This lover of the road and all its ways lived to see the old order pass away and railways supplant the crack teams that passed his gates. Endeared to all the coachmen and guards on the Holyhead, and the Chester, and Liverpool roads, he was the recipient in 1812 of what was called “a Token of gratitude presented by the Coachmen and Guards of the ‘Lion’ Establishment, Shrewsbury.” This took the form of a silver salver purchased with a subscription of a hundred and twenty guineas. The presentation was made in the course of a dinner at the “Lion” by Isaac Taylor, himself, as the guest of the evening truly said, “one of the most spirited and respected coach-proprietors in the kingdom.” It was an occasion marked by much compliment, and much enthusiasm for the road, but the glory had already waned. Four years before, the London and Birmingham Railway had cleared the greater part of the Holyhead Road of its coaches, and the “Wonder” itself, from the smartest four-horse coach in England had become a two-horse conveyance; but still a wonder, the wonder being that it could, in the face of the railway advance, have kept the road at all.
Nine years later, in 1851, the Honourable Thomas Kenyon died, and was laid to rest in the church of West Felton.
Beyond that straggling village, at a point where a branch of the Ellesmere canal runs athwart the road and is lost in a long perspective to the right, is the hamlet called “Queen’s Head,” taking its name from the old coaching-inn of that name still presenting a stolid red face to the highway. The inn, the road, the canal, and a deserted toll-house all tell a tale of the havoc wrought by the railway. It was a busy place once, for many coaches changed at the inn, and on the old grass-grown wharves of the canal many a ton of goods was unloaded from the barges that in times gone by passed in great numbers, laden with coals, bricks, and manure. It is also the point whence a branch road, going through Whittington, and rejoining the main Holyhead Road at Gobowen, saves a mile by avoiding Oswestry altogether.
Along that road lies the road to Halston, where, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, lived the Mad Squire, Jack Mytton, of whose exploits we have already heard something at Shrewsbury. He came of the ancient family of Mytton, and traced a distinguished ancestry from 1373, when Reginald de Mutton, as the name was then spelled, was a Member of Parliament for the county town. Between that time and his own there were Myttons who left names honoured in the law and in the service of King and Country, and had always held a tight hand upon Halston; handing from father to son, a fine estate and a handsome rent roll.