The total population of Flat Holm is twenty. Here is an inn. There are two fresh-water springs on the island.
There is much charm in the curious islanded and semi-islanded features of the Weston outlook. Boldly rising from sea-level to the left of the long front of the town, are the great hunchbacked masses of Brean Down and Uphill.
Uphill stands romantically at the mouth of the Axe, marked from great distances by its abrupt hill rising to a hundred feet above the plain, but looking much loftier. It is made further noticeable by the ruined church that stands prominently on its barren summit. The seaward side is scarred by limestone quarries into the likeness of cliffs, at whose feet the turbid waters of the Axe crawl sluggishly to the sea, between deep, muddy banks. This was the site of a Roman station and port, whence the lead and other minerals mined by those strenuous ancients on the Mendip hills were shipped. From Old Sarum, a distance of fifty-five miles, a Roman road has been traced, going by Charterhouse-on-Mendip, and ending here. Antiquaries give the name of the Roman station as Ad Axium, following the lead of Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who himself invented the name. Still on the hilltop, near the church, may be traced the earthworks that once enclosed the Roman fort, and many coins of that period have been found here. Down below is a limestone cavern accidentally discovered in 1826, when it was found to contain bones of the hyæna and other animals long extinct in Britain: long centuries before ever the Romans came.
UPHILL.
In Domesday Book Uphill is found as “Opopille,” a form which takes the place-name almost entirely out of the category of names descriptive of the physical features of the spot, and places it in that of personal names. For “Uphill” is, in short, not what it seems, and does by no means refer, in its true form, to the hill. It is, reduced to the name first given, “Hubba’s Pill”; that is to say, Hubba’s Creek, or harbour. All creeks, and many small streams on either side of the Bristol Channel, are “pills.” This particular name was first conferred in A.D. 882, the year when these Channel coasts in general were attacked by Danish raiders under the leadership of one Hubba, who was slain in battle with Alfred the Great, either near Appledore, on the North Devon Coast, at a place still known as “Bloody Corner,” or at Cannington, near the river Parret, in the neighbourhood of Bridgwater, supposed to be the “Cynuit” of ancient chronicles where the “heathenmen” were also utterly defeated by the great King.
Those sea-rovers were naturally attracted by the safe harbours afforded by such estuaries as these of the Parret and Axe, and laid up their piratical craft here. Probably Hubba’s flotilla first anchored in the Axe before moving on to final disaster at Cynuit; and the stay, it might be supposed, could not have been short, for the place to have been given his name. Moreover, between Uphill and Bleadon we have the ferry known at this day as “Hobbs’s Boat,” this name itself hiding, in another corrupted form, that of the ancient chieftain.
Here, then, is good news for the Hobbses of modern times, writhing perhaps under the possession of so ungainly and apparently plebeian a name, and wishing they were Mount joys or Mauleverers, or something of equally aristocratic sound. Any Hobbs may, it is clear, derive from Norse berserkers, and who knows but Biggs and Triggs also, and their like!
Oh! what a chance of high romance
Lies hid in names like Hobbs;