 | 76 BROMSGROVE. Head, Pug's Hole Allotment, The Lear, Devil's Den, Cobnail, Jack's Croft, Patch Leasow, &c. The Lickey - well known to travellers from Birmingham to Worcester and Gloucester - is a hilly district of a very charming character. It is now a chapelry formed out of the outlying portions of the parishes of Bromsgrove and Kingsnorton and part of the district of Catshill. It has a population of about 1,400, and nail-making is the principal occupation. There are a church, several dissenting chapels, and schools. The old coaching time over the Lickey was a much more romantic affair than the present mode of rushing through its cutting by means of steam. Within living memory this district was almost entirely unenclosed, being a thinly-populated waste; it presented a steep ridgy surface, picturesquely tinted with heath and grass, and small plantations of fir and larch. Gradually it was brought into cultivation, and the slopes and ravines are now dotted with the humble cottages of the nailers and agricultural labourers. When coaches ceased running, all this beauty was lost to the traveller, unless he made a special visit; and it is much to be wondered at that the Lickey is not covered with villas of the Birmingham manufacturers, or that boarding-houses are not constructed. To show what a demand there is for houses here, I am informed that some time ago there were twenty-five applications for one house to let! There are two good inns, excellent fishing, botanising, and geologising, and a railway station within two miles (Barnt Green). Bromsgrove has given birth to many noted characters, and among others were William de Bremesgrave, Abbot of Hales Owen in 1369; William Dugard, master of Merchant Tailors' School, London, in 1644, who was imprisoned in Newgate for being concerned in printing Salmasius's Defence of Charles I; Jonathan Kimberley, a famed preacher in the University, and chaplain in ordinary to Charles II; John Flavel, a celebrated Nonconformist and author, who was one. of the "ejected," in 1662, at Dartmouth; Dr. John Hall, |