The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE SOMERSET COAST

WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER

The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.

The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.

The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.

The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.

The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike.

The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols.

The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.

The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”

Cycle Rides Round London.

A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.

Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols.

The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”

The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.

The Dorset Coast.

The South Devon Coast.

The Old Inns of Old England. Two Vols.

Love in the Harbour: a Longshore Comedy.

Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey).

Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural.

The Manchester and Glasgow Road: This way to Gretna Green. Two Vols.

The North Devon Coast.

Half Hours with the Highwaymen. Two Vols.

The Autocar Road Book.

The Tower Of London: Fortress, Palace, and Prison.

The Cornish Coast. North. [In the Press.

The Cornish Coast. South. [In the Press.

CLIFTON BRIDGE

THE SOMERSET

COAST

BY

CHARLES G. HARPER

“Somerset, that pleasant londe which

rennith to the Severn Se.”—Fuller.

London: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd.

1909

PRINTED AND BOUND BY

HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,

LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

On confiding to personal friends, journalistic paragraphists, and other Doubting Thomases, professional sceptics, chartered cynics and indifferent persons, the important and interesting literary news that a proposal was afloat to write a book on the Somerset Coast, the author was assured with an unanimity as remarkable as it was disconcerting, that there is no coast of Somerset.

This singular geographical heresy, although totally unsupported by map-makers, who on all maps and charts show a very well-defined seaboard, seems to be widely distributed; but it is not shared by (among others) the inhabitants of Clevedon, of Watchet (where furious seas have twice within the last few years demolished the harbour), of Weston-super-Mare, Burnham, Minehead, or Porlock. The people of all these places think they live on the coast; and it would be really quite absurdly difficult to persuade them that they do not, or that they do not live in Somerset.

This singular illusion, that there is no coast of Somerset, is, however, but one among a number of current fallacies, among which may be included the belief that:

Essex is a flat county.

London is dirty.

The virtuous are necessarily happy;

The wicked equally of necessity miserable.

All Irishmen are witty.

Scotsmen cannot see a joke.

And so forth. Essex is flat, and London grimy, only comparatively. Natives of Huntingdonshire (which is an alternative term for flatness) no doubt think of Essex as a place of hills; and although London may seem grimy to the eyes of a villager from Devon or Cornwall, it is as a City of light and purity to the Sheffielder, the inhabitants of Newcastle, and the people of other such places of gloom.

The coast of Somerset, then, to make a beginning with it, opens with the great port and city of Bristol, on the navigable estuary of the river Avon, and ends at Glenthorne, where the North Devon boundary is met. The distance between these two points is sixty miles. Throughout the entire length of this coastline, that of South Wales is more or less clearly visible; the Bristol Channel being but four and a half miles wide at Avonmouth; seven and a half miles at Brean Down, by Weston-super-Mare, and fifteen miles at Glenthorne.

The foreshore of a great part of this coast is more or less muddy; the Severn, which you shall find to be a tea or coffee-coloured river, even at Shrewsbury a hundred miles or so up along its course, from the particles of earth held in suspension, depositing much of this, and the even more muddy rivers Avon and Parret contributing a larger proportion. The “Severn Sea,” as poetical and imaginative writers style this estuary, known to matter-of-fact geographers as the “Bristol Channel,” is therefore apt to be of a grey hue, except under brilliant sunshine.

But it would be most unjust to infer from these remarks, that mud, and only mud, is the characteristic of these sixty miles. Indeed, the Somerset Coast is singularly varied, and has many elements of beauty. Between the noble scene of its opening, where the romantic gorge of the Avon, set with rugged cliffs and delightful woods, is spanned by the airy Suspension Bridge of Clifton, and the wood-clad steeps of Glenthorne, you will find such beautiful places as Portishead and Weston, whose scenery no crowds of vulgarians can spoil; and Dunster, Minehead, and Porlock, which need no advertisement from this or any other pen. I have purposely omitted Clevedon from the list above, for it does not appeal to me.

Mud you have, naked and unashamed, practically only at Pill and the outlet of the Avon, and again at Steart and the estuary of the Parret, where those surcharged waters precipitate their unlovely burden. Elsewhere, the purifying sea completely scavenges it away or kindly disguises it. Nay, between Weston and Burnham we have even a long range of sandhills, as pure as the sand-towans of North Cornwall or as the driven snow.[^[1]]

[1]. But this depends largely upon the neighbourhood in which it has been driving.

And further, if we turn our attention to the scenery and the churches and castles and ruined abbeys, or to the associations, of this countryside, we shall find it an engaging succession of districts, comparing well with some better-known and more generally appreciated seaboards.

A specious air of eternal midsummer and sunshine belongs to the name of Somerset. Camden, writing in the first years of the seventeenth century, was not too grave an historian and antiquary to notice the fact; and we find him, accordingly, at considerable pains to disabuse any one likely to be deceived by it. He says, in his great work “Britannia”: “Some suppose its name was given it for the mildness and, as it were, summer temperature of its air.... But as it may be truly called in summer a summer country, so it has as good right to be called a winter one in winter, when it is for the most part wet, fenny and marshy, to the great inconvenience of travellers. I am more inclined to think it derives from Somerton, anciently the most considerable town in the whole country.”

True, it did; for Somerton was until the eighth century the capital of the tribe of Britons known as Somersætas. Their kingdom and their capital were finally swept away by the victorious irresistible advance of the great Saxon kingdom of Wessex, in A.D. 710. Hence Somerset, although we occasionally hear of “Somersetshire,” is not really a shire, in the sense of being a more or less arbitrarily shorn-off division after the fashion of the Midland shires—Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and many others—but is historically an individual entity; the ancient kingdom of the Somersætas, remaining in name, though not in fact; just as Wiltshire, wrongly so-called, is the ancient country of the Wilsætas; Devon the land of the Damnonians, and Cornwall the home of the Cornu-Welsh.

CHAPTER II
THE RIVER AVON—CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE

Bristol, whence one comes most conveniently to the coast of Somerset, is among the most fortunate of cities. It has a long and interesting history, both in the warlike and the commercial sorts, and its citizens have ever been public-spirited men, of generous impulses. (It is not really necessary for the discreet historian to go into the story of Bristol’s old-time thriving business of kidnapping and slave-trading, by which her merchants grew wealthy, and so we will say nothing about it, nor enlarge upon the wealth-producing import of Jamaica rum.) It has many noble and interesting buildings, and a lovely and striking countryside is at its very gates, while the river Avon, to which Bristol owes the possibility of its greatness, flows out to sea, amid the most romantic river scenery in England, at Clifton.

This immense gorge of the Avon was created, according to tradition, A.D. 33, on the day of the Crucifixion, in the course of a world-wide earthquake accompanying that event. Then, according to that strictly unreliable story, the hills were rent asunder, and the ancient British camps at St. Vincent’s and at Borough Walls and Stoke Leigh had the newly formed river Avon set between them. Geologists know better than this, but in the early years of the nineteenth century, when Miss Ann Powell sat upon the heights of Clifton and, contemplating the scene, was filled with great thoughts, which she eventually poured forth in the shape of something then thought to be poetry, the tradition was not considered to be so absurd as it now is. In her “Clifton, a Poem,” published in 1821, we learn some things new to history, especially as to the year A.D. 33. Then, according to Miss Ann Powell, the Romans were encamped here, in victorious arrogance, and the very day of the Crucifixion chanced to be that which the Roman general had fixed for a reception of conquered British chiefs:

Our humbled kings upon his levee wait,

This day appointed as a day of state.

