Charles G. Harper

“ The hedges and wayside trees between Bridgwater and Nether Stowey are nowadays, from this cause, a curious and woeful sight, and the village of Nether Stowey itself is, for the same reason, made to wear a shameful draggletailed appearance. The dust off the limestone road is of the whiteness 140of flour, but looks, as it lies heavily on the foliage, singularly like snow. The effect of a landscape heavily enshrouded in white, under an intensely blue August sky, is unimaginably weird: as though the unthinkable—a summer snowstorm—had occurred. ”

“ WESTON-SUPER-MARE Weston-super-Mare has frequently been styled the “Western Brighton.” It matters little or nothing to those who invent these impossible parallels that the places thus compared with one another have nothing in common; and certainly Weston (for few there be who give it the longer name) is as little like Brighton as any place well can be. Weston fringes the bold curve of the shallow and sandy Weston or Uphill Bay, sandy inshore: a mile-broad expanse of mud at low water. ”

“ North Hill is so striking a feature in all views of the town, that one comes unconsciously to regard it as the only typical outstanding feature of the place. It is, so far as pictures go, Minehead. A noble hill it is, with the old quayside houses of the original fisher-village and ancient little port nestling beneath it. Immemorially a swelling green hillside, seamed and lined irregularly with hedgerows roughly into a chessboard pattern, it is distressing nowadays to find it being studded with villas and scarred with roads. ”

“ Bossington street, irregularly fringed with rustic cottages, and with the Horner on one side fleeting amid its pebbles to the sea, is as unconventional as a farmyard, and ends at last on the great shingle-bank of Porlock Bay, where two or three ruined old houses stand against the skyline and look as if they had known stirring incidents of shipwreck and smuggling, as indeed they probably have, in abundance. ”

“ Now across the levels rise the distant houses of Bridgwater town, and the slim spire of its church. The long flat road, of undeviating directness, points directly towards the place. Hedgerow and other trees dispose themselves casually, without ordered plan, on either hand, and a railway crosses the highway, diagonally, on a bridge and embankment. The scene is absolutely negative and characterless: neither beautiful nor absolutely ugly: the very realisation, one would say, of the commonplace. ”

“ Yet, beautiful in its wild original way though it may have been in those days, when the castle was a sea-fortress and the little town of Dunster something in the nature of a port, Dunster Castle in our own times, and on some evening of late summer, when the sun sets gloriously over the hills and irradiates the burnt-up grass to a golden tinge, affords a picture of surpassing beauty, viewed from the road to Minehead, across those level pastures. ”

“ 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 10presently tunnels under them, below the Suspension Bridge. ”

“ It is an effect, as you look eastward down the long broad village street to the church, standing in a low situation at the end, of a rich red-yellow, like that of a ripening cornfield, on houses, cottages, and church alike, with the lead-sheathed spire gleaming like oxidised silver against the chilly blue-grey of the eastern sky at evening, spangled already, before the sun has finally gone to bed, with the cold, unimpassioned twinkle of the stars. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Travellers to or from the West by the Great Western Railway are generally much impressed, between Yatton and Bridgwater, by the strange solitary hill of Brent Knoll that rises abruptly from the plain of Burnham Level, and looks oddly like some long-extinct volcano with its cone shorn off or fallen in. Fast trains do not stop at the little wayside station also called “Brent Knoll,” and while passengers are still gazing curiously at the hill, they are whirled away in midst of other interesting scenery. ”

“ Sand Bay, nearly as large as Weston Bay, but quite lonely, stretches from St. Thomas’s Head and Swallow Cliff to Anchor Head, Weston-super-Mare. Shingle and sand continue in an unbroken semicircular sweep, fringed by pastures, to the neighbourhood of Kewstoke, a small village situated on a shelf of rock below the craggy uplands of Worle Hill, and yet raised above the meadows. Nowadays Kewstoke is greatly afflicted in summer by brakes and traps, and strollers from Weston, for it is but two miles from the town, and there are the beautiful Kewstoke woods fringing the road all the way. ”

“ The road down from Selworthy to Porlock passes the little river Horner and commands views on the left hand up to the purple hills of Exmoor, up to Cloutsham, where the wild red deer couch, and the great heights of Dunkery, Easter Hill, and Robinow. To the left lies the hamlet of Horner, so-called from the river, “Hwrnr,” = “the Snorer,” snoring, as the Anglo-Saxons are supposed to have fancifully likened the sound of its hoarse purring, over the boulders and amid the gravel-stones that strew its shallow woodland course. ”

