ENTRANCE TO THE CHEDDAR CLIFFS.
HIGH ROCKS AT CHEDDAR.
The Mendip Hills, with their picturesque gorges and winding valleys, were formerly a royal forest. It was here that King Edmund was hunting the red deer when his horse took fright and galloped towards the brow of the highest part of the Cheddar Cliffs. Shortly before, the king had quarrelled with Dunstan, and expelled the holy man from his court. As the horse galloped with him to destruction, he vowed if preserved to make amends. The horse halted on the brink as if checked by an unseen hand, and the king immediately sought Dunstan and made him abbot of Glastonbury. These hills were the haunt of the fiercest wild beasts in England, and their caves still furnish relics of lions to a larger extent than any other part of the kingdom. The most remarkable deposit of these bones is in the Wookey Hole, on the southern edge of the Mendips, about two miles from Wells. At the head of a short and picturesque glen, beneath an ivy-festooned cliff, is a cavern whence the river Axe issues and flows down the glen. The cave that disclosed the animal bones is on the left bank of the glen, and was but recently discovered in making a mill-race. It also contained about three hundred old Roman coins, rude flint implements, and skeletons of a mammoth and woolly rhinoceros. The larger cave, which is hung with fine stalactites, can be explored for some distance. Near the entrance is a mass of rock known as the Witch of Wookey, who was turned into stone there by a timely prayer from a monk who opportunely arrived from Glastonbury. The underground course of the Axe in and beyond this cave is traced for at least two miles. The Mendips contain other pretty glens and gorges, and from the summit of their cliffs can be seen the valley of the Axe winding away southward, while to the westward the scene broadens into the level plains that border the Bristol Channel, guarded on either side by the hills of Exmoor and of Wales. Little villages cluster around the bases of the hills, the most noted being Cheddar, famous for its cheese, straggling about the entrance to a gorge in which caves are numerous, each closed by a door, where an admission-fee is charged. Some of them are lighted with gas and entered upon paved paths. Lead-and zinc-mines are worked in the glens, and above Cheddar rises the Black Down to a height of eleven hundred feet, the most elevated summit of the Mendips.
GLASTONBURY.
About six miles south-west of Wells is the ancient Isle of Avelon, where St. Patrick is said to have spent the closing years of his life, and where are the ruins of one of the earliest and most extensive religious houses in England—Glastonbury Abbey. A sixpence is charged to visit the ruins, which adjoin the chief street, but the remnants of the vast church, that was nearly six hundred feet long, are scanty. Of the attendant buildings there only remain the abbot's kitchen and an adjoining gateway, now converted into an inn. This kitchen is about thirty-four feet square within the walls and seventy-two feet high. The church ruins include some of the walls and tower-foundations, with a well-preserved and exceedingly rich chapel dedicated to St. Joseph. On the High Street is the old George Inn, which was the hostelrie for the pilgrims, built in the reign of Edward IV. and still used. It is fronted by a splendid mass of panelling, and the central gateway has a bay-window alongside rising the entire height of the house. The church of St. John the Baptist in Glastonbury has a fine tower, elevated one hundred and forty feet and richly adorned with canopied niches, being crowned by an open-work parapet and slender pinnacles. Almost the entire town of Glastonbury is either constructed from spoils of the abbey or else is made up of parts of its buildings. One of the most characteristic of the preserved buildings is the Tribunal, now a suite of lawyers' offices. Its deeply-recessed lower windows and the oriel above have a venerable appearance, while beyond rises the tower of St. John the Baptist. Behind the town is the "Weary-all Hill," from which arose the foundation of the monastery. Tradition tells that Joseph of Arimathea, toiling up the steep ascent, drove his thorn staff into the ground and said to his followers that they would rest there. The thorn budded, and still flowers, it is said, in winter. This was regarded as an omen, and they constructed the abbey there around the chapel of St. Joseph. The ponderous abbot's kitchen, we are told, was built by the last abbot, who boasted, when Henry VIII. threatened to burn the monastery, that he would have a kitchen that all the wood in Mendip Forest could not burn down. King Arthur was buried at Glastonbury, and a veracious historian in the twelfth century wrote that he was present at the disinterment of the remains of the king and his wife. "The shin-bone of the king," he says, "when placed side by side with that of a tall man, reached three fingers above his knee, and his skull was fearfully wounded." The remains of King Arthur's wife, which were quite perfect, fell into dust upon exposure to the air.