Unfortunately for the poem, the Romans were not in Britain at the time. They had not been here for eighty-seven years, since the last departure of Julius Caesar, in B.C. 54, and were not to land on these shores again until ten years more had passed: in A.D. 43. As a description of an earthquake which did not happen, and an account of disasters which did not befall people who were not here, the poem is a somewhat remarkable production. The authoress herself is so overwrought that she mixes past and present tenses. Let us see how Romans and Britons behaved under the appalling circumstances:

Now darkness fast the distant hills surround;

Beneath their feet, slow trembling, mov’d the ground;

High tempests rose that shook the stately roof,

Nor was the conqu’ror’s heart to this quite proof.

“Sure nature is dissolv’d!” the Roman cry’d.

“Sure nature is dissolv’d!” the guests reply’d.

Now awful thunders with majestic sound,

And vivid lightnings separate the ground;

The crash tremendous fill’d each heart with fear;

The sound of gushing waters strikes the ear.

Ah! now destruction’s hurl’d thro’ earth and sky;

Men seeking safety know not where to fly;

They through the ramparts run to make their way;

The guards lay prostrate there with sore dismay.

The Britons mount their horses—fly in haste:

No time in idle compliments they waste.

How delicious that last line! “No time in idle compliments they waste.” It flings us down from the heights of a world in pieces to the inanities of the “How d’ye do’s” of afternoon teas.

Clifton Suspension Bridge, opened in 1864, is a bridge with a romantic history. From the early years of the eighteenth century it had been proposed to bridge the Avon at or near this point, by some means, and thus save the descent from Clifton to Rownham Ferry, with the uncomfortable and sometimes perilous crossing of the Avon and the climb up to Abbot’s Leigh.

The ferry at Rownham had been the property of the abbots of the Augustinian monastery of Bristol, from 1148, and was of necessity frequently crossed by those dignified churchmen, who in course of time, as the size and trade of Bristol increased, derived a considerable revenue from their rights here, which, at the Reformation, passed to their successors, the Dean and Chapter of Bristol, who in their turn were succeeded by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.

At this point was also a ford, practicable at low water for horsemen, but, as the tide here rises swiftly and to a height of forty-five feet, it was generally of a hazardous character, as seems to be sufficiently shown by the fact that in 1610 one Richard George was drowned in thus crossing, while on December 27th of the same year the eldest son of one Baron Snigge, Recorder of Bristol, met a like fate. On the Bristol side stands, among other houses on the quay, the Rownham Tavern, and on the Somerset shore stood a somewhat imposing hostelry called the “New Inn.” The building of the last-named house of entertainment and refreshment remains to this day, but it is now a species of tea-garden and picnic place, with arbours in which on summer days parties may make modestly merry and listen to the murmur of Bristol’s traffic borne, like a subdued roar, across the river. In the rear of the old house, the single-track Bristol and Portishead branch of the Great Western Railway runs at the foot of the cliffs and presently tunnels under them, below the Suspension Bridge.

The first person ever to put into shape the old aspirations of Bristol for a bridge across the gorge of the Avon at this point was Alderman Vick, of Bristol. He died in 1753, leaving by his will a sum of £1,000, to be invested until the capital sum reached a total of £10,000, a sum he imagined would be sufficient to build a stone bridge here. For seventy-seven years this generous bequest accumulated as he had willed, and by 1830 had reached £8,000. It was then felt, as engineering had already made great strides, and as the suspension principle had been tried in various places, successfully and economically, that the bridging of this gulf should no longer be delayed. It had long been evident that £10,000 would not nearly suffice to build a bridge of any kind here, but it was thought that, if an Act of Parliament were obtained for the undertaking of the work and a company formed, the necessary funds could be found to begin the construction forthwith; the company to be recouped by charging tolls. The Parliamentary powers were therefore obtained, the company formed, capital subscribed, and Telford, the foremost engineer of the day, invited to prepare plans and estimates. Telford’s plan provided for a suspension bridge with two iron towers, and he estimated the cost at £52,000. Telford was an engineer first, a practical, matter-of-fact Scotsman, and not by way of being an artist. His fine, but not sufficiently grandiose, scheme was, therefore, rejected, and that of Brunel, who was next invited to prepare plans, accepted, although his estimate was £5,000 higher. Brunel’s success was undoubtedly due to the picturesque design he made, and the stress he laid upon the fact that the romantic scenery of this spot might easily be ruined by a mere utilitarian structure. The bridge as we see it completed to-day is in essentials his design, but the two great towers from which the roadway is suspended are plain to severity, instead of being, as he had contemplated, richly sculptured. The towers, he explained to the committee of selection, were on the model of the gateways to the ruins of Tentyra, in Egypt, and would harmonise well with the rugged cliffs and hanging woods of Clifton and Abbot’s Leigh.

In 1831 the foundations of Brunel’s bridge were laid, amid great local rejoicings. Felicitations on the occasion were exchanged. Sir Eardley Wilmot, first imagining an Elizabethan Bristolian returned to earth, and, coming to Rownham Ferry, finding the place just the same as he had left it three hundred years earlier, then congratulated all and sundry on this reproach being about to vanish, in the proximate completion of the works, and all was joy and satisfaction.

But money grew scarce; the works were more costly than had been anticipated, and the furious riots of 1831 in Bristol rendered capital shy and fresh funds difficult to obtain. In 1833 Brunel was desired to reduce the estimates, and did reduce them by £4,000, at the cost of sacrificing much of the ornamental work. In 1836 another foundation-stone was laid, and a communication opened in mid-air across the river, by means of an iron bar stretched across. Along this the workmen travelled daily, suspended in a wicker basket; a sight that every day drew fascinated crowds. A demand to cross in this manner at once sprang up among people who wanted a new sensation, and the bridge company earned an appreciable sum by charging for these aerial trips. While the novelty was very new, the fare across was five shillings; it then sank by degrees to half a crown, two shillings, and one shilling. The total sum thus netted was £125.

Delays occurred in 1836 owing to the contractors going bankrupt, but the company itself then assumed the work. In 1840 the great towers were finished, but by 1843 the bridge was still but half finished, although £45,000 had been expended. Money was again very scarce and work was at last stopped, and in 1853 the half of the ironwork and the flooring that had been delivered were sold to satisfy creditors.

Work was again resumed in 1860, an opportunity shortly afterwards arising to cheaply purchase the ironwork of Hungerford Suspension Bridge, which, built by Brunel in 1845 across the Thames, from Hungerford Market, at the foot of Villiers Street, Strand, to the Lambeth shore, at a cost of £100,000, was about to be removed to make way for the iron lattice-girder bridge of the South-Eastern Railway, still a feature of that spot.

Meanwhile, the original Act of Parliament for the building of Clifton Bridge had expired, and it was necessary to obtain new powers, to form a new company, and to raise more funds. All these things were accomplished, not without considerable difficulty. The ironwork of Hungerford Bridge was purchased for £5,000, and the new Act was obtained in 1861. This, however, laid an obligation upon the new company to compensate the owners of Rownham Ferry for any loss. It declared that “persons having a right of ferry across the river Avon called Rownham Ferry may, in some respect, be injured by the building and using of the Bridge; and it is fit, in case such Ferry should be injured or deteriorated thereby, that a fair compensation should be made.” It is understood that this compensation to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, on behalf of the Dean and Chapter of Bristol, the old owners of the ferry, was estimated at £200 per annum.

