Far more delightful than automobiling were the leisurely drives we took in the neighbourhood of Shrewsbury. One fair afternoon we drove five miles southeast to Wroxeter to view the tragic ruins of the Roman city of Uriconium. Here, at the junction of Watling Street with the western Roman road, guarding these communications and the passes of the Severn, stood "The White Town in the Woodland." After the Roman armies were withdrawn, it was stormed and burned by the Saxons. The lapse of fourteen hundred years has not obliterated the traces of that anguish. Only a little below the surface lies earth still black from the heats of the tremendous conflagration; charred bones crackle beneath the tread; in an under-chamber of one of the baths has been found the skeleton of an old man crouched between the pillars, as if seeking refuge from the rage of fire and sword. The skeletons of two women were beside him and, close to his bony hand, his little hoard of coins. There still stands a rugged mass of wall some seventy feet in length, its Roman string-courses of flat red bricks showing bright against the prevailing grey of that jagged, gaping structure. Now birds nest in it, and from the lower heaps and ranges of broken masonry all about springs the wild rose as well as the thistle. Uriconium was larger than Pompeii, and its ruins, said to be the most extensive of their kind in England, smite one with heartache. We roamed about its grassy hollows and thicketed mounds, its bone-strewn forum, and its baths with their patches of mosaic flooring, their groups of little brick columns, and other fragments of a perished luxury. We wondered that the sky above this city left so desolate, a sky of softest azure flecked with cloudlets dazzling white, did not wear perpetual shadow for its sake. But those heavens were as serene as if the dying wail of Uriconium had never pierced them, and the cleft summit of Milton's "blue-topped Wrekin"--a deep, intense, gleaming blue it was that afternoon--kept no memory of the day when the Severn ran red with blood and its own head was veiled with smoke and ashes.
The noble Norman church of Wroxeter, near by, has set at its churchyard gate two Roman pillars with finely sculptured capitals that have been recovered from the river-bed. Its font is hollowed out of another Roman capital and looks only half converted. The church is remarkable for its Easter sepulchre, an arched niche in the north wall of the chancel, and for its altar-tombs. This Easter sepulchre, where the crucifix would have been placed on Good Friday to be raised again with rejoicing on Easter morning, is of creamy stone with ball-flower ornament. Within the niche are reddish traces of a Resurrection fresco. The effigies on the altar-tombs have been singularly preserved from mutilation. Even the rings upon those comely hands that clasp their prayer-books in the centuried trance of their devotions remain intact. Here sleeps a Jacobean baronet splendid in scarlet alabaster robes and broad gilt chain. A peacock is at his head and a lion's claw at his feet. His lady, from gold head-dress to dainty shoon, is no less immaculate. May their rest on their stone pillows be forever unprofaned! In that hushed and almost forgotten sanctuary slumber also Elizabethan knights and ladies whose tombs, wrought about with quaint figures, are peculiarly individual and tempted us to closer study than the waning light allowed.