restore the ruins of Shrewsbury Castle as a dwelling-house, he
sought out the young mason who had attended to his Scotch property,
and asked him to superintend the proposed alterations in his
Shropshire castle. Nor was that all: by Mr. Pulteney's influence,
Telford was shortly afterwards appointed to be county surveyor of
public works, having under his care all the roads, bridges, gaols,
and public buildings in the whole of Shropshire. Thus the Eskdale
shepherd-boy rose at last from the rank of a working mason, and
attained the well-earned dignity of an engineer and a professional
man.

Telford had now a fair opportunity of showing the real stuff of
which he was made. Those, of course, were the days when railroads
had not yet been dreamt of; when even roads were few and bad; when
communications generally were still in a very disorderly and
unorganized condition. It is Telford's special glory that he
reformed and altered this whole state of things; he reduced the
roads of half Britain to system and order; he made the finest
highways and bridges then ever constructed; and by his magnificent
engineering works, especially his aqueducts, he paved the way
unconsciously but surely for the future railways. If it had not
been for such great undertakings as Telford's Holyhead Road, which
familiarized men's minds with costly engineering operations, it is
probable that projectors would long have stood aghast at the
alarming expense of a nearly level iron road running through tall
hills and over broad rivers the whole way from London to
Manchester.

At first, Telford's work as county surveyor lay mostly in very
small things indeed--mere repairs of sidepaths or bridges, which