At length, in spite of a shortness of funds that always accompanied the progress of the enterprise, the bridge was opened in September 1864, and has, in all the time since then, proved to be a great convenience for traffic making for Clevedon and adjacent parts of the coast. It has also been a favourite resort for persons of suicidal tendencies, who have, indeed, often come from great distances for the purpose of putting an end to themselves; being unable to screw up a sufficiency of desperate courage elsewhere. Indeed, instances have been known of apparently sane and contented people, finding themselves on this height, suspended in mid-air, being unable to resist a sudden impulse to fling themselves off, and many others there are who, afraid of losing command over themselves, have never yet dared face the crossing.

Mere figures do not suffice to give an idea of the majesty and sense of vastness conjured up by Clifton Suspension Bridge, viewed either from below, or along its lengthy roadway; the picturesqueness of the situation has also to be taken into account. But they must needs be given. The suspended roadway between the two great towers is 703 feet in length and some 34 feet wide, and hangs 245 feet above the river Avon. The towers themselves are 80 feet in height. The entire weight of the bridge is 1,500 tons. The toll payable by foot-passengers is the modest one of one penny each. Motor-cars pay sixpence for a single journey, or ninepence returning the same day. A curious privilege was secured by Sir John Greville Smyth, Bart., of Ashton Court, who very appreciably helped on the construction by taking £2,500 shares in the company, and by a gift of a further £2,500. In consideration of his generosity, no tolls were payable by him personally, or any of his horses, carriages, or servants, or by the owner for the time being of Ashton Court, for a period of thirty years from the opening of the bridge.

Engineers and men of science tell us that suspension bridges and the like structures are safest when they swing most. There can, therefore, at any rate, be no doubt of the entire safety of Clifton Suspension Bridge, which vibrates sensibly to a vigorous stamp of the foot; alarmingly to those who have not thoroughly assimilated that engineering rough formula of stability. That there can be too much sway or vibration is evident by the traffic across being strictly limited in speed; while the theory of a sudden application of heavy weights being likely to snap the chains and rods that hold up the roadway is endorsed by companies of soldiers marching this way being always bidden to change step. It should, however, be said that not all engineers support this theory.

The great tower rising massively above the Somerset bank of the Avon bears an inscription carved prominently upon its stonework: a Latin inscription, a belated example of the priggish classicism, beloved by pedants in the eighteenth century, which set up, all over the country, statements wholly unintelligible to ninety-nine out of every hundred wayfarers. “Suspensa vix via fit,” says this monumental line—that is to say, rendered into English, “With difficulty can a roadway be suspended.” The thing is self-evident anywhere, and much more so here, when you gaze from this suspended roadway down upon the gulf, and on to the tall masts of some sailingvessel arriving at, or leaving, the port of Bristol. The various attempts made by passers-by at an understanding of the Latin sentence are amusing, but the toll-taker appears to have arrived at the sense of it, by favour, no doubt, of some one learned in the dead languages; for he was observed by the present writer to answer the inquiries of two ladies in this wise: “Well, you see, it’s a bit above me; but I’ve always been given to understand it to mean that this yer bridge was made with great difficulty.”

CHAPTER III
ABBOT’S LEIGH TO CLEVEDON

It is a hilly road that leads from Clifton Bridge to Abbot’s Leigh, through the noble Leigh Woods. Nightingale Valley lies down on the right; a beautiful seclusion, well-named from those songsters of early summer. Looking down upon it is the ancient camp of Borough Walls. An enterprising Land Company has acquired building rights here from Sir H. Miles, owner of these woods and of Leigh Court, and has recently built a number of charming detached residences, irregularly disposed among the glades; and far advanced, in disposition, in planning, and in architectural style, beyond the methods in vogue when the suburban villas built nearer the bridge were erected, from about 1870 to 1890.

AVONMOUTH, FROM PILL.

Three miles, bearing to the right, bring the traveller down to the Avon estuary again, at the hillside and waterside village of Pill; a queer little place, clinging and huddling closely to the steep banks, and ending in a short quay, where pilots and other strange waterside folk lean and sit on walls and look across to Avonmouth, plainly visible on the Gloucestershire shore, at the meeting of the Avon and the Bristol Channel; a distant congeries of clustered masts, great warehouses, railway signal-posts, and puffs of smoke and steam: all signs of the great series of docks constructed by the somewhat belated enterprise of Bristol, between 1880 and 1908. The delays and dangers attending the progress of modern shipping up and down the Avon, to and from the docks of Bristol city, have long hindered the expansion of the port, and have left Bristol behind in that race for commercial greatness in which Liverpool and Glasgow have emerged foremost; and now it remains to be seen what the expenditure of millions will be able to effect in recovering tonnage and redressing the balance of missed opportunities. There is a ferry across to Shirehampton from Pill and those eager for light on the subject may readily make the passage into Gloucestershire and satisfy themselves on the spot of the likelihood of Avonmouth’s future prosperity. The rise of Avonmouth, at any rate, means loss to the pilots of Pill, in the diminished call there will be for their services in guiding vessels up and down the muddy meanderings of the Avon.

A pleasant land opens out before the traveller who wends from Pill through Easton-in-Gordano (called for short, “St. George’s”) and Portbury, to Portishead, where the open coast is first reached.

Portishead is almost wholly delightful. The straggling village is surprisingly unspoiled, considering its nearness to Bristol and the fact that places further removed have been ruined by overmuch building in recent times. There are docks, with an area of some twelve acres, at Portishead, in the level lands below the great bluff of Woodhill and Black Nore, and there is a single-track railway, with a terminus here; but the brilliant future once prophesied and confidently expected for Portishead docks has not yet been realised; and now that the great modern docks of Avonmouth have been opened, there is even less prospect of those of Portishead coming into that predicted success.

Attempts have been made to popularise Portishead, but as the derelict villas on the wooded crest of Woodhill sufficiently prove, entirely without success, and the beautiful underwoods, traversed in every direction by footpaths, and commanding fine views over the Channel, are as yet unspoiled. There is great beauty in this outlook upon the narrow Channel; great beauty alike in the outlook and in the spot whence it is obtained. It is not found in the hue of the water, which is here coffee-coloured; but rather in the glimpses across the five-mile-wide estuary to another land—to Monmouthshire—where the misty levels of Caldicot are relieved by a gleam on Goldcliff.

On this side the estuary are the long levels beyond Avonmouth, in Gloucestershire, ending in the sudden rise of cliff at Aust, where the Old Passage across the dangerous Severn was situated in the old coaching days, before railways and the Severn Tunnel were thought of.

This boldly projecting hill of Portishead commands the entire panorama of the shipping that comes to and from the docks at Gloucester and Avonmouth; and every wind that blows beats against it, so that the scrub woods are closely knitted and compacted together. It is a place of piercing cold and howling blasts in winter, and in summer the most invigorating spot on the Somerset coast. The ivy-clad, storm-tossed dwarf oaks and gnarled thorns reach down to the low, black, seaweedy rocks, and here and there are fine houses, with gardens and conservatories, perched within reach of the spray.

Woodhill Bay, westward of this windy point, is as sheltered as the heights of Woodhill are exposed. Near by is the imposing new Nautical School, which has replaced the old Formidable training-ship that for many years was a familiar sight in the anchorage of King Road.

