From the lawn and grounds adjoining a path led to the flower-gardens, intersected by gravel walks and grassy terraces, where a sun-dial stood, and where fountains, fed by copious supplies from unfailing springs on the high grounds of Shirlot, threw silvery showers above the shadows of the trees into the sunlight.
Willey, augmented by tracts of Shirlot, which was finally disafforested and apportioned two centuries since, came into possession of the Foresters by the marriage of Brook Forester, of Dothill Park, with Elizabeth, only surviving child and heiress of George Weld, of Willey; and George Forester, “the Squire of Willey,” was the fruit of that marriage.
Squire Forester—His Instincts and Tendencies—Atmosphere of the Times favourable for their Development—Thackeray’s Opinion—Style of Hunting—Dawn of the Golden Age of Fox-hunting, &c.
IT will be seen that around Willey and Willey Hall, associations crowd which serve to make the place a household word and Squire Forester a man of mark with modern sportsmen and future Nimrods, at any rate if we consent to regard the Squire’s characteristics as outcrops of the instincts of an ancient stock. Descended from an ancestry so associated with forest sports and pursuits, he was like a moving plant which receives its nourishment from the air, and he lived chiefly through his senses. He was waylaid, as it were, on life’s path by hereditary tendencies, and his career was chequered by indulgences which, read in the light of the present day, look different from what they then did, when at court and in the country there were many to keep him in countenance. At any rate, Squire Forester lived in what may be called the dawn of the golden age of fox-hunting. We say dawn, because although Lord Arundel kept a pack of hounds some time between 1690 and 1700, and Sir John Tyrwhitt and Charles Pelham, Esq., did so in 1713, yet as Lord Wilton, in his “Sports and Pursuits of the English” states, the first real pack of foxhounds was established in the West of England about 1730. It was a period when, for various reasons, a reaction in favour of the manly sports of England’s earlier days had set in, one being the discovery that those distinguished for such sports were they who assisted most in winning on the battle-fields of the Continent the victories which made the British arms so renowned. Then, as now, it was found that they led to the development of the physical frame—sometimes to the removal of absolute maladies, and supplied the raw material of manliness out of which heroes are made—a view which the Duke of Wellington in some measure confirmed by the remark that the best officers he had under him during the Peninsular War were those whom he discovered to be bold riders to hounds. Lord Wilton, in his book just quoted, goes still further, by contending that “the greatness and glory of Great Britain are in no slight degree attributable to her national sports and pastimes.”