had always been over four hundred feet up, midway between the valleys
of the Frome on the left and the Midford brook on the right--we looked
far on either side over valleys of mist. The hollow land on the right,
which contained Radstock coalfield, many elm trees, and old overgrown
mounds of coal refuse, was vague, and drowsed in the summer-like mist:
the white smoke of the collieries drifted slowly in horizontal bands
athwart the mist. The voices of lambs rose up, the songs of larks
descended, out of the mist. Rooks cawed from field to field. Carts met
us or passed us coming from Road, Freshford, Frome, and other places,
to load up with coal from the store by the side of the road, which
is joined to the distant colliery by a miniature railway, steep and
straight. But what dominated the scene was a tall square tower on the
road. Turner’s Tower the map named it. Otherwise at a distance it might
have been taken for an uncommon church tower or a huge chimney. The
Other Man asked twenty questions about it of a carter whom we met as we
came up to it; and the carter, a round-eyed, round-nosed, round-voiced,
genial man, answered them all. He said it had been built half a
century ago by a gentleman farmer named Turner, as a rival to Lord
Hylton’s tower which we could see on our left at a wooded hilltop near
Ammerdown House. Originally it measured two hundred and thirty feet in
height. Mr. Turner used to go up and down it, but it served no other
purpose, and in course of time more than half fell down. The long hall
at the bottom became a club-room, where miners used to drink more than
other people thought good for them. Finally Lord Hylton bought it: the
club ceased. About a hundred feet of the tower survives, pierced by a
few pointed windows above and doors below, cheap and ecclesiastical in
appearance. Attached to it is a block of cottages, and several others
lie behind.
We crossed the Frome and Radstock road, and raced down a straight
mile that is lined on the left by the high park walls of Ammerdown
House, and overhung by beeches. At the bottom only an inferior road
continued our line, and that dwindled to a footpath. For the descent
to Kilmersdon by this direct route is too precipitous for a modern
road. We had to turn, therefore, sharp to the left along the road from
Writhlington to Mells and Frome, and then curved round out of it to the
right, and so under the railway down to Kilmersdon. Before entering the
village the road bent alongside a steep wooded slope littered with ash
poles. The bottom of the deep hollow is occupied by a church, an inn
distinguished by a coat-of-arms, and the motto, “_Tant que je puis_,”
and many stone cottages strung about a stream and a parallelogram
of roads. The church tower has three tiers of windows in it, and a
blue-faced clock, whose gilt hands pointed to half-past three. There
is a venerable and amusing menagerie of round-headed and long-headed
gargoyles, with which a man could spend a lifetime unbored. Inside as
well as outside the church the Jolliffe family, now represented by Lord
Hylton, predominates, amid the Easter scent of jonquil and daffodil.
For example, much space is given to the following verses, in memory of
Thomas Samuel Jolliffe, lord of the Hundreds of Kilmersdon and Wellow,
a “high-minded and scrupulously honourable gentleman,” “of Norman
original,” who died in 1824 at the age of seventy-eight,--
“A graceful mien, an elegant address,
Looks which at once each winning charm express,
A life where worth by wisdom polished shines,
Where wisdom’s self again by love refines:--
A wit that no licentious coarseness knows,
The sense that unassuming candour shows,
Reason by narrow principles unchecked,
Slave to no party, bigot to no sect.
Knowledge of various life, of learning too,
Thence taste, thence truth, which will from taste ensue;
An humble though an elevated mind,
A pride, its pleasure but to serve mankind:
If these esteem and admiration raise,
Give true delight and gain unflattering praise,
In one bright view the accomplished man we see,
These graces all were thine and thou wert he.”
If human virtue, as it appears from these lines, lies buried at
Kilmersdon, it has a pleasant resting-place--pleasant partly on account
of the neighbourhood of one Robert Twyford, a former Treasurer of St.
Davids, and lord of this manor, who died in 1776, aged sixty-one,--
“The sweetness of his temper made him happy in himself, and he employed
his abilities, his fortune, and authority in rendering others so; and
those many virtues which constituted his felicity in this life will, we
trust, through the merits of Christ, make him completely happy to all
eternity.”
