of Buckingham, when unable to cross the river with his army at its mouth.  Shakspere alludes to the event, in “King Richard,” thus:—

“The news I have to tell your majesty
Is, that by sudden flood and fall of waters,
Buckingham’s army is dispersed and scatter’d,
And he himself wandered away alone,
No man knows whither.”

Tradition says that the fallen nobleman was betrayed by an old servant to whom the wood belonged, named Bannister; and an old writer thus records the curses which he says befel the traitor: “Shortly after he had betrayed his master, his

sonne and heyre waxed mad, and dyed in a bore’s stye; his eldest daughter, of excellent beautie, was sodaynelie stryken with a foulle leperze; his seconde sonne very mervalously deformed of his limmes; his younger sonne in a smal puddell was strangled and drowned; and he, being of extreme age, arraigned and found gyltie of a murther, was only by his clergye saved; and as for his thousand pounde, Kyng Richard gave him not one farthing, saying that he which would be untrew to so good a master would be false to al other; howbeit some saie that he had a smal office or a ferme to stoppe his mouthe withal.”

CRESSAGE

Is forty-three miles from Worcester, and eight and a half from Shrewsbury.  The name is an abbreviation of Christsache, ache

been the old Saxon term for oak.  The folk-lore of the district is, that the old tree was one under which the early Christian missionaries preached, that it stood in the centre of the village, and that upon its decay it was supplanted by a market cross, which cross itself has disappeared.  Our engraving represents another of these venerable trees standing a quarter of a mile from the village, known as the Lady Oak.

Before the railway caused a deviation in the road, it stood by the wayside, where it was regarded with veneration by the inhabitants, who cramped it with iron, and propped it with blocks of wood to preserve it; they also planted an acorn within its hollow trunk, from which, as will be seen by our engraving, a young tree mingles its foliage with that of the parent oak.  About a mile from Cressage is Belswardine, the seat of Sir George Harnage, an old border estate, in

possession of the same family which received it from the Conqueror.  Cressage station is the nearest and most convenient on the Severn Valley line from which to reach the Wrekin.  The distance is three miles.  The road crosses the river by an ancient wooden bridge, and at Eaton Constantine passes the house in which Richard Baxter lived when a boy; and which the great Puritan divine describes as “a mile from the Wrekin Hill.”  The visitor, in his ascent of the hill, passes a conical knoll of deep red syenite, clothed with verdure, and known as Primrose Hill.  The summit is 1,320 feet above the level of the sea, and commands a prospect embracing a radius of seventy miles.  Our engraving represents a severed cliff of greenstone at the top, called the Needle’s Eye, and which tradition alleges to have been riven at the Crucifixion.  Near it is a culminating boss of pinkish felspar known as the Bladder Stone, a name derived, it is supposed, from Scandinavian mythology; whilst at a short distance is the Ravens’ Bowl, a basin in the hard rock, always containing water.  On its sides are stratified rocks which the trap has pierced in its ascent; and which, by the action of heat, have been changed into a white crystalline substance.  At the northern termination is an entrenched fortification called Heaven Gate, supposed to be of British origin; and near it is another, called Hell Gate, with what is supposed to be a tumulus.  In the valley at the foot of the hill, on the eastern side, tumuli have been opened, in which hundreds of spear heads and other broken weapons have been found.  Here formerly,

“Unknown to public view,
From youth to age a reverend hermit grew.
The moss his bed, the cave his humble cell,
His food the fruit, his drink the crystal well.
Remote from man, with God he passed his days,
Prayer all his business—all his pleasure praise.”

Henry III., in order to afford the said anchorite, Nicholas de Denton, greater leisure for holy exercises, and to support him during his life, or so long as he should be a hermit on the aforesaid mountain, granted him six quarters of corn, to be paid by the Sheriff of Shropshire out of the Town’s Mills of Bridgnorth.

On leaving Cressage, Eyton-upon-Severn is seen on the

right, and on an eminence close by is the “Old Hall,” built by Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas Bromley.  It was the birthplace of Lord Herbert of Chirbury, of whom Ben Jonson wrote:—

“If men get fame for some one virtue, then
What man art thou that art so many men,
All virtuous Herbert! on whose every part
Truth might spend all her voice, Fame all her art?”

The railway now passes Cound Hall, Cound Church, and Cound Mill, a manor which Henry III. gave to his brother-in-law, Llewellyn, and which was afterwards held by Walter Fitz-Alan, who entered the service of David, King of Scotland, and became head of the royal house of Stuart.  It crosses the Devil’s Causeway, and passes Venus Bank, with Pitchford and Acton Barnell on the left; the latter celebrated for the ruins of the old castle where Edward I. held his parliament, the Commons sitting in a barn.

Berrington, forty-seven miles from Worcester, and four and a half from Shrewsbury, lies a short distance from the station.  Its church has many points of interest, being of Anglo-Norman and Early English architecture; it also possesses a fine Norman font, and a curious monumental figure of a cross-legged knight, carved in wood.

The little village of Atcham may be reached from here by a very pleasant foot walk of about a mile through the fields.  It is celebrated as the birthplace of Ordericus Vitalis, chaplain to William the Conqueror, and a famous historian of that time.  The church is an ancient structure reared on the little grassy flat round which the river bends; tresses of luxuriant ivy conceal its walls, in which are found sections of a Roman arch and a sculptured Roman column, part of the spoil of the city of Uriconium.  Among its relics is a reading-desk, carved, it

is supposed, by Albert Durer, with panels representing passages in the parable of the Prodigal Son.