has been diminished, and its beauties not augmented, by considerable enclosures in the neighbourhood of Rugeley and Hednesford, and by the opening of collieries near the latter place. But the new fields do not seem likely to do much more than pay interest on the first expenditure, and the collieries have not been so uniformly successful as to cause apprehensions that, at any rate in the present generation, the moorland will become a "Black Country." Another danger has lately threatened its solitudes, for a tract of Cannock Chase was one of the sites proposed for the meeting of the National Rifle Association in succession to Wimbledon Common. Bisley has been preferred, but there is still a possibility that this tract may be used as a practice ground for the Volunteers of the Midland and Northern counties, in which case the charm of another large segment of the Chase will quickly vanish.