The rise and fall of the tide at Portishead, ranging from 33 feet at neaps to 44 feet at spring-tides, is said to be the greatest, not only in England, but in Europe.

IN PORTISHEAD CHURCH.

The old village of Portishead is quite distinct from the modern Portishead just described. A broad straggling street, a mile long, connects the two. Some very charming old-world houses are clustered around this original inland Portishead, whose noble pinnacled church-tower, rising in four stately stages, is one of the finest in these parts of Somerset. The north aisle has towards its east end a transverse masonry strainer, built in the middle of the fifteenth century to prevent the walls collapsing, owing to a subsidence of the soil. As in the case of the great stone inverted arches inserted to support the central tower of Wells Cathedral, a century earlier, the architects employed have attempted to mask the merely utilitarian addition by decorative treatment. The attempt has here met with a greater degree of success than was possible at Wells, and although the broad arch spanning the north aisle has obviously no ecclesiastical use or purport, save that of shoring up walls that were in danger of falling, it is not the offensive blot it might, with less careful treatment, easily have been made.

At Portishead is the terminus of that quaint short railway, some twelve miles in length with the long many-jointed name, like some lengthy goods-train—the Weston, Clevedon, and Portishead Light Railway; familiarly (for life is short and busy) the “W.C. and P.L.R.” This is a single-track line, of ordinary gauge, originally planned for a steam-tramway, when the Parliamentary powers for its construction, as between Weston and Clevedon, were first obtained in 1887. The Act authorising the extension to Portishead was obtained in 1898.

The first portion, between Weston and Clevedon, was opened December 1st, 1897. In the interval between 1887 and 1897 the Light Railways Act had been passed, and the methods of construction were modified in accordance. This was the first line to be opened under the Light Railways Act, and has therefore the interest attaching to a pioneer. The W.C. and P.L.R. has, in the few years it has been opened, conferred many benefits upon a district almost wholly agricultural and hitherto peculiarly inaccessible.

The coast between Portishead and Clevedon is formed principally by the long steeply shelving hill-range known for the greater part of its length as Walton Down, thickly covered with woods. The road on to Clevedon runs in the valley formed between the landward dip of these heights and the rise of other hills yet further inland, dominated by the camp-crested summit of Cadbury Hill. In the pleasant vale thus formed, runs easily the W.C. and P.L.R. aforesaid.

There are two villages along this road, Weston and Walton, both equipped with the “Gordano” suffix, lest they should, perhaps, be confounded with other Westons and Waltons. They are not remarkable villages, and the church at Walton has been rebuilt; so that the place holds no particular interest for the stranger. But the church of Weston-in-Gordano, a small Perpendicular building, retains in its porch an unusual and very interesting feature: a wooden musicgallery over the doorway, approached by a short flight of stone steps in the thick side wall of the porch itself. This gallery appears to have been used by the church choir in olden times, principally for the singing of the canticle for Palm Sunday, “Gloria Laus et Honor,” and for Christmas hymns; but it has, for centuries past, remained unused and is now merely an archæological curiosity.

As the stranger approaches Clevedon, his attention cannot fail to be attracted by a singular castle-like group of buildings upon the skyline, on the right hand. This is the so-called “Walton Castle,” built in the reign of James the First by the Paulets, then owners of the surrounding lands, as a hunting-lodge. Castle-building after the mediæval style had long been extinct, but this lodge was designed, for picturesqueness’ sake, in that old manner. It is a flimsy and fast-decaying sham.

CHAPTER IV
CLEVEDON—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: COLERIDGE

Clevedon is now entered by the modern suburban developments of Walton Park. Suburbs and light railways, and all the things they mean, do not come into the minds of those who have merely read of Clevedon and have not been there. Clevedon to these untravelled folk means Coleridge and Tennyson and Hallam, a certain “quiet cot,” a stately Court and a lone church on a hilltop, overlooking the Severn Sea. These are essentials; the rest is incidental. But when you come at last to Clevedon, you discover, with a pained surprise to which you have no sort of a right, that the position is altogether reversed: these literary landmarks and associations are the incidentals, and the essentials—well, what are they? It would puzzle even an old-established resident of Clevedon to say. Nothing matters very much at Clevedon—except that half the houses are to let; and that is a matter of moment only to the owners of them and to the tradesfolk. How do people make shift to pass the time here? They don’t care for literature: they don’t stroll the sands, for there are none; and they don’t walk, for it is a neighbourhood of atrocious hills, except on the way to the railway-station, the dust-destructor, and the gas-works.

What is it, then, they do? I will tell you. They sit upon the rocks, waiting for the next mealtime and refusing (rightly) to support the miserable creatures who, calling themselves “pierrots,” infest the front. In the exiguous public gardens old ladies of both sexes knit impossible and useless articles or pretend to read the newspapers, and wonder why they ever came to the place.

The paradoxical tragedy of Clevedon is that there is at once too little and too much of it: too little sea-front, and a great deal too much of the town in these later times built beside it; but the place must indeed have been delightful in 1795, at the time when Samuel Taylor Coleridge brought his bride here from Bristol, where they had been married, in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe. He was twenty-three, and a visionary immersed in German metaphysics and the Kantean philosophy; and had but recently been bought out of the 15th Light Dragoons, in which in a moment of despair and starvation, he had enlisted. Four months of military duties untempered with glory, but strongly savoured with riding-lessons and stable-fatigue, did not make him a more practical man; and he remained in all the sixty-two years that made up his span of life, although the most gifted of all the clever Coleridge family, an amiable dreamer.

The dreams in which he and Southey and other friends were at this time immersed were concerned with a fantastic kind of Socialism they were pleased to style a “Pantisocracy,” in which ideal state all property was to be held in common, and all spare time was to be occupied with literature; a truly terrible prospect! This ideal community was to be established in North America, on the Susquehanna river, there to live a life of plain living and high thinking, punctuated with washing up the domestic dishes, weeding the potato-patch, and propagating a new generation of prigs. But money was needed for the starting of this pretty and pedantic scheme, and because “Pantisocracy” (Heavens! what a name!) did not appeal, and was never likely to appeal, to any one who was master of any honest coin of the realm, it remained a vision. It failed for want of money; and, human nature being what it is, it would still have failed disastrously had funds been provided.

So our Pantisocrats remained in England; “Myrtle Cottage,” Clevedon, remaining for a little while the address of the Coleridges, until they removed to Nether Stowey. We may fairly suppose that here this wayward genius, a brilliant talker, a poet of gorgeous ideas and noble language, but a man constitutionally infirm of purpose, and made yet more inconstant by deep reading of mystical German philosophy that led to mental blind alleys, lived the happiest time of his life. We obtain an early first glimpse of him—the second day after arrival—in his letter to Cottle, the amiable and helpful bookseller of Bristol, who greatly befriended Coleridge and Southey when they needed friendship most:

To his “dear Cottle” he wrote, October 6th, 1795: “Pray send me a riddle, slice, a candle-box, two ventilators, two glasses for the washstand, one tin dust-pan, one small tin tea-kettle, one pair of candlesticks, one carpet-brush, one flour dredge, three tin extinguishers, two mats, a pair of slippers, a cheese toaster, two large tin spoons, a Bible, a keg of porter, coffee, raisins, currants, catsup, nutmegs, allspice, cinnamon, rice, ginger, and mace.”

COLERIDGE’S COTTAGE, CLEVEDON.

