YATTON--CHEDDAR CHEESE AND CHEDDAR CLIFFS--WELLS--GLASTONBURY--THE ISLE
OF ATHELNEY--DUNSTER
The little town of Yatton, below Bristol, situated on excellent roads
and with a convenient station on the Great Western main line, is a
very useful point whence to start upon a rambling exploration of
Mid and North Somerset, called by Mr. Hardy “Outer Wessex.” Yatton
is a junction station, its name-board familiar to travellers, with
the alluring legend beneath: “For Cheddar and Wells.” Whether the
place-name be really “Ea-ton” or “Yeo-ton,” from the little river Yeo,
on which the town is situated, or “Gate-town,” from the road or “gate”
under the hills on which it stands, will ever remain a problem to give
antiquaries something to think about. The church, one of the finest in
this shire of fine churches, has a remarkable outline because of its
incomplete spire, whose upper part appears never to have been added.
It thus wears a truncated appearance, and is crested with a kind of
coronet. The effect is distinctly pleasing and gives Yatton a decided
individuality. The general appearance of the church is that of a Late
Decorated building. The tomb, with red-robed effigy of Chief Justice
Newton, of the Common Pleas, 1449, is well worth seeing.
Through Congresbury and Churchill, whence the Churchill family emerged
from obscurity to a dukedom and political fame in later generations,
we come, through the little town of Axbridge, to Cheddar. There is no
need, it may be presumed, to instruct the reader in the two things
for which Cheddar is deservedly famous--its cheese and cliffs. Time
was, and that until quite recent years, when the tourist who by some
strange chance knew nothing of Cheddar cheese might proceed through the
picturesque village without a glimpse of its staple product. So modest
was Cheddar that no one would deduce or suspect a cheese in the entire
district. But nowadays--these being days of strenuous publicity--shops
that do nothing else but sell cheeses are a feature of the place.
The results are extremely satisfactory, especially in view of the
fact that inferior cheese from the United States, known as “American
Cheddar,” was bulking largely in provision markets, and bidding fair
to wholly overshadow the home produce. In these scientific times it
is said to be quite possible to produce Cheddar by the cultivation
of a bacillus, and that it is therefore the method alone that makes
the cheese, which can be produced anywhere. But it would be a bad day
for the Somerset dairy-farmer if that doctrine were accepted in its
entirety, and it is comforting to believe that it is not likely to win
to such acceptance.
Cheddar Cliffs are strikingly formed by huge precipitous rifts in the
limestone escarpments of the Mendip Hills, and lead at right angles
out of the main road. The most picturesque portion of the village is
situated at the beginning of them, beside the fine winding road that
ascends between their grey spires and impending fissures, looming in
monstrous shapes, like the fabled turrets and bastions of some giant’s
castle. The old geological theory as to how these huge rifted chasms
were produced was of an earthquake that had thus torn the everlasting
hills asunder. But a recent school of thought has the view that
they were originally immense caverns, and that the gorge effect is
caused by the roof having at some time fallen in. The famous caverns,
discovered in 1837 and 1893, are cited as examples. These are the
chief attractions at Cheddar for the sightseer, and are not in the
least difficult to find, because, in fact, they open upon the road and
are rented by rival proprietors who eagerly solicit the stranger’s
patronage. Whether the cave that belongs to Cox or that which is
exploited by Gough is the better, I will not pretend to say; only the
mental impression left by perusing the handbills and advertisements of
the competitors is that each is better than the other, “which,” as our
old enemy Euclid would say, “is absurd.”
[Illustration: THE ALMSHOUSES, CORSHAM.
Built by Lady Hungerford, 1672. One of the finest examples of the
post-Reformation Almshouse.]
In another seven miles we come to the slumberous cathedral city of
Wells, in its rich vale beneath the Mendips. The population of Wells
is about five thousand, and decreasing, or at the most stationary, and
thus there are no unhistorical modern suburbs, and the outskirts are
quite innocent of notices offering land “ripe for building.” It is
true that there are two railway-stations at Wells, but they are the
product of rival railway politics, rather than called into existence
by necessity. I suppose the stranger would deduce a river from the
place-name, but Wells knows nothing of the kind. It takes that title
from the clear springs that gush forth in the neighbourhood of the
cathedral, and form delightful pools at its south-eastern end, serving
also to surround the fortified Bishop’s Palace with a pellucid moat.
The Diocese of Wells was founded A.D. 704 by Ina, King of Wessex.
Never have the rude buffetings of warfare disturbed the quiet of the
place, whose history is solely ecclesiastical, and is concerned only
with the long succession of Bishops and the various rebuildings of the
cathedral. As we see it now, within its grassy close, the cathedral
is a singularly perfect work, chiefly of the thirteenth century,
rich above all other English cathedrals in delicate sculpture, and
with sixty carved miserere seats that display the sweetest artistic
fancy, the closest study of natural forms, and the most exquisite
craftsmanship in wood-carving to be found in England. Here, too, is
a curious fourteenth-century clock, still in good going order. The
Bishop’s Palace, largely an Early English work, is a building beautiful
enough, and looking like enough to be the scene of the legend of the
Briar Rose and the Sleeping Beauty. Wells is the most cloistral of
English cathedral cities. It is the one ideal cathedral city for
scholar and poet that England possesses, for the rest are for the most
part pushful commercial places, with electric tramways and the like
manifestations of modernity. Of these things Wells knows nothing.