It would be easier to invent Thomas Samuel Jolliffe than Robert
Twyford. I should like to meet them both; but in Jolliffe’s case my
chief motive would be curiosity to see how far his virtues were due to
time, place, and the exigencies of rhyme. A dialogue between Jolliffe
and the writer of his epitaph would be worth writing; equally so
between the Treasurer of St. Davids and his--I can imagine the old man
(I cannot imagine him a young man even in another world) beginning,--
“Sir, have you the felicity to know of a case where authority rendered
any one happy save the exerciser of it? I desire also, at your leisure,
to know what you understand by the words, ‘Completely happy to all
eternity.’ With as much impatience as is compatible with the sweetness
of temper immortalized (to use a mortal phrase) by you at Kilmersdon, I
await your answer. Will you drink tea? But, alas! I had forgotten that
complete happiness in our present state has to be sustained without tea
as well as without some of the other blessings of Pembrokeshire and
Somerset....”
“This is very sudden, Mr. Twyford....”
What the Other Man most liked in the whole church was the small,
round-headed window stained in memory of Sybil Veitch.
Out of Kilmersdon we walked uphill, looking back at the cottage groups
in the hollow, the much-carved green slopes, and the high land we had
traversed, all craggy-ridged in the mist. As steeply we descended to
another streamlet, another hollow called Snail’s Bottom, and the hamlet
of Charlton and a rookery. Another climb of a mile, always in sight of
a stout hilltop tower very dark against the sky, took us up to where
the Wells road crosses a Roman road, the Fosse Way, now the road from
Bath to Shepton Mallet. We chose the Fosse Way in order to see both
Shepton and Wells. Thus we went through Stratton-on-the-Fosse, a high
roadside village that provides teas, and includes a Roman Catholic
college and a new church attached to it--that church whose tower we had
been admiring so as it stood up against the sky. The flowering currant
here was dressed in blossom.
A mile farther on we were seven hundred and twenty feet up, almost on
a level with the ridge of the Mendips, now close before us. Running
from that point down to Nettlebridge and its rivulet, and walking up
away from them, was the best thing in the day. The gradient of the
hillside was too much for a modern road. The Fosse Way, therefore, had
been deserted and a new descent made, curving like an S; yet, even
so, bold enough for a high speed to be attained before we got down
to the “George” and the loose-clustered houses of Nettlebridge. The
opposite ascent was also in an S. At the top of it we sat on a wall by
the larches of Horridge Wood, and looked back and down. The valley was
broad and destitute of trees. Gorse scrambled over its sides. Ducks
fed across the turf at the bottom. Straight down the other side came
the Fosse Way, denoted by its hedges, and round its crossing of the
brook was gathered half of Nettlebridge. The rough, open valley, the
running water, the brookside cluster of stone cottages, reminded me of
Pembrokeshire. There is no church.
From that bleak and yet pleasant scene I turned with admiration to a
farm-house on the other side of the road. It stood well above the road,
and the stone wall enclosing its farm-yard followed the irregular crown
of the steep slope. This plain stone house, darkened, I think, by a
sycamore, and standing high, solitary, and gloomy, above Nettlebridge,
seemed to me a house of houses. If I could draw, I would draw this and
call it “A House.” For it had all the spirit of a house, farm, and
fortress in one, grim without bellicosity, tranquil, but not pampered.
Presently, at Oak Hill, we were well up on the main northern slope
of the Mendips. The “Oak Hill” inn, a good inn, hangs out its name
on a horizontal bar, ending in a gilded oak leaf and acorn. I had
lunch there once of the best possible fat bacon and bread fried in
the fat, for a shilling; and for nothing, the company of a citizen
of Wells, a hearty, strong-voiced man, who read the _Standard_ over
a beef-steak, a pint of cider, and a good deal of cheese, and at
intervals instructed me on the roads of the Mendips, the scenery, the
celebrated places, and also praised his city and praised the stout of
Oak Hill. Then he smacked his lips, pressed his bowler tight down on
his head, and drove off towards Leigh upon Mendip. I was sorry not to
have arrived at a better hour this time. The village is no more than
the inn, the brewery, and a few cottages, and a shop or two, in one
of which there was a pretty show of horse ornaments of brass among
the saddlery. I almost counted these ornaments, crescents, stars, and
bosses, as flowers of Spring, so clearly did I recall their May-day
flashing in former years. It was darkening, or at least saddening, as
we rode out of Oak Hill along the edge of a park which was notable for
much-twisted, dark sycamores on roots accumulated above-ground like
pedestals. At the far side gleamed the water, I imagine, of the brewery
reservoir. We reached the main ridge road of the Mendips soon after
this, and crossed it at a point about nine hundred feet high. Shepton
is five hundred feet lower, and but two miles distant; so that we
glided down somewhat like gods, having for domain an expanse that ended
in the mass of Selwood Forest twelve miles to our left, level-topped,
huge, and dim, under a cloudy sky. Unprepared as I was, I expected to
meet my end in the steep conclusion of this descent, which was through
narrow streets; and my brakes were bad. On the other hand, nothing
troubled the godlikeness of my companion. In the rush at twenty-five
miles an hour he sang, as if it had been a hymn of the new Paganism, a
ribald song beginning,--
“As I was going to Salisbury upon a Summer’s day.”
