Motor Tours in the West Country. Rodolph Mrs. Stawell
A RUN ACROSS SOMERSET
SUMMARY OF RUN ACROSS SOMERSET
Distances.
| Clifton Suspension Bridge | ||
| Clevedon | 11½ | miles |
| Wells | 25⅛ | ” |
| Ilchester | 17⅝ | ” |
| Crewkerne | 11 | ” |
| Devon Border | 12 | ” |
| Total | 77¼ | miles |
Roads.
No bad gradients except near Chard—1 in 8.
Surface: from Clifton to Ilchester, poor; Ilchester to Crewkerne, fair; Crewkerne to Border, extremely good.
I
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