The most startling thing I ever saw at Wells was the Bishop riding
a bicycle, and he ran into me, which perhaps serves to show that,
although the mitred know the straight celestial way, their terrestrial
route on wheels is sometimes not so forthright as that of the mere
layman. Lovely Wells, sweet with the last faint afterglow of the Middle
Ages, with ancient houses, and some few comparatively modern, facing
the quiet market-place, closed in at its eastern end by the great
gate-houses of the cathedral precincts, the towers of that stately
church peering up beyond.
[Illustration: THE MARKET PLACE, WELLS.
Wells is the nearest approach in England to the ideal Cathedral city
of poets and students, and the Market-place is so little disturbed by
markets that the plashing of the perennial springs which gives Wells
its name is easily heard from the fountain.]
From Wells we come in little more than five miles into Glastonbury,
standing in the fabled Arthurian “Vale of Avalon” of the poets. I
must confess that, many years ago, coming for the first time into
Glastonbury, I was disappointed. I had read so deeply of Avalon--the
Tennysonian Avalon of apple orchards and mystic Round Table
story--that I expected too much. Glastonbury is indeed a commercial
little town. Its population is less than that of Wells, but it gives
the impression of being larger--perhaps because its people are out and
about doing things, while the folk at Wells are engaged indoors in
such meditations as befit their ecclesiastical surroundings. Really,
you know, the roads into Glastonbury are quite good; and there is gas
in the streets and shops, and everything that savours of the twentieth
century--things that somehow sink so far into the background of it when
reading Arthurian romance, that you are unreasonably inclined to resent
them when coming into the town. Yet Glastonbury is rich in relics of
medievalism. You may even come to your truly ancient inn here, just as
did the pilgrims of old before the abbey was dissolved and the last
Abbot and two of his monks were hanged, a good deal higher than Haman,
on the lofty crest of Glastonbury Tor in 1539. Abbot Selwood built what
is now the George Hotel in 1485 as a pilgrims’ hostel, and the ancient
frontage is still in existence. The abbey ruins, which include the
fine Transitional Norman remains of St. Joseph’s Chapel, are situated
in lovely woodland grounds, and close by is the even more interesting
Abbot’s Kitchen, massive and ecclesiastical-looking, dating from about
1420.
We may with advantage strike across country from Glastonbury to
Taunton, across the interesting marshes of Sedgemoor--twenty-two
miles. Glastonbury, indeed, took its original title from the Latin
_Insula Vitrea_, a name formed by the Romans from the British “Ynys
Vitrin,” and Englished by the Saxons into “Glaestingabyrig.” This was
a descriptive name, applied to the still, glassy waters of the shallow
inland sea which then covered the whole of Sedgemoor with the exception
of a few islands. The town was one of many lake-dwellings in these
waters, overlooked by the tall and steep Tor, rising strangely to a
height of 500 feet. Now crowned with the fifteenth-century tower of a
chapel of St. Michael, this mountainous hill is a weird object in the
landscape for many miles.
We pass the boot-making village of Street, and then the village
of Greinton. Westonzoyland, with its very large and very fine
Perpendicular church, two and a half miles on the right, is really an
Avalon, or apple island, and delightful in spring. To the north of
the village was fought the Battle of Sedgemoor, July 6, 1685, and the
church was afterwards used as a prison for some hundreds of captured
rebels.
The flat scenery of the moor, with dykes beside the road filled with
reeds and water, is varied by strangely sudden hills here and there.
One of these is at Boroughbridge, a hamlet where we cross the River
Parret and enter the historic Isle of Athelney. The hill, locally
called “The Mump,” is crested by the ruins of a chapel of St. Michael.
Here we enter a district associated with the endearing story of Alfred
the Great. “He was England’s darling,” says the old Saxon Chronicle,
and so he remains. It was in this selfsame Isle of Athelney that he lay
hid amid the marshes, A.D., 879, after the Saxon disasters in battle
with the Danes. An obelisk on a hillock records the facts.
I should like to linger in the pleasant old town of Taunton--“Taunton
on the Tone,” as school primers told us to style it--but I am bound
for Dunster, on the Severn Sea, and that is another twenty-two miles
distant. The road to it, past Combe Florey, Crowcombe, Williton, and
Washford, is Somerset at its best, in every circumstance of rustic
beauty. At Washford is the ruined Cleeve Abbey, the most interesting
remains of a Cistercian monastery in the West of England. The church
has wholly disappeared. The interest lies in the domestic buildings and
the cloisters, together with the chapter-house and refectory, all in
the Early English style and very beautiful.
I choose Dunster to close this route because it is one of those rare
old towns which keep their ancient manorial aspect, and neither
increase nor greatly decline. It owes this distinction to the facts
of being situated just off the road to anywhere at all, and to being
a mile or two away from the sea, which in remote times came up to the
outworks of its castle, and made the place a seaport. Dunster is a
picture--nay, it is a gallery of pictures, for one meets you at every
turn. There is the sleepy town of one broad street, with the castle
on its wooded height in the background, and in the foreground the old
Yarn Market, a remarkable timber-framed building which seems to be
again awaiting the marketing of yarn. It was built, they say, in 1609,
and the weather-vane, dated 1647, marks the repairs effected after
the siege of the castle in 1646. That the reigning family of Dunster
is named Luttrell is evident from the name of the inn, the Luttrell
Arms, close by. This was in olden times a house of the Abbots of
Cleeve, and still retains some semi-ecclesiastical features, including
a fifteenth-century window of great size, with many elaborate oaken
mullions, looking upon the courtyard. The fine priory church of
Dunster, with its sweet carillons, that play a different air for every
day of the week, the so-called “Nun’s House,” the old water-mill--these
are all delights of Dunster. The castle, which is described as “Stancy
Castle” in Thomas Hardy’s novel _A Laodicean_, is still the residence
of the Luttrells.