The imagination readily pictures the essentially unpractical Samuel Taylor Coleridge, certainly not well versed in domestic economy, taking down this list of household small gear from his “pensive Sara”; prepared, with the receipt of them, to open his campaign for existence against an indifferent world.

He sang the praises of that early home in no uncertain manner:

Low was our pretty cot; our tallest rose

Peeped at the chamber window. We could hear

At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,

The sea’s faint murmur. In the open air

Our myrtle blossomed; and across the porch

Thick jasmins twined: the little landscape round

Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye.

It was a spot which you might aptly call

The Valley of Seclusion!

You might indeed so call it now, if inclined to poetry, but you would be wholly wrong. The painful fact must be recorded that “Myrtle Cottage” stands beside the road, directly on the busiest route between the railway-station and the sea-front (such as the sea-front is), and that flys, “charleybanks,” wagonettes, motor-cars, and all conceivable traffic come this way. Indeed, this cottage and its trim fellow are now almost the only vestiges in the road left of the Clevedon that Coleridge knew. What little remained of the rocky bluff at the back is now being actively blasted and quarried away by the local authority, in its attempt—highly successful, too—at matching the place with the London district of Notting Hill. Property owners have already filled Clevedon with stuccoed semi-“Italian” villas on the Ladbroke Grove model, that became discredited a generation ago; the kind of property that has dismal semi-underground dungeons called “breakfast-rooms” (by way of a penitential beginning of the day), and long flights of stone steps to the front door, alleged to be ornamental, and certainly excessively tiring. This is a kind of property that never, or rarely, lets nowadays; and Clevedon has many empty villas.

The white-paled, red-tiled trim cottages—Coleridge’s and another—are among the pleasantest sights of Clevedon, by reason of their unconventional, homely style, and the fine trees that surround and overhang them. Tiles, you will observe, have replaced the thatch of the poet’s description; but the jessamine still twines over the porch. Five pounds a year, the landlord paying the taxes; that was the rent of this then idyllic spot.

It should here be added that doubts have recently been expressed as to the genuine nature of the tradition that makes “Myrtle Cottage” the temporary home of Coleridge. And not only have these doubts been expressed, but very strongly worded statements have been made, to the effect that the real Coleridge Cottage was in the valley at East Clevedon, adjoining Walton-in-Gordano. But the matter is controversial, and at any rate the legend—if, indeed, it be but a legend—that has attached to the cottage popularly known as Coleridge’s, has had so long a start that it will be difficult, if not impossible, ever to demolish it.

CHAPTER V
CLEVEDON (continued)—LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS: TENNYSON

But Clevedon has more prominent literary associations than that just considered, and has a place unforgettable in poetry by reason of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” that lengthy poem written by the future laureate to the memory of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, who, born in 1811, died untimely, at the age of twenty-two, in September 1833.

Arthur Hallam, a son of that Henry Hallam who is generally alluded to as “the historian”—although it would puzzle most of those airy, allusive folk to name offhand the historical works of which he was the author—would appear to have been in posse an Admirable Crichton. He composed poetry and wrote philosophical essays at a tender age, thought great and improving things, and had already begun to set up as something of a paragon, when death rendered impossible the fulfilment of this early promise. There were at that time some terribly earnest young men, ready and willing—if not realty able—to set the world right. Prophets and seers abounded in that dark first half of the nineteenth century, when religion was at odds with the comparatively new era of steam and machinery. Each one had a panacea for the ills of the age, and each had his own little band of devoted admirers, devoted on condition that he should in his turn spare a little admiration for those who hung upon his words and doings. Prigs and prodigies stalked the earth, preaching new gospels. They formed mutual-admiration societies, wherein each protested how vastly endowed with all the virtues and all the intellect possible was the other; and before they had outgrown their legal definition of “infants” and had come of age and become technically men, were ready with criticisms and appreciations of Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare, and were laying down the laws of conduct in this life, with speculations upon what awaits us in the next. It was a morbid, unhealthy generation; but at the same time, these sucking philosophers were not without the tradesman instinct, and zealously combined to advertise one another. Thus, the early Tennysonian circle at Cambridge was a Society of Mutual Encouragement, with its eyes well fixed on publicity. How valuable were some of these early friendships may well be guessed from the one outstanding fact that it was Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, one of this circle, who at an early date, when Tennyson himself was little more than a hopeful promise as a poet, procured by his influence with Sir Robert Peel, the then Prime Minister, a pension of £200 a year for his friend. It fortunately proved a wise selection; but in the case of Tennyson’s over-elaborate post-mortem praise of his friend Hallam, we have foisted upon us a very high estimate of one who, although engaged to the poet’s sister, Emily, and thus additionally endeared to him, had not yet proved himself beyond this narrow circle. He was, therefore, no fitting subject for the “rich shrine,” as Tennyson himself styled it, of “In Memoriam,” but should have been mourned privately.

The connection of the Hallams with Clevedon was through the mother of Arthur. She was a daughter of Sir Abraham Elton, of Clevedon Court. Arthur Hallam died in Austria, and his body was brought to Clevedon for burial; hence the allusion in the poem, in that metre Tennyson fondly imagined himself had originated:

The Danube to the Severn gave

The darkened heart that beat no more:

They laid him by the pleasant shore,

And in the hearing of the wave.

There twice a day the Severn fills;

The salt sea-water passes by

And hushes half the babbling Wye,

And makes a silence in the hills.

The Wye is hushed nor moved along,

And hushed my deepest grief of all,

When filled with tears that cannot fall,

I brim with sorrow drowning song.

The tide flows down, the wave again

Is vocal in its wooded walls;

My deeper anguish also falls,

And I can speak a little then.

Clevedon church was selected as the resting-place of Arthur Henry Hallam, “not only from the connection of kindred, but on account of its still and sequestered situation on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel.”

CLEVEDON.

Much has been altered at Clevedon since 1833, when that decision was made. The village has become a small town, of some six thousand inhabitants, and although the ancient parish church is still at the very fringe of modern boarding-house and lodging-house developments, yet no one could now have the hardihood to describe its position as “lone.”

All this, if you do but consider awhile, is entirely in keeping with the change of sentiment since that time when the poem was written. Everything is more material. We no longer examine our souls at frequent intervals, to see how they are getting on—after the manner of children with garden plants. The practice is equally injurious to souls and to plants. Yes, even in this material age, among those who have not forgotten or denied their God there is a better spirit than that which characterises the “In Memoriam” period. The faith that is demanded of the Christian—the faith of little children—was not in these troubled folk. The assurance we have of Divine infinite goodness and mercy was not sufficient for them. They must needs enquire and speculate, and seek to reason out those things that are beyond research and scholarship. A great deal of mental arrogance is wrapped up in these semi-spiritual gropings and fumblings towards the light. You see the attitude of the consciously Superior Person therein, and all these troubles leave you cold and unsympathetic; and all the more so when it is borne in upon you that they were carefully pieced together and prepared for the market during a space of sixteen years.

The inevitable result of the piecemeal and laborious methods employed is that the belated poem lacks cohesion, and although there are gems of thought and expression embedded in the mass of verbiage, it must needs be confessed that “In Memoriam” is a sprawling and unwieldy tribute. The “rich shrine” erected has indeed a great deal of uninspired journeyman work, and is, in fact, not a little ruinous. It is safe to conclude that portions only of it will survive, while “Maud,” that line poem of passion, will endure so long as English verse is read.

