“They went through the stream.”
“Kerridges too?”
“Yes, such as the carriages of those times were.”
“’Eavens,” said he, summing up; “what ’eathenish times to live in!” And he proceeded with his work, which turned out, on closer inspection, to be that of plentifully oiling the fore and aft identification-plates of his car, to the end that the dust which so thickly covered the roads should adhere to them and obscure alike the index-letters and the numbers. He was obviously proposing to travel well up to legal limit.
The church is a noble example of the Perpendicular period, with an ancient Court House adjoining, the property of the Roman Catholic Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. It was made the home of a French Benedictine sisterhood in 1807; and is now a Roman Catholic Industrial School for boys. The tall, timeworn enclosing walls of its grounds form a prominent feature of the village.
One of the monuments on the walls of the church, in the course of a flatulent epitaph upon the virtues of various members of the Rogers family, of early seventeenth-century date, indulges in a lamentable pun. The subject under consideration is “Amy, daughter of Henry Rogers.” “Shee,” we are told, “did Amy-able live.” Deplorable!
Cannington stands at the entrance to the Quantock country, that delightful rural district of wooded hills and secluded combes which remains very much the same as it was just over a century ago, when Coleridge and his friends first made it known. The Quantock Hills run for some twelve miles in a north-westerly direction, from Taunton to the sea at West Quantoxhead; the high road from Bridgwater to Minehead crossing the ridge of them at Quantoxhead. The highest point of this range is Will’s Neck, midway, rising to 1262 feet. The capital of the Quantock country, although by no means situated on or near the ridge, is Nether Stowey. Behind that village rises the camp-crowned hill of Danesborough, which, although not itself remarkably high, is so situated that it commands an exceptionally fine panoramic view extending over the flat lands that border the Parret estuary, and over the semicircular sweep of Bridgwater Bay.
NETHER STOWEY; GAZEBO AT STOWEY COURT.
Some wild humorist, surely, that was, who pretended to derive the name of the Quantocks from a supposititious exclamation by Julius Cæsar, who is supposed to have exclaimed, standing on the crest of Danesborough, behind Nether Stowey, “Quantum ad hoc!” That is, “How much from here!” in allusion to the view from that point. Serious persons, however, tell us that the name is the Celtic “Cantoc” or “Gwantog;” i.e. “full of combes.”