When he had done he shouted across at me, “I would rather have written
that song than take Quebec.”
The Other Man would not stay in Shepton Mallet. He was very angry
with Shepton. He called it a godless place, and I laughed, supposing
he lamented the lack of Apollo or Dionysus or Aphrodite; but he
justified the word by relating his first visit to the church. The
bell was ringing. It was five minutes to eleven on a Wednesday, a day
of north-east wind, in February. With him entered a clergyman, and
except for the old bell-ringer, the church was empty. When the bells
ceased at eleven it was still empty. The clergyman and the bell-ringer
mumbled together, the old man saying, “You see, nobody has come.” No
service was held; the Other Man and the bell-ringer were unworthy. The
clergyman struggled up the road against the north-east wind. “And look
there,” exclaimed the Other Man, as we turned out of the long, narrow
street of shops into Church Lane, mediæval-looking and narrower, “look
there,” he exclaimed, pointing to the remains of a blue election poster
on a wall, where these words survived,--
“Foreigners tax us; let us tax them.”
“Why,” said he, “it is not even in the Bible,” and with this he mounted
and rode on toward Wells. The church tower was framed by the end walls
of Church Lane, a handsome, tall tower with a pointed cap to it, and
a worn statue of the Virgin and two other figures over the door.
Immediately inside the door are tablets to seventeenth-century and
eighteenth-century Barnards and Strodes of Down Hill, one bearing the
inscription,--
“Urna tenet cineres
Animam deus.”
The truth of it sounded like a copper gong in that twilight silence.
I went on among the ashes. Two window ledges, one looking east, one
west, form couches for stone effigies. That in the eastward ledge,
with his hand across the shield on his breast, looked as if happily
sleeping; the other had lost an arm, and was not happy. I re-entered
the main street by a side street broad enough for a market-place. Here
are some of the inns, and at the edge of the pavement a row of fixed
wooden shambles. The market cross stands at the turn. It is a stone
canopy, supported by six pillars in a circle, and one central pillar
surrounded by two stone steps or seats, and the south side wears a
dial, dated 1841. To know the yards of the “Red Lion,” “George,” and
“Bunch of Grapes,” and all the lanes and high-walled passages between
Shepton and the prison, would be a task (for the first ten years of
life) very cheerful to look back upon, and it would be difficult to
invent anything more amusing and ingenious, as it would be impossible
to invent anything prettier than the ivy, the ivy-leaved toadflax, and
that kidney-leafed cressy white flower, growing on the walls of the
passages. There are no public lights in Shepton, so that away from the
shop lamps all now was dark in the side streets and edges of the town.
The stone prison and all its apertures, like a great wasps’ nest, was a
punishment to look at in the darkness. But night added grandeur to the
many round arches of the viaduct on which the railway strides across
the valley. At this, a sort of boundary to Shepton upon the east, I
turned back, and ended the day at a temperance hotel. Its plain and not
old-looking exterior, ordinary bar and public room, suggested nothing
of the ancientness within. I found a good fire and peace in the company
of a man who studied Bradshaw. With the aid of maps I travelled my
road again, dwelling chiefly on Tellisford, its white bridge over the
Frome, the ruined mill and cottage, the round tower of Vaggs Hill Farm,
and the distinct green valley which enclosed them, and after this, the
Nettlebridge valley and the dark house above it.
VIII.
SHEPTON MALLET TO BRIDGWATER.