To the present writer—if a personal note may be permitted—the tone and outlook of this long-sustained effort are alike depressing. This is not robust poetry, and for the already morbid-minded it is easily conceivable that it might even be disastrous.

Tennyson in those early years had what we cannot but think the great misfortune not to possess a local knowledge. He made a personal acquaintance with what was then the little village of Clevedon only when “In Memoriam” was completed, and was thus unfortunately unable to verify some of his most important descriptive details. He visited Clevedon only belatedly, and knew so little of the circumstances, although he publicly mourned his friend so keenly and at such length, that he was not quite sure where they had laid him. We observe him trying twice to place the grave, and failing:

’Tis well; ’tis something; we may stand

Where he in English earth is laid,

And from his ashes may be made

The violet of his native land.

Or else, he proceeds to say, if not in the churchyard, then in the chancel:

Where the kneeling hamlet drains

The chalice of the grapes of God.

Leaving aside that shockingly infelicitous alliterative expression, “the grapes of God,” intended to convey the meaning of “communion wine,” we know that neither in the churchyard nor in the chancel was the body of Arthur Hallam laid, but in the south transept. But he continues:

And in the chancel like a ghost,

Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn,

making another bad shot. This, however, was remedied in later editions, in which “dark church” was substituted for “chancel.” But, since Clevedon church is not exceptionally dark, why not the word “transept,” which would be absolutely correct and certainly more poetic and less clumsy than “dark church”?

The white marble tablet to the memory of Arthur Hallam is fixed, with those to his father and others of the family, on the west wall of the little transept. Speaking of it, the poet says:

When on my bed the moonlight falls,

I know that in thy place of rest

By that broad water of the west,

There comes a glory on the walls:

Thy marble bright in dark appears,

As slowly steals a silver flame

Along the letters of thy name

And o’er the numbers of thy years.

It is the ghastly morbidness of this that at first arrests the reader’s attention, and a closer examination does not by any means impress him; for surely to describe a moonbeam as a “flame,” moonlight in fact, in appearance, and in the long history of poetic thought being notoriously cold and the very negation of heat, is a lapse from the rightness of things more characteristic of a poetaster seeking at any cost a rhyme to “name” than the mark of a great poet.

It has long been the fashion among those who shout with the biggest crowd to point scornfully at the critic who, discussing “In Memoriam” soon after it was published, wrote: “These touching lines evidently come from the full heart of the widow of a military man.” This has been termed “inept.” Now, if we turn to the dictionaries, we shall find the commonly received definition of that word to be “unfitting.” But was it, indeed, unfitting? The opinion of that critic did not actually fit the facts; but the morbid tone of the poem, and the singularly feminine ring of such phrases as “The man I held as half-divine,” “my Arthur,” and the like, seem to many a reader to be a perfect justification of the aptness of the critic’s views; and remind us that none other than Bulwer Lytton once referred to Tennyson as “school-miss Alfred.”

My Arthur, whom I shall not see

Till all my widowed race be run;

Dear as the mother to the son,

More than my brothers are to me.

There is the critic’s ample defence. To a healthily constituted mind, that verse is more than ordinarily revolting.

The humble little hilltop church of St. Andrew, anciently a fisherman’s chapel, has many modern rivals in suburbanised Clevedon; but in it is centred all the ecclesiastical interest of the place. It is chiefly a Transitional-Norman building, with aisleless nave and chancel, north and south transepts, and central tower of Perpendicular date, but plain to severity. The pointed Transitional arch is the finest and most elaborate part of the building and is richly moulded. Hagioscopes command views from either transept into the chancel. Near the chancel arch is a curious miniature recumbent effigy, two feet six inches in length, in the costume of the sixteenth century, representing a woman, of which no particulars are known. It is thought to be that of a dwarf. The Hallam and Elton monumental tablets are on the walls of the south transept; of plain white marble, with characteristically bald monumental-mason’s lettering; the very ne plus ultra of the commonplace and matter-of-fact, and very trying indeed to hero-worshipping pilgrims. For ornament and display of mosaic and gilding the visitor should turn to the reredos, recently placed in the chancel. Whether he will delight in it, after the severity of the tablets, is a matter for individual prejudices; but he surely will not feel delighted by being approached by a caretaker with pencil and notebook and a request for a gift towards the restoration fund—which doubtless includes the cost of this theatrical reredos. It has come to this: that the Tennysonian association has been made the excuse and stalking-horse for badgering the visitor for sixpences. The wise visitor, whether he approves of elaborate restoration or not, will leave those who called the tune to pay the piper, and will further leave to the Elton family of Clevedon Court, who draw an excellent revenue from their property here, the duty and the pleasure of footing the bills that may yet be unsatisfied.

Clevedon Court lies away back on the direct Bristol road, over a mile distant from the church and the sea, and removed from the modern developments of the place, which at one and the same time have largely enriched its owners, the Elton family, and have rendered the neighbourhood less desirable as a residence to them. Ever, with each succeeding phase of Clevedon’s growth, the sweetly beautiful valley that runs up hither from the sea is further encroached upon by houses, until at the present time a few outlying blocks are within sight of the Court itself. The recently opened light railway also bids fair to be the prelude to further building-operations.

Meanwhile, the grounds of the Court remain as beautiful as ever, ascending to a long and lofty ridge, heavily wooded. The Court itself, of which the interior is not generally shown, stands prominently facing the park wall and the road, only a few yards away, and is quite easily to be seen. It is a long, low mansion, a singular mass of Gothic gables, chimneys, and terraces, dating originally from the early years of the fourteenth century, when it was built by the De Clyvedons. Court and estates passed with an heiress by marriage to one Thomas Hogshaw, thence in the same manner to the Lovell family, and from them to the Wakes, whose arms and allusive motto, “Wake and Pray,” are to be found in parts of the house altered by them about 1570. The Wake family sold their possessions at Clevedon to Digby, Earl of Bristol; and finally the executors of the third Earl sold them to the Elton family in the time of Queen Anne.

Great destruction was caused to the west front of the Court by the fire that broke out in November 1882, but the damage has been so skilfully repaired that, to any save the closest inspection, the building retains the aspect it had long presented. The chief feature of the principal front, of fourteenth-century date, is the entrance-porch, with portcullis, and room over. Here, midway along the irregular front, is a very large square window, filled with curiously diapered tracery. Thackeray, who often visited here, as a friend of the Rev. William H. Brookfield and his wife, Jane Octavia, sister of Sir Charles Elton, then owner of Clevedon Court, has left a somewhat striking pencil sketch of the building, viewed from this point. The house is the original of “Castlewood,” in his novel, “Esmond.”

CLEVEDON COURT.

Clevedon Court was largely rearranged in the time of Queen Elizabeth, in accordance with the ideas of comfort then prevailing, considerably in advance of those that ruled when it was originally built, in the reign of Edward the Second. But it was left to the remarkable people who ruled when the nineteenth century was yet young to further modernise the ancient residence, and they perpetrated strange things: painting and graining interior stonework to resemble oak, and the like atrocities; the highest ambition of builders and decorators in that era of shame being to treat honest materials as though they were not to be shown for what they really were, and to make them masquerade as something else. No one ever was deceived by the plaster of that age, pretending to be stone; and stone that was given two coats of paint and tickled with a grainer’s comb, and then finished off with varnish, never yet made convincing oak, any more than “marbled” wall-papers looked or felt like real marble; but those were then conventional treatments, and were followed and honoured all over the land.

