To touch the coast on the left-hand of the Parret estuary is to adventure into a little-visited land. But although the way is long—the distance is six miles to Steart Point—the road is sufficiently easy, being downhill from Cannington to Cannington Park, scene of the battle of Cynuit, and to Otterhampton; and then flat for the remaining four miles. At Otterhampton, a village of a few farms and cottages, the church contains a memorial to a former rector, the Rev. Dr. Jeffery, who held the living for no fewer than sixty-seven years, from 1804 to 1871.
The river bends abruptly and nears the road at a point a mile and a half out, where the little waterside hamlet of Combwich—“Cummidge,” as it is styled locally—stands looking on to muddy creeks and the broad grey bosom of the Parret itself, with a colour like that of a London fog. Bridgwater spire is plainly visible, far off to the right, across the levels: sailing barges are loading the bricks made here from the kilns close at hand, and carts rattle and rumble along the few narrow alleys that form the only streets of the place. Away across the river, a whitewashed house marks the position of a little-used ferry from the out-of-the-world district of Pawlett Hams to this even more outlandish peninsula of Steart.
Steart Point thrusts out a long tongue of land over against Burnham, whose houses and tall white lighthouse seem so near across the levels, yet are almost two miles distant, over the rivermouth and the mud-flats. The name of “Steart” has come down to us little altered from Anglo-Saxon times, an “a” replacing the “o” with which it appears to have originally been spelled. It is the same name as that of the Start in South Devon, and signifies a boldly projecting neck of land, “starting” out to sea. Otherwise there is no likeness between that Devonian promontory of cruel, black jagged rocks and this flat, muddy and shingly fillet of land.
The fisher village of Steart is a singular place: a fishing village without boats! The shrimps, eels and flounders usually caught here are taken in nets set by the men of Steart going down to the sea at low water on “mud-horses.” Everything is conditioned here by the deep mud of the foreshore, which may only be crossed by special appliances, evolved locally. Chief among these is the “mud-horse,” which, it may at once be guessed, is no zoological freak. If it is related to anything else on earth, it may perhaps be set down as a hybrid production: a cross between a towel-horse and a toboggan sledge.
When the fishermen of Steart prepare to go forth a-fishing, they proceed to undress themselves to the extent of taking off their trousers and putting on a cut-down pair, very little larger than bathing-drawers. Mud-boots clothe their feet. Then they bring down their wooden “horses,” and, leaning against the upright breast-high framework, give a vigorous push, and so go slithering along the buttery surface of the flats; the nearest approach to that fabulous body of cavalry, the “Horse Marines,” any one is ever likely to see:
There was an old fellow of Steart,
Who went catching eels in the dirt.
When they asked “Any luck?”—
“Up to eyes in the muck!”
Said that rueful old fellow of Steart.