Motor Tours in the West Country 2

Motor Tours in the West Country 2

A RUN ACROSS SOMERSET

 

To most of us the very thought of the West Country is full of

enchantment. In this grey and strenuous island, where a man must move

quickly if he would be warm, this is the nearest approach to a Lotus

Land--a land of green hills and hollows all lapped in an emerald sea,

a land where the breezes are sleepy and scented, and the flowers

grow because they want to see the view, and the sunshine is really

encouraging, and the very rain is soft and kind. Even here the weather

has its moods; but they are all lovable, and in any case cannot touch our

happy memories. We who are but wayfarers, and have chanced to see the sun

shining on the blue distances of Dartmoor, and warming the little sandy

coves of South Devon, and peering into the depths of the wooded valley of

Lynmouth, and lighting up the dark granite of the Land’s End, may keep

the remembrance of it unspoiled for ever. Like the figures on Keats’

Grecian Urn, our vision of sunny hours suffers no change. “For ever shalt

thou love, and she be fair.”

 

Even in Somerset the spell begins to work. We feel at once there is no

need for haste. We begin to loiter, and stray from the straight path, and

saunter through the orchards of the “Summerland;” though all the time the

thought of the Devon border is never absent from our minds.

 

Very slowly the car creeps over Clifton Suspension Bridge. The Avon, a

long way below us, flows between its high red-and-white cliffs towards

the Severn Sea, to whose shore we too are bound before we turn southwards

and make our leisurely way to Exeter, through Cheddar, and Glastonbury,

and Chard.

 

It is a fairly hilly road that takes us by way of Failand to Clevedon.

The surface is a little rough, too, but this is unfortunately a quality

that is shared by many of the roads of Somerset. After passing through

some pleasant scenery--here a dark plantation, and there a wide landscape

bounded by the grey waters of the Bristol Channel, and here on the slope

a pretty village--it leads us into the bright, clean, breezy streets that

have been trodden by Coleridge and Thackeray and the Brookfields, by

Tennyson and the Hallams.

 

When Coleridge came to Clevedon with his bride, and “only such furniture

as became a philosopher,” there was no more than a village here. There

was no esplanade, nor pier, nor bandstand to try his philosophy, when he

took the one-storied cottage with the jasmine-covered porch and the tall

rose that peeped in at the window, and settled there with the woman whom

he loved “best of all created things” and by whom he was bored at the

end of two months. Except in the matter of the jasmine on the porch, and

the garden that contains--in the words of the sarcastic Cottle--“several

pretty flowers,” there is little likeness between the Coleridge Cottage

in the Old Church Road and the poet’s “Valley of Seclusion.” Local

tradition would have us believe, however, that this red-tiled cottage

with the two sentinel trees is the very one that “possessed everything

that heart could desire”--for two months; the one that was supplied at

the philosopher’s request with a dustpan and a small tin kettle, a Bible

and a keg of porter; the one in which poor Sara sat so often by herself,

uncheered even by Mr. Cottle’s gift of “several pieces of sprightly

wall-paper.”

 

In those days Clevedon Court, which we passed as we drove into the town,

was really in the country, no doubt. It is still shaded and sheltered

by trees, and its mellow walls, its stately arches and mullions and

terraces, contrive to keep an air of academic calm in defiance of the

highway that passes near them, and of the neat little villas that

make modern Clevedon look so tidy. If we should chance to be here on

Thursday we may see the gardens. The rare beauty of this ancient house is

inevitably tinged with sadness now; but it was not sad, we may be sure,

when boyish Brookfield did his wooing here, and Thackeray paced these

paths, as novelists use, with the visionary Henry Esmond at his elbow,

and Tennyson walked with Arthur Hallam among the flowers, and there was

as yet no tablet “glimmering to the dawn” in the dark church on the cliff.

 

Quite solitary still, and undisturbed by any sound but the faint murmur

of the sea, is the grey church “by the broad water of the west” where

Arthur Hallam lies. It must always have been a desolate, haunting

spot, even before the song of the sea became a dirge and the old walls

were consecrated anew to the memory of a poet’s sorrow. In those

days, doubtless, the fragments of Saxon work and the moulding of the

chancel-arch received more attention than now, when every eye wanders

instantly to the white tablet on the wall of the south transept, and

every foot is fain to stand where Tennyson stood with his bride, above

the grave of Arthur Hallam and his father.

 

From Clevedon, turning inland to Wells, we cross a level land of orchards

and meadows on a very poor surface, through Yatton with its curious

church-tower, and Congresbury with its old cross-steps, and Churchill

with its historic name. Before us is the long shoulder of the Mendips,

changing from blue to green as we pass Churchill and climb, on a road

that suddenly becomes good, through a gap in the hills. There are fine

views from these uplands, and here and there a glimpse, far behind us,

of the Severn estuary. Very slowly we drive through the narrow, winding

streets of Axbridge, shadowed by overhanging eaves and gables of every

height and angle; and quickly through the level strawberry fields beyond,

to Cheddar under the hills.

 

[Illustration: CHEDDAR GORGE.]