At the same time, the ancient oak roof of the hall of Clevedon Court was hidden behind a plaster ceiling.

But the house is not sought out only for its antiquity, or for the beauty of its situation, or even for its Thackeray associations. After all, does any considerable section of the public really care for Thackeray landmarks? Writers of literary gossip, of prefaces to new editions, may affect to think so, but, in fact, Thackeray does not command that intimate sympathy which Dickens enjoys. Sentiment does not attach itself to the satirist, who, in the odd moments when he, too, sentimentalises, is apt to be suspected, quite wrongly, of insincerity. It is for its Tennyson associations that Clevedon Court is sought by most tourists.

CHAPTER VI
YATTON—CONGRESBURY—WICK ST. LAWRENCE

The main road from Clevedon to Kingston Seymour trends sharply inland, passing the little village of Kenn. Seaward the flat and featureless lands spread to an oozy shore; Kenn itself, an insignificant village, standing beside a sluggish runnel of the same name. From this place sprang the Ken family, which numbered among its members the celebrated Bishop of Bath and Wells, who owed his preferment from a subordinate position at Winchester to his having, while there, refused to give up his house for the accommodation of Nell Gwynne. Charles the Second was a true sportsman. He respected those who were true to themselves, whether it were an unrepentant highwayman, whom he could pardon and fit out with a telling nickname; or a Church dignitary whose conscience forbade him to curry favour by housing a King’s mistress. So, in 1684, when a choice was to be made of a new Bishop of Bath and Wells, the King declared that no one should have it but “the little black fellow that refused his lodging to poor Nelly.”

The Ken family finally died out in the seventeenth century, after having been settled here over four hundred years. A small mural monument to Christopher Ken and his family, 1593, remains in the little church, rebuilt in 1861 and uninteresting; but with a pretty feature in the unusual design of the pyramidal stone roof of its small tower.

Beyond Kenn, in a lonely situation midway between Yatton and the coast at the point where the waters of the Yeo estuary glide and creep, rather than fall, into the sea, stands the village of Kingston Seymour. The country all round about is more remarkable for the rich feeding its flat pastures afford the cows than for its scenic beauties. If it were not for the luxuriant hedgerows and the fine hedgerow trees, it would be possible to say, with the utmost sincerity, that this corner of Somerset was tame and dull. But the dairy-farmers who occupy it so largely draw great prosperity from these flat meadows.

KINGSTON SEYMOUR.

Within the beautiful and delicately graceful old church of Kingston Seymour are tablets recording the floods once possible here, and the destruction wrought by two such visitations, in 1606 and 1703. An epitaph records the odd bequest of a certain “J. H.,” in bequeathing “his remains” to his acquaintance, and their still more singular joy at the legacy:

He was universally beloved in the circle of

His acquaintance; but united

In his death the esteem of all,

Namely, by bequeathing his remains.

The centre of this district is Yatton, which now draws all surrounding traffic by reason of its junction station on the Great Western Railway. Here the traveller changes for Clevedon, or for Cheddar and Wells, or for Wrington Vale. Yatton takes its name from the river Yeo, which oozes near by, and itself hides in that form of spelling the Celtic word ea, for water, akin to the modern French eau. Thus Yatton is really, derivatively, the same as Eton, near Windsor, the water-town beside the river Thames; Eaton by Chester, on the river Dee, and many other places throughout the country with the affix of “ea” or “ay.” An alternative derivation, as arguable as the first, makes Yatton derive from the “gate,” or gap, in the neighbouring hills, through which the Yeo drains on its way from Wrington. The village itself stands somewhat high, but overlooks a very considerable tract of low-lying country, formerly in the nature of a creek, as proved by modern discoveries of a Roman boat-house and similar waterside relics near by.

The business brought by the junction-station of the Great Western Railway at Yatton has effectually abolished the village-like rustic character of the place. It is more by way of a townlet of one long street, remarkable for the unpleasing prominence of blank walls enclosing the grounds of residents whose desire for privacy appears to be excessive.

The great feature of Yatton is, however, its fine church. No traveller can have journeyed much on the Great Western Railway without having noticed, as his train approached Yatton, the singular effect produced by the tall tower of this fine building, surmounted by a spire that has lost the last third part of its original height, and has been finished off with small pinnacles. The effect is almost uncanny, but by no means unpleasant, and the proposals that have from time to time been made to complete the spire are altogether to be deprecated. No records remain by which it can with certainty be said that the spire was ever completed when the church was at last finished, after building operations that extended from 1486 to 1500; but the evidence afforded by the Late Perpendicular cresting and pinnacles that finish off the incomplete structure, and are contemporary with it, seems to point to one or other of two hypotheses: that funds finally proved insufficient, almost on the eve of the works being brought to a conclusion; or that the builders were alarmed by signs of their having already placed as much weight upon the tower as it could possibly bear.

YATTON CHURCH.

It is a noble church, designed in the last phase of pure Gothic architecture, with some few remains of Early English and Decorated from a former building, demolished to make way for this larger and more splendid place of worship. Here in the De Wyke chantry is the altar-tomb of Evelina de Wyke and her husband, c. 1337; and near by is that of Sir Richard Cradock Newton, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 1448, and his wife, Emma, or Emmota, Perrott. The recumbent effigies of the Judge and his lady are very fine. He wears the robes of his office and a collar with links of “S.S.,”—mystic letters generally considered to signify “Souveraigne,” and to be a badge of Lancastrian loyalty. This example is considered to be the earliest known. The “garbs,” or wheatsheaves of the Judge’s coat-of-arms, may still be traced, as also the arms of his wife—three pendant golden pears on a red field, in punning allusion to “Perrott.”

Here also is the tomb of the Judge’s eldest son, Sir John Newton, and his wife, Isabel Chedder. All these had, in their time, greatly to do with the rebuilding and beautifying of Yatton church.

A curious epitaph in the churchyard, to the memory of a gipsy who died in 1827, reads:

Here lies Merrily Joules,

a beauty bright,

Who left Isac Joules, her

heart’s delight.

Prominent, close by, is the boldly stepped base of a churchyard cross, of which the shaft has long disappeared. Surviving accounts prove it to have been erected at a cost of £18, in 1499.

Yatton church, as we have seen, has a spire, an unusual feature with Somerset churches. Here, however, a small group of spires or spirelets occurs, including also those of Congresbury, Kingston Seymour, Kenn, and Worle. Congresbury spire is the most prominent of all, both from its own height and from the position it occupies in the vale below Yatton.

“Coomsbury”—for that is the local shibboleth—is a considerable village, taking its name traditionally from “St. Congar,” son of some uncertain “Emperor of Constantinople.” This really very autocratic personage endeavoured to marry his son to a person whom the young man could not love, and he fled his father’s Court; wandering in wild and inclement lands, until he came at last to this then particularly wild and unwholesome region. We cannot avoid the suspicion that the lady must have been a terror of the first water; or, alternatively, that Congar was not altogether weather-proof in the upper storey. He is said to have founded a hermitage here, A.D. 711, and a baptistry at which the heathen were admitted to the Church; and King Ina, we are told, became his most powerful patron. At last he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and died there; but his body was conveyed back to Congresbury.

Thus the legend, which has no historical foundation whatever, and appears to be an ancient, but entirely idle tale: the name of Congresbury being really, in its first form, an Anglo-Saxon Königsburg; or, in modern English, Kingston. But “St. Congar,” although he finds no place in learned hagiologies, is still a belief at “Coomsbury,” and the villagers point to the stump of an ancient yew-tree as “St. Congar’s walking-stick.”

