Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/358

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Walks in the Black Country

beside supplying his family with milk and cream. Few dairies in England can exhibit such a high average of production.

We have now radiated these walks from Birmingham in a westerly direction through the Black Country. With a winding walk through it from south to north, we will bring our notes on the district to a close.

The whole of the Black Country between Birmingham and Wolverhampton is a nebula of coal and iron towns, making one great cloud of industrial communities, interspersed with many centres of deeper density, each of which has a town or parish name, and gives it to a space of thinner shade that surrounds it. Smethwick is one of these centres of population and industry, and is the seat of several large establishments, including The London Works of the Patent Bolt and Nut Company, Patent File Company, and several other extensive manufactories. Soho, a centre of mechanical genius and enterprise which once put forth such an influence over the world under Boulton and Watt, has lost its pre-eminence since their day. Still important works are carried on in the parish, of which those established by the late George Frederick Muntz, M.P., for the manufacture of Metal Sheathing, are the most noted and extensive. Oldbury has perhaps as