 

Cheddar Gorge is a surprising--almost a startling--place, and we must

leave our highway for a little time to see it. From the village at the

foot of the Mendips a road--and a very good road it is--climbs to the

table-land above through a natural cleft between two mighty cliffs, which

rise sheer from the roadway and stand out against the sky in a mass

of towers and pinnacles. And all this sternness is softened and made

beautiful by hanging draperies of green. Masses of ivy trail from crag

to crag; high overhead the little birch-trees find a precarious footing

on invisible ledges; every tiny cleft and ridge holds a line of grass

and wildflowers across the grey face of the cliff. Gradually, as the road

sweeps higher, the towering sides of the gorge change into steep slopes

of grass and fern, strewn with boulders and broken here and there by

clumps of firs. The slopes become lower and lower, more and more open,

till at last the landscape widens into undulating fields. Then we turn,

and glide down again round curve after curve, while the grandeur grows,

as the huge walls of the gorge close in upon us and reach their climax in

the Pinnacle Rocks.

 

And deep in the heart of these wild cliffs is a strange, uncanny world.

Surely in these caverns the gnomes ran riot till they were frightened

away by an elaborate system of electric lighting and an exuberance of

advertisement. It is plain that they have left Gough’s Cave, for it is

more than a little artificial; but none the less there is an ethereal

beauty in the myriad stalactites and stalagmites through which the light

gleams so softly on roof and floor. As for the poor prehistoric man who

guards the entrance of the cave that has served him for dwelling-house

and tomb, it is an indignity for him, I think, after his seventy

thousand years or so of rest in the heart of the earth, to be set up thus

in a glass case to grin at tourists.

 

Between Cheddar and Wells a pretty, winding, undulating road dips in and

out of several red-roofed villages shaded by trees. In the distance the

unmistakable outline of Glastonbury Tor is dark against the sky.

 

This is not the best way into Wells, for the cathedral is hidden. It is

from the Shepton Mallet road that we may see “the toune of Wells,” as

John Leland saw it nearly four hundred years ago, “sette yn the rootes of

Mendepe hille in a stony soile and ful of springes.” It has not changed

very much: the clergy here being secular, the Dissolution did not affect

them, and Wells has never greatly concerned itself with worldly matters

and has been all the more peaceful on that account. There have been

disturbing moments, of course; as when Perkin Warbeck set up his claim,

so confusing to the minds of quiet folk; and when the Parliament-men

made havoc in the cathedral; and when Prince Maurice and his troops

were billeted on the town, to its great impoverishment; and when King

Monmouth passed this way. But on the whole Wells has suffered little.

Leland, when he visited the cathedral, entered the close by one of these

gates that are standing to-day: came through the Chain Gate, under the

gallery and past the great clock that was made by a monk of Glastonbury,

or through Browne’s Gate from Sadler Street, or on foot through Penniless

Porch in the corner, once the haunt of beggars; and saw Jocelin’s famous

west front rising above the greensward, with the embattled deanery hard

by; and passed from the market-place to the moated palace under the

archway of Beckington’s “right goodly gatehouse,” the Bishop’s Eye.

This fifteenth-century Bishop Beckington did much for the beauty and

benefit of Wells; built, not only three gateways, but also “xij right

exceding fair houses al uniforme of stone, high and fair windoid,” in the

market-place, and set a conduit there, “for the which the burgeses ons a

yere solemply visite his tumbe, and pray for hys sowle.”

 

We may visit his tomb ourselves. His dust lies in the cathedral at the

entrance to the choir, beyond that ugly inverted arch that was set up

for safety’s sake in the fourteenth century; but in later days his tomb

has been treated less reverently than of yore. Its carved and painted

canopy stands broken and empty in the chapel of St. Calixtus, and in the

south aisle of the choir is the rather ghastly tomb--bishop above and

skeleton below--which the burgesses visited so gratefully. It is a rare

and delightful custom here that allows one to walk alone through the

choir and exquisite lady-chapel; to linger at will by the throne where

William Laud and Thomas Ken have sat; to picture Lord Grey standing

with drawn sword before this altar, to defend it from the rabble that

followed Monmouth; to seek out Bishop Button’s tomb, which cured so many

mediæval toothaches; to mount the long flight of footworn steps to the

chapter-house, and rest beneath its lovely vault in silence. These same

steps lead also to the gallery that was built by Beckington for the use

of the priest-vicars, whose peaceful close is reached by a gateway of its

own, outside the Chain Gate.

 

[Illustration: THE BISHOP’S EYE, WELLS.]

 

Beyond the cloisters is the palace: the fortified gatehouse, the towers

and drawbridge that Ralph of Shrewsbury found it wise to set between

himself and the citizens; the moat that is filled every day from St.

Andrew’s Well; the shattered banquet-hall where Edward III. once ate his

Christmas dinner; the great red dwelling-house that has passed for nearly

seven centuries from hand to hand. “Many bisshops hath bene the makers of

it, as it is now,” says Leland. It has had Wolsey for its master though

not its inmate; it has been stolen by Somerset the Protector; it has been

the home of Bishop Laud. Saintly Thomas Ken went from its seclusion for

a little time to join the rest of the Seven Bishops in the wild uproar

of their trial and acquittal, and later on was driven from its doors by