Day opened cold, dull, and windy in Shepton Mallet. After paying the
usual bill of about four shillings for supper, bed, and breakfast, I
tried to get into the churchyard again; but it was locked, and I set
out for Wells. The road led me past the principal edifice in Shepton
on the west side, as the prison is on the east--the Anglo-Bavarian
Brewery, which is also the highest in position. It is a plain stone
heap and a tubular chimney-stack of brick. A lover of size or of beer
at any price might love it, but no one else. I rode from it in whirls
of dust down to Bowlish and into the valley of the Sheppey. To within
a mile of Wells I was to have this little river always with me and
several times under me. Telegraph posts also accompanied the road. It
was a delightful exit; the brewery was behind me, a rookery before me
in the beech trees of the outskirts. On both hands grassy banks rose up
steeply. The left one, when the rookery was passed, was topped with
single thorn trees, and pigs and chickens did their duty and their
pleasure among the pollard ashes below. Most of the cottages of Bowlish
are on the other side, their gardens reaching down in front of them to
the stream, their straggling orchards of crooked apple trees behind
within walls of ivy-covered stone. Where Bowlish becomes Darshill, the
cottages are concentrated round a big square silk-mill and its mill
pond beside the road. Up in the high windows could be seen the backs
or faces of girls at work. All this is on the right, at the foot of
the slope. The left bank being steeper, is either clothed in a wood of
ivied oaks, or its ridgy turf and scattering of elms and ash trees are
seldom interrupted by houses. A sewage farm and a farmhouse ruined by
it take up part of the lower slope for some way past the silk-mill:
a wood of oak and pine invades them irregularly from above. Then on
both hands the valley does without houses. The left side is a low,
steep thicket rising from the stream, which spreads out here into a
sedgy pool before a weir, and was at this moment bordered by sheaves
of silver-catkined sallow, fresh-cut. But the right side became high
and precipitous, mostly bare at first, then hanging before me a rocky
barrier thinly populated by oaks. This compelled the road to twist
round it in a shadowy trough. In fact, so much has the road to twist
that a traveller coming from the other direction would prepare himself
for scaling the barrier, not dreaming that he could slink in comfort
round that wild obstacle.
Out of this crooked coomb I emerged into dust whirls and sunshine. The
village of Crosscombe was but a little way ahead, a long village of old
stone cottages and slightly larger houses, and two mills pounding away.
The river running among stones sounds all through it. At the bridge,
where it foams over the five steps of a weir, a drinking fountain is
somewhat complicated by the inscription: “If thou knewest the gift of
God, thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee
living water.” At the “Rose and Crown,” outside which is a cross, or
rather a knobbed pillar surmounting some worn steps, I branched up a
steep lane to St. Mary’s Church. It has a spire instead of a tower, and
an image of the Virgin at the base of it. Its broad-tailed weather-cock
flashed so in the sun as to be all but invisible. The grass was at its
greenest, the daisies at their whitest, in the churchyard, under the
black cypress wedges, where lies something or other of many a Chedzoy,
Perry, Hare, Hodges, and Pike. The upper side is bounded by a good
ancient wall, cloaked in ivy and tufted with yellow wallflower. Another
chiffchaff was singing here. While I was inside the building, a girl
hung about, rattling the keys expectantly (but no more persuasively
than the Titanic roadsters told their tale at Erlestoke), while I
walked among the dark pews and choir stalls of carven oak, and looked
at the tablets of the Hares and Pippets, great Clothiers of this
country, and the brass of Mr. William Bisse, and his nine daughters
and nine sons, and Mrs. Bisse, in the costume of 1625. The church
has a substantial business flavour belonging to the days when it was
so little known as to be beyond dispute that blessed are the rich,
for they do inherit this world and probably the next. A few yards
higher up the slope from the church is a Baptist chapel and a cottage
in one, evidently adapted with small skill or expense from a church
building older than the sect. Nothing divided the vegetable garden of
the cottage from the graveyard of the chapel, and it looked as if the
people of Crosscombe were ill content to raise merely violets from the
ashes of their friends.
[Illustration:
CROSSCOMBE.]
The road climbed away from Crosscombe up the left wall of the valley,
which is given a mountainous expression by the naked rock protruding
both at the ridge and on the slope of Dulcote Hill. The river runs
parallel on the right beneath, and along its farther bank the church
and cottages of Dinder in a string; and the sole noise arising from
Dinder was that of rooks. At a turning overshadowed by trees, at
Dulcote, a path travels straight through green meadows to Wells, and
to the three towers of the cathedral at the foot of a horizontal
terrace-like spur of oak, pine, and beech, that juts out from the main
line of Mendip leftwards or southwards. The river, which follows that
main line up to this spot, now quits it, and follows the receding
left wall of its valley, and consequently my road had its company no
longer. My way lay upward and over the spur. The white footpath was to
be seen going comfortably below on the left through parklike meadows,
and beyond it, the pudding-shaped Hay Hill and Ben Knowle Hill, and the
misty dome of Glastonbury Tor farther off.
