The unfortunate person who, clad perhaps in a light summer suit (“Gent’s West-End lounge suit. This style 25s.”), has unwittingly sat upon a piece of ham-fat left behind by one of these gay irresponsibles, hates the tripper thereafter with a baleful intensity. Can we blame him that he does so? But this is only one of that half-day excursionist’s deadly sins, of which the fact that he brings merely his presence and his nosebag—and little money—into the places he favours is one of the deadliest. Another is the circumstance that he is a Welshman. The Somerset folk do not like the Welsh, who are alien from them in every possible way, and it is quite certain that the South Wales colliers and dockers are not a favourable or pleasing type. Thus triply—financially, racially and socially—the trippers from across the Severn Sea are not a success.
It is all very lively at Burnham, and there is a bandstand, and there are lodging-houses and boarding-houses innumerable, and teashops, and a “park” about the area of a moderate-sized private garden. No tramways have yet appeared at Burnham, but it is possible to travel expeditiously, if involuntarily and not altogether safely, and quite freely—on the banana-skins that plentifully bestrew the streets. But this form of locomotion is not altogether popular.
There is much motor-boating in these latter days off Burnham, and by favour of such a craft, or by sailing-skiff, or the comparatively tedious method of rowing, you may visit Steart Island, off the mouths of the Brue and Parret. But there are no attractions on that flat isle, swimming in surrounding ooze, except at such times as winter, when the wild-fowl congregate greatly there, in the mistaken notion that they are safe from the sportsman.
In midst of the long line of houses that closely front upon the sea, stands the ancient parish church of Burnham; considerably below the level of the street. The traveller who has come from Brean and Berrow will at once perceive that this street and this roadway are founded upon the blown sand that has placed Brean church in a similar hollow.
Here, at Burnham, the church-tower, of three storeys, leans as many times, this way and that, and has apparently been long in this condition, having been left so at the restoration of 1887. In the chancel remains a portion of a huge white marble altar-piece designed by Inigo Jones for the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, and subsequently erected in Westminster Abbey by Sir Christopher Wren. At the coronation of George IV. it was removed and placed here by Dr. King, Canon of Westminster and vicar of Burnham; and singularly cumbrous and out of place it looks still, even though parts of it have been removed, to afford much-needed room.
Leaving Burnham behind, and then Highbridge, we come to Huntspill Level, with the square, massive tower of Huntspill church prominent against the skyline, on the right hand. The road, worn into saucer-shaped holes by excess of motor-traffic, goes straight and flat across the Level, with pollard willows and stagnant, duck-weedy ditches on either side, and so through the wayside hamlet of West Huntspill: a naturally slovenly, out-at-elbows place, not improved by being nowadays thickly coated with motor-dust.
HUNTSPILL.
And so to Pawlett (locally “Pollitt”) consisting of an old church and half-a-dozen houses on a slight knoll, overlooking miles of flat pasturelands, said to be the very richest in Somerset. Proceeding in the direction of Bridgwater, the Sedgemoor Drain, chief of the many cuts, large and small, that prevent the moor from being inundated, is crossed at the point where it falls into the river Parret. Here is the level expanse known as Horsey Slime. It is not a pretty name. Dunball railway-station stands on the left, and the distance in that direction is closed by the Polden Hills, crowned by a ready-made ruined castle, built some sixty years ago, yet looking perfectly romantic and baronial, so long as this distressing fact of its appalling modernity is not disclosed. Over those strangers and pilgrims from far lands who, landing at Plymouth, and travelling to Paddington per Great Western Railway for the first time, catch a momentary glimpse of this fictitious fortalice, before the engine dashes with a demoniac yelp into the Dunball Tunnel, there comes a feeling that they have at last entered a region of romance. They have indeed, but not in respect of that castle, at any rate. It is painful to be confronted with the necessity for such a revelation, but the honest topographer sees his duty plain before him—and does it, no matter the cost!
In the levels beneath the hills crowned by this sham castle lies Bawdrip, a village of the very smallest and most retiring agricultural type, with a little Early English cruciform church, remarkable for the finely sculptured female heads and headdresses of wimple and coif on the capitals of the four pillars supporting the central tower. Restoration has left the building particularly neat and tidy and singularly bare of monuments. Bawdrip church, however, contains a monumental inscription which includes a mysterious allusion that has never yet been properly explained; and probably never will be. The small black marble slab setting forth this inscription in the ornate Latinity of the seventeenth century might well escape the scrutiny of the keenest antiquary, for it is built into the wall in a most unusual situation, behind the altar. It is a comprehensive epitaph to Edward and Eleanor Lovell and their two daughters, Eleanor and Mary, erected here to their memory by the husband of the daughter Eleanor, who, singularly enough, omits his own name. Done into English, it runs as follows: