No one could justly declare the village of Stogursey to be picturesque. Nor is it ugly; but at the radiant close of some summer day, when an afterglow remains in the sky, the village takes a beautiful colouring that cries aloud for the efforts of some competent watercolourist. It is an effect, as you look eastward down the long broad village street to the church, standing in a low situation at the end, of a rich red-yellow, like that of a ripening cornfield, on houses, cottages, and church alike, with the lead-sheathed spire gleaming like oxidised silver against the chilly blue-grey of the eastern sky at evening, spangled already, before the sun has finally gone to bed, with the cold, unimpassioned twinkle of the stars. Daylight heavily discounts this romantic effect, for then you perceive that the lovely hue on the church-tower at evening was the dying sunset’s transfiguration of the yellow plaster with which the tower was faced at some time in the Georgian period.
But Stogursey has a castle, or the remains of one, styled by villagers “the Bailey.” The stranger looks in vain for it in the village street.
Stogursey Castle stands in a meadow, surrounded by a stream which in the olden days was made, not only to form the moat, but to turn the wheels of the Castle mill. The mill-leat still runs on one side of the lane branching from the main village street; a lane now smelling violently of tanneries, and lined with cottages of a decrepit “has been” character; for it should be said that Stogursey is a decaying place. Changes in method of agriculture; changes in methods of communication, making for swifter and cheaper import of corn and other products of the soil; changes, in fact, in everything have all conspired to injuriously affect the place. The few remaining local shops do not look prosperous, and the village is full of private houses whose windows clearly show them to have once been shops, that gave up the pretence of business long ago. These bay-windowed, many-paned shop-fronts retired from business are familiar all over rural England. The villagers generally turn them to account as conservatories for geraniums and other flowers, and a pleasant sight, treated in this way, they often are. But there is a future for the Stogursey district; if not for the shopkeepers, certainly for the farmers. No light railway yet serves it, but the need of such an enterprise is great; and when it comes it will effect great changes in local fortunes.
STOGURSEY CASTLE.
“Stoke,” as it was styled originally, is a place of greater antiquity than any neighbouring village, as its name would imply; indicating as it does a stockaded post in a wild and dangerous district innocent of settled houses.
That post was probably on the site of the castle whose scanty ruins remain. The de Courcy castle was destroyed as early as the time of King John, when it passed by the second marriage of Alice de Courcy to one Fulke de Breauté, who set up here as a robber lord, and issued from this stronghold from time to time for the purpose of levying involuntary contributions from all who passed to and fro on the highway yonder, from Bridgwater to Quantoxhead. His castle can never have been strong, for its situation forbade strength, but the district was remote and little known, and people who were plundered on the ridgeway road had little inducement to plunge down here after this forceful taker of secular tithes. But de Breauté’s proceedings at length grew so scandalous that a strong force was sent at the instance of Hubert de Burgh, Chief Justiciar of the realm, and this thieves’ kitchen was burnt and more or less levelled with the ground. The subsequent history of the castle is vague, but it would appear to have been at some time rebuilt, for it was again, and finally, destroyed in 1455. A glance at the remains will show that it could never have been seriously defended against any determined attack. The moat, still in places filled with water, was deep as could be made, for it was the only external defence. Fragments of curtain-wall and portions of towers with loop-holes for arrows remain; and the entrance-towers may yet be traced, although a modern cottage has been built on to them, in all the incongruousness of red brick and rough-cast plaster. Such is the modern economical way with the shattered walls of this old robber’s hold. For the rest, the enclosure is a tangled mass of undergrowth and ivy-clad ruins of walls, and the meadow without is uneven with the ancient foundations of outworks that disappeared centuries ago.
The roads leading back from Stogursey to the coast have a distressing lack of signposts, and the district is for long distances without habitations, so that the way to Lilstock may well be missed. That they are fine roads for the cyclist, with never a motor-car about, is not sufficient to recompense the explorer who cannot find his way. And Lilstock—Little Stock originally; that is to say, some ancient small coastwise stockaded fort—is, perhaps, not worth finding, after all; for it appears to consist solely of a tin tabernacle, by way of church, and a lonely cottage amid elms, at the end of everything; a veritable dead-end. You climb to the lonely beach and have it all to yourself; the grey sea lazily splashing amid the ooze and scattered boulders, and a great empty sky above.
It is all the same beside the sea to Kilve, and rough walking too; the rebuilt church of Kilton prominent inland, on the left; very modern, but with a relic of a century ago in the shape of a battered old barrel-organ with a set of mechanical psalm and hymn tunes, that used to be ground out every Sunday to the long-suffering congregation, who must, by dint of sheer damnable iteration, have come to loathe this unchanging psalmody with a peculiar hatred.
We come now into the marches of West Somerset, where the folk-speech still to some extent remains; but the famous broad “Zummerzet” speech of these parts nowadays survives in its olden force only in the pages of dialect novels. The dialect novel is a thing of convention, like the dramatic stage, and is not necessarily a direct transcript from life. In novels of rural life, in rustic plays, and in illustrated jokes in which villagers appear, the countryman still wears a smock-frock and talks as his great-grandfather was accustomed to talk. Frequently, too, he wears a beaver hat, with a nap on it as luxuriant as the bristles of a boot-brush; and he is made to smoke “churchwarden” clay pipes about a yard long. Real rustics do not do these things nowadays. I only wish they did; for then exploring in the byways would be much more interesting. Nowadays, the unaccustomed Londoner can quite easily understand anything a Somersetshire man, even of the most rustic type, has to say.