The church itself is large and fine, but not so fine as that of Yatton. In the churchyard is the base of an ancient cross, and in the village itself a tall shaft of the fifteenth century, with the cross replaced by a ball.

THE RECTORY. CONGRESBURY.

The rectory was until towards the end of the eighteenth century wholly a fifteenth-century building; but the clergy of that time, little disposed towards archæology, and with marked leanings towards a certain standard of stately comfort and display, procured the building of the present large but ugly parsonage, and degraded the old building into a kitchen and outhouse. The expansive (and expensive) ideas of that time have for some generations past proved expensive indeed to the incumbents of Congresbury, for the large house and great lofty rooms cost much to keep in repair, and the ideas of the present-day clergy are not so nearly as they were like those of the old-fashioned free-handed country squires.

In Congresbury churchyard a lengthy epitaph upon a former inhabitant incidentally tells us that belated highwaymen still troubled these parts in 1830, a period when most other regions had long seen the last of those unknightly “Knights of the Road”:

In Memory of

CHARLES CAPELL HARDWICKE

of this Parish

died

July 2nd 1849

aged

50 years

And was buried at Hutton

His Friends

Erected this Monument

To Record

their admiration of his

Character

and

their regret at his

Loss

A.D. 1871

He was of such courage that being attacked by a highwayman on the heath in this parish, Oct. 21st, 1830, and fearfully wounded by him, he pursued his assailant and having overtaken him in the centre of this village, he delivered him up to Justice.

The old rectory, happily still standing, was built about 1446. Its chief interest lies in the projecting porch; the doorway surmounted with a sculptured panel enclosing the figure of an odd-looking angel with a cross growing out of his head, holding in his hands a scroll inscribed “Laus Deo.” The archway is pointed in the manner of an Early English arch, and sculptured with an imitation of the “dog-tooth” moulding of that period. Stone shields bear the arms of Bishop Beckington, and of the Pulteney family.

From Congresbury it is possible to again approach the coast, coming by level roads that run through flat alluvial lands to Wick St. Lawrence, a small and solitary village standing near the banks of the Yeo estuary.

The writer grows tired of writing, and the reader doubtless as weary of reading, of the richness of the land in these parts; but the occasion for and the necessity of this continued allusion are at least proofs of the fertility of Somerset and of the abundance of the good gifts bestowed upon this fortunate county, whose soil even oozes plentifully out at its river-mouths and in the way of muddy deposits conspicuously advertises this form of wealth. There can be no possible doubt of the great importance the dairying business has assumed in these parts. It has already been noted at Yatton, and here again the traveller by road, who thus sees the country intimately, is impressed, not only with the rich pastures, but with the beautiful stock he sees in them or driven along the road; and also with the numbers of carts he observes, with from one to half a dozen milk-churns, driven smartly across country to the nearest railway-station, to catch the up trains for Bristol or London.

The road to Wick St. Lawrence—i.e. St. Lawrence’s Creek—after crossing the Great Western Railway midway between Yatton and Puxton, winds extravagantly between high hedges, passing only an occasional farmhouse. Rarely the stranger in these parts meets any other wayfarers than farming folk, and the children of Wick St. Lawrence at sight of him stand stock-still, with fingers in mouths, quaint figures of combined curiosity and shyness, clad in the old rustic way in homely clothes and clean “pinners.”

The remains of a many-stepped fifteenth-century village cross stand opposite the church: all steps and not much cross, ever since some village Hampdens in the long ago showed their hatred of superstition by leaving only about a foot and a half of the shaft. The church itself, with tall and rather gaunt tower, is a Late Perpendicular building, with elaborate stone pulpit. Here is an epitaph which would seem to have its warnings for those who might feel disposed to extend their explorations to the mud-flats of the Yeo estuary at low tide:

To the memory of James Morss, of this parish, yeoman, who dy’d November ye 25th 1730, aged 38 years.

Save me, O God, the mighty waters role

With near Approaches, even to my soul:

Far from dry ground, mistaken in my course,

I stick in mire, brought hither by my horse.

Thus vain I cry’d to God, who only saves:

In death’s cold pit I lay ore whelm’d with waves.

Beyond the village, the road winds again in fantastic loops, and is crossed, without the formality of gates by the W. C. and P.L.R. This weird concatenation of initials sounds like a mass-meeting of household sanitary appliances, but those readers who have diligently persevered through the earlier pages of this book will understand that the Weston, Clevedon and Portishead Light Railway is meant. Thenceforward, after more windings through a thinly peopled district, the road wriggles on to Worle; sending off a branch to the left hand for Woodspring, Swallow Cliff, and Sand Bay.

CHAPTER VII
WORSPRING PRIORY, KEWSTOKE

The Augustinian Priory of Worspring, or Wospring, now called “Woodspring,” stands in a very secluded situation in this little-visited nook of the coast, projecting abruptly into the Bristol Channel north-west of Wick, and terminated in that direction by St. Thomas’s Head: a promontory which owes its name directly to the Priory itself, partly dedicated to the Blessed St. Thomas of Canterbury. The roads of this district are perhaps better to be termed lanes; and they are lanes of old Devonian character: narrow, hollow, with high banks and hedges, stony and winding. The land is purely agricultural. Thus, except for a few farmers’ carts and waggons, or for those more than usually enterprising tourists and amateurs of ancient architecture and ecclesiastical ruins who spend their energies in seeking out the remains of Woodspring Priory, the stranger has until now been but rarely seen. A new complexion has, however, been put upon matters by the coming of what is known locally, “for short,” as the “W. C. and P.L.R.”; i.e. the Weston, Clevedon, and Portishead Light Railway, already described; and now learned archæologists, enthusiastic, but perhaps not always endowed with the stamina and endurance of explorers, travel hither in the company of picnic parties, to whom any ruin in a picturesque setting is a sufficient excuse for an afternoon afield. “Hither,” however, is here a generous term, for the railway does not come within a mile and a half of the spot. But “every little helps,” as the trite proverb tells us.

The name of “Woodspring” does not appear in print before 1791, when it is found in Collinson’s “History of Somerset.” Before that date it was always referred to as “Worspring.” The name has puzzled many, but it is really a simple corruption of the original term, “Worle-spring,” indicating the situation of the Priory on a rill that descended to these levels by the sea from the neighbourhood of Worle heights.

The Priory was founded in the first instance by Reginald FitzUrse, as a chapel of expiation of his share in the murder of Thomas à Becket. It was in 1210 refounded on a much larger scale by William de Courtenay, grandson, on the maternal side, of William Tracy, another of those sacrilegious knights. Courtenay endowed it as a home of Austin Canons and triply dedicated the establishment in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy and Undivided Trinity, and St. Thomas à Becket; and it was further enriched by lands bequeathed by Maud, the daughter, and Alice, the granddaughter, of the third murderer, le Bret or Brito: Alice expressing the devout hope that the intercession of the blessed martyr might always be available for herself and her children.

The seal of the Priory is curious. In the lower portion of the usual vesica-shaped device is an allusion to the dedication to St. Thomas of Canterbury, in the form of a representation of his martyrdom: Becket being shown falling by the altar, on which stands a chalice, at the moment of his skull being cleft by Richard le Bret’s sword, which protrudes, immensely large in proportion to the figure of the Archbishop, from the border.

WOODSPRING PRIORY.