MONTACUTE PRIORY.
Montacute Priory, near the village, has a fine Perpendicular tower and other picturesque remains. To see it at its best, one should visit the village late in autumn, when the Virginia creeper, which covers the ancient walls, has turned to brilliant red. Other buildings under similar conditions may look as lovely, but we can recollect nothing to equal this old farmstead in its clinging robes of gold and scarlet.
There are many interesting old inns in this part of Somersetshire, notably in the town of Yeovil, where the "George" and "Angel" are vis-à-vis, and can compare notes as to whose recollections go back the farthest. The wide open fireplaces and mullioned windows of the former are of the time of Elizabeth or earlier, but the stone Gothic arched doorway and traceried windows of the latter can go a century better. But important as they both have been in their day, neither has had the luck or energy to keep pace with the times sufficiently to hold younger generations of inns subservient. The old "Green Dragon" at Combe St. Nicholas, near Ilminster, possessed a remarkable carved oak settle in its bar-parlour. It was elaborately carved, the back being lined with the graceful linen-fold panels. At the arm or corner were two figures, one suspended over the other, the upper one representing a bishop in the act of preaching. They were known as "the parson and clerk"; but when we saw the settle the "parson" was missing, having mysteriously disappeared some time before. The "clerk" was so worn out, having occupied his post so for centuries, that his features were scarcely recognisable; but who can wonder when he had been preached to for close upon four hundred years! To be "overlooked" in remote parts of Somersetshire means certain misfortune. Many a poor unoffending old woman, suspected of "overlooking" people, has been knocked on the head that her blood might be "drawn" to counteract the spell. Probably the parson's attitude aroused suspicion, and he was quietly put away; but as his head had not been broken neither had the spell, and the last we heard of the "Green Dragon" was that it had been burnt down.
The old landlady we remember had a firm belief that the death of one of her sons was foretold by a death's-head moth flying in at the window and settling on his forehead when he was asleep in his cradle. The child, a beautiful boy, then in perfect health, was doomed, and her eldest son immediately set forth with his gun to shoot the first bird he chanced to see, to break the spell. However, that night the child died; and upon the wall in a glass case was the stuffed bird as well as the moth, a melancholy memento of the tragedy of thirty years ago.
[IN WESTERN SOMERSET]
Some of the prettiest nooks of old-world "Zoomerzet" are to be found under the lovely heather-clad Quantock Hills. The beauty of the scenery has inspired Coleridge, Wordsworth, and many famous men, not the least of whom was poor Richard Jeffreys, who has written sympathetically of the delightful vale to the west of the range.
To the north and north-west of Taunton the churches of Kingston and Bishop's Lydeard are both remarkable for their graceful early-Tudor towers. Of the two, the former is the finer specimen of Perpendicular work, the soft salmon-yellow colour of the Ham stone being particularly pleasing to the eye. The situation of the church is fine, commanding grand views; and at the intersection of the roads to Asholt and Bridgwater one gets a glorious prospect of Taunton and the blue Blackdown Hills beyond on one side, and on the other the sea and the distant Welsh mountains.