“ Midway between Birnbeck and the Grand Pier is a projecting rock, once an island called Knightstone, now connected with the shore and made the site of the Knightstone Pavilion and Baths.
Add to these varied delights the presence of hundreds of itinerant vendors on Parade and sands, and barrows innumerable in the busy streets; and throw in a very plentiful supply of teashops, restaurants, and dining-rooms in the centre of the town, whose proprietors or their agents stand on the pavement and shout for custom, and you will have a very fair notion of what Weston is like. ”

“ Mud you have, naked and unashamed, practically 4only 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. ”

“ The rise of Porlock Hill is one thousand feet, but the tableland beyond it rises yet another 378 feet by Culbone Hill. The gradient of Porlock Hill is in parts as steep as one in six, and the surface is always, at all seasons of the year, bad in the extreme. A sharp bend to the right appears, a little way uphill. In summer a mass of red dust six or eight inches deep, and plentifully mixed with large stones, it is in winter a pudding-like mixture of a clayey nature. ”

“ Stoutly the ancient walls yet stand, and sharp to this day are the carvings 96of the Norman north porch and the grim, uncanny faces of the uncouth gargoyles that look out over Weston and the bay.
Brean Down, that huge, almost islanded hill—a sort of miniature Gibraltar—that rises from the Axe marshes and the sand-flats opposite Uphill, to a height of 321 feet, looks from Weston, and from Uphill itself a place quite easy to arrive at, but, as sheer matter of fact, no one can reach it by road under nine miles, by way of Bleadon and Brean village. ”

“ WORLEBURY—WORLE All the ebullient modernity of Weston is looked down upon by the immemorially old, from that overhanging vantage-point, Worle Hill, where the ancient camp and fortress of Worlebury, dwelling-place and stronghold of many ancient peoples, shows traces of occupation by a race who flourished some four thousand years since. ”

“ But it was still more the valour of the Somerset rustics that won the day on that occasion for Faith and Freedom.
Had Monmouth followed up his advantage, the wavering sympathies of the West of England gentry might have thrown fresh levies into the field for his cause; but he retired upon the then defenceless town of Bridgwater, and remained inactive.
WESTONZOYLAND.
Now, there is nothing that more disheartens untrained men than a check in their forward march. Countermarching to them appears but the forerunner of defeat, and the flow of ardour in any cause once hindered is difficult to recover. ”

“ Brent Knoll stands out prominently by virtue of its height of 457 feet, as well as by its isolated situation in the great alluvial plain through which lazily meander the muddy streams of Brue and Axe to their outlets at Uphill and Highbridge. It is one of those many scattered heights that are so strangely disposed about the neighbourhood of Sedgemoor, and give so romantic an appearance to these wide-spreading levels. ”

“ You see before you the Castle of Dunster, on its hill, the eighteenth-century tower of Coneygore, on its own particular eminence, and the great Grabbist Hill, disposing themselves in new groupings as you advance, and realise that England has not much finer to give.
Dunster, with much else in these districts, from Kilve to Minehead, belongs to the Luttrells, whose heraldic shield of a bend sable on a golden field, between six martlets—a “martlet” being a heraldic bird of the swallow species, without feet, unknown to ornithologists—is in consequence frequently to be noticed here. ”

“ The river Parret—in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle styled “Pedridan”—is in other ways a river of considerable importance to North Somerset. Like the Avon at Bristol, it runs out towards the sea in its last few miles more like a deep and muddy gutter at low water than in the likeness of a river; but the Parret mud, as we have already seen, is at least useful, and a source of wealth to Bridgwater; and shipping of considerable tonnage, bringing chiefly coals from South Wales, and deals from Norway, comes up the estuary to Bridgwater’s quays. ”

“ Passing through many hands, it is now among the properties of the Smyth-Pigott family, owners of much land hereabouts, including the site of Weston-super-Mare.
There can surely be no farmhouse more ecclesiastical in appearance than that of Woodspring Priory. As the traveller approaches it across the rough occupation-roads of two large pastures, he sees the noble central tower of what was the Priory church rising exquisitely from a characteristically English rural scene of tall elms, profuse hedgerows, and succulent grass. ”