By ten o’clock I was in the cathedral, and saw the painted dwarf up on
the wall kick the bell ten times with his heel, and the knights race
round and round opposite ways, clashing together ten times, while their
attendant squires rode in silence; and I heard the remote, monotonous
priest’s voice in the _Benedicite_, and the deep and the high responses
of men and boys. Up there in the transepts and choir chapels are many
rich tombs, and recumbent figures overarched by stone fretwork; but
the first and lasting impression is of the clean spaciousness of the
aisles and nave, clear of all tombs and tablets.
But clear and clean as was the cathedral, the outer air was clearer and
cleaner. The oblong green, walled in on three sides by homely houses,
and by the rich towered west front on the fourth, echoed gently with
the typical cathedral music, that of the mowing-machine, destroying
grass and daisies innumerable, with a tone which the sun made like
a grasshopper’s, not out of harmony with the song of a chaffinch
asseverating whatever it is he asseverates from one of the bordering
lime trees. The market-place, too, was warm; the yellowish and grayish
and bluish walls, the windows of all shapes and all sizes, and the
water of the central fountain, answered the sun.
Two gateways lead out of one side of the market-place to the cathedral
and the palace grounds. Taking the right-hand one, I came to the
palace, and the moat that flows along one side, between a high wall
climbed by fruit trees and ivy, and a walk lined with old pollard
elms. Rooks inhabited the elm tops, and swans the water. Rooks are
essential to a cathedral anywhere, but Wells is perfected by swans. On
the warm palace roof behind the wall--a roof smouldering mellow in the
sun--pigeons lay still ecclesiastically. Sometimes one cooed sleepily,
as if to seal it canonical that silence is better; the rooks cawed; the
water foamed down into the moat at one end between bowery walls. Away
from the cathedral on that side to the foot of the Mendips expanded
low, green country. I walked along the moat into the Shepton road, and
turning to the left, and passing many discreet, decent, quiet houses
such as are produced by cathedrals, and to the left again, so made a
circuit of the cathedral and its high tufted walls and holly trees,
back to the market-place.
It was difficult to know what to do in all this somewhat foreign
tranquillity. I actually entered an old furniture shop, and looked over
a number of second-hand books, _Spectators_, sermons that were dead,
theology that had never been alive, recent novels preparing for their
last sleep, books about Wells, “Clarissa Harlowe,” Mr. Le Gallienne’s
“English Poems,” “The Marvels of the Polar World,” and hundreds of
others. A cat slept in the sun amongst them, curled superbly, as if she
had to see justice done to the soporific powers of the cathedral city
and the books that nobody wanted. For the sake of appearances, I bought
“The History of Prince Lee Boo” for twopence. I thought to read this
book over my lunch, but there was better provender. The restaurant was
full of farmers, district councillors and their relatives, and several
school children. The loudest voice, the longest tongue, and the face
best worth looking at, belonged to a girl. She was a tomboy of fifteen,
black-haired, pale, strong-featured, with bold though not very bright
eyes. Her companion was a boy perhaps a little younger than herself,
and she was talking in a quick, decided manner.
“I like a girl that sticks to a chap,” she began suddenly.
The boy mumbled something. She looked sharply at him, as if to make
sure that he did exist, though he had not the gift of speech; then
directed her eyes out into the street. Having been silent for half a
minute, she stood up, pressing her face to the window to see better,
and exclaimed,--
“Look, look! There’s lovely hair.”
The boy got up obediently.
“There’s lovely hair,” she repeated, indicating some one passing; “she
isn’t good-looking to it, but it is lovely now. Look! isn’t it?”
The boy, I think, agreed before sitting down. What impressed him most
was the girl’s frank enthusiasm. She remained standing and looking out.
But in a moment something else had pleased her. She beckoned to the
boy, still with her eyes on the street, and said,--
“There’s a nice little boy.” As she said this she tapped the glass and
smiled animatedly. So in half a minute up came another boy of about the
same age as the first, and took a seat at the next table, smiling but
not speaking. Only when he had half eaten a cake did he begin to talk
casually about what had been passing at school--how an unpopular master
had been ragged, but dared not complain, though nobody did any work.
The girl listened intently, but when he had done, merely asked,--
“Have you ever been caned?”
“Lots of times,” he answered.
“Have _you_?” she asked the boy at her own table.
“Once,” he laughed.