The traveller has to pass the little church and scattered cottages of Otterhampton on the way to Steart; and on the return, if he wishes to keep near the coast, he comes through Stockland Bristol, a pretty rustic village, with prosperous-looking manor-house and an entirely modern church. Beyond it are Upper Cock and Lower Cock farms, that take their names from a tumulus down in the levels near the estuary known as “Ubberlowe.”
“Upper Cock,” in its original form, was “Hubba Cock”; “Cock” signifying a heap, and comparing with “haycock.” “Ubbalowe” is properly “Hubbalowe,” i.e. “Hubba’s heap,” both names pointing to the probability that here was buried the chieftain Hubba, who, as we have already seen, fell at Cynuit.
From this point a succession of winding lanes leads down again to the curving shore of Bridgwater Bay at Stolford. Here meadows, a farmstead with well-filled rickyards, and a compound heavily walled and buttressed against flooding from the salt marshes, border upon a raised beach of very large blue-grey stones, which replaces the mud that gathers round the Parret estuary. Here at low spring tides traces may yet be found of the submarine forest off-shore. A sample of the foreshore taken at Stolford usually suffices explorers, and fully satisfies their curiosity; for the clattering loose stones of the heaped-up beach form an extremely tiring exercise-ground.
THE “MUD HORSE.”
These level lands of highly productive meadows, lying out of the beaten track, below the greatly frequented high road that runs out of Bridgwater to Nether Stowey, and so on along the ridge to Holford and West Quantoxhead, are much more extensive than a casual glance at the map would convey. They are at one point over five miles across. The centre of this district is Stogursey, which is, as it were, a kind of capital, if a large agricultural village may be thus dignified.
Stogursey is a considerable village, taking the second half of its name from the de Courcy family, who once owned it, but the thick speech of Somerset rendered the place-name into “Stogursey” so long ago that even maps have adopted the debased form; some, however, inserting a small (Stoke Courcy) in brackets, under the generally accepted form. The visitor will at the same time notice, in the title of the local parish magazine, that efforts are being made by the clergy to restore the original name. The church was built by those old Norman lords, but the family died out so very long ago, that no memorials of them remain in it; and the net result of all their ancient state and glory is—a name! It is a large and fine church, in the Norman and Transitional Norman styles; consisting of a large and lofty nave without aisles, a central tower, north and south transepts, and deep chancel. The clustered shafts supporting the central tower have elaborately sculptured Norman capitals of a distinctly Byzantine character. A variant of the place-name is seen on a monument to one Peregrine Palmer, where it appears as “Stoke Curcy.” The Palmer family is seen, on another monument, revelling in a pun beneath the Palmer coat of arms: in this wise, “Palma virtuti.”
STOLFORD.
But the Verney aisle of this beautiful church contains more interesting memorials than those of Palmers; notably two altar-tombs with effigies of the Verneys of Fairfield. The earliest is that of Sir Ralph Verney, 1352. The other, that of Sir John Verney, who died in 1461, is of very beautiful workmanship, and displays, among other shields of arms, the punning device of the family: three ferns—“verns,” as a rural Somerset man would say, in that famous “Zummerzet” doric that is not yet wholly extinct.