The ruined church of St. Nicholas has not been in that condition so long as might be supposed. It was in use until April 5th, 1846. From Norman times it had stood here, and the religious fervour of many generations had proved easily equal to this arduous climb to the hilltop, a very real exercise, alike of piety and of the body. But hilltop churches must in modern times expect less faithful attendance, and must be resigned to compete, on terms disadvantageous to themselves, with dissenting chapels more fortunately situated in the levels. Thus, when, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the roofs of the old church of Uphill were discovered to be in a highly dilapidated condition, a long-sought opportunity was seized to abandon the building, which was otherwise not in any desperate structural condition. A new church was accordingly built below, and the old building unroofed and left to the winds of heaven and the fowls of the air. Even the old font was left here to unregarded desecration for a number of years. The chancel, it will be observed, has been re-roofed to serve as a mortuary chapel; for the churchyard still receives the bodies of parishioners. Stoutly the ancient walls yet stand, and sharp to this day are the carvings of the Norman north porch and the grim, uncanny faces of the uncouth gargoyles that look out over Weston and the bay.
Brean Down, that huge, almost islanded hill—a sort of miniature Gibraltar—that rises from the Axe marshes and the sand-flats opposite Uphill, to a height of 321 feet, looks from Weston, and from Uphill itself a place quite easy to arrive at, but, as sheer matter of fact, no one can reach it by road under nine miles, by way of Bleadon and Brean village. In a direct line from Uphill, across the river Axe, Brean Down is only about a mile and a half away. The readiest method of reaching this spot is by the ferry across the Axe at the end of Weston sands, a threepenny passage, generally, at low water, the matter of walking along planks laid in the mud, and a pull of three or four boat’s lengths. And then you have the breezy isolation of all Brean Down before you; and you will have it very much to yourself. Wild birds and wild flowers are the only habitants of the Down, once you have left the farmhouse on the flats behind, but the place has been the subject of not a few ambitious schemes. The summit was fortified in 1867, but suddenly ceased to be so in July 1900, when the magazine was blown up by a soldier firing his rifle into it. Whether he did this by accident, as a novel way of committing suicide, or as an ill-advised joke, does not appear, because there was nothing left of him from which to seek an explanation.
A grand scheme was formulated in 1864, which a fine harbour was to be built under the lee of the Down, with piers, quays, and all the usual appurtenances of a steam-packet station, together with a railway from the Great Western. The huge sum of £365,000 was expended upon the pier, but the scheme eventually came to nothing, and the derelict works were finally destroyed in the storms of December 1872. So those far-distant merchants, the pre-Roman Phœnicians, who are said to have used this spot as a commercial port, are not immediately likely to have any successors.
CHAPTER XI
BLEADON—BREAN—BRENT KNOLL
To reach the village of Brean and to come in touch again with the coast on leaving Weston-super-Mare, Uphill village is passed, with a choice of roads then presenting itself: a short road with a penny toll to pay, or a slightly longer one, free. Either one of these brings you down into the flat lands under the scarred and quarried sides of Bleadon Hill, some 550 feet high. The handsome Perpendicular tower of Bleadon church groups beautifully with a fine fifteenth-century village cross.
Thenceforward, across the flats, now rich meadows, through lanes with much fine hedgerow timber, the way leads to Lympsham, a village rebuilt by the local squire, who happened to be also the parson, over half a century ago. Every cottage is in a more or less domestic Gothic style, as Gothic was then understood, strongly flavoured with ecclesiasticism. The manor-house itself is Gothic, something after the Strawberry Hill manner of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century date, and really deplorable, were it not that the beautiful and well-wooded grounds, and the magnolias that clothe the walls, soften the effect. The church of St. Christopher, immediately opposite, and encircled by beautiful elms and oaks, has a fine tower that noticeably leans to the west.
BLEADON CHURCH.
From Lympsham the road turns abruptly to the coast at Brean, winding and turning unweariedly this way and that, over the open marshes; with deep dykes, half-filled with water and mud, on either side, and willows of every age, from saplings like walking-sticks to reverend ancients, hollow and riven with age, lining them.