At the outskirts of the town is Dillington House, where Mr. Speke entertained the popular duke when he came to Ilminster. We pass the entrance to the park as we drive out upon the road to Yeovil—the park whose palings were broken down by the crowd that surged about Monmouth, when he rode in with his self-constituted bodyguard of two thousand horsemen. Our progress, if greeted with less enthusiasm than his, is quicker. We spin through dull scenery upon a splendid road till the bluff outline of Hamdon Hill comes into sight. For a moment we touch the Fosse Way, then swing slowly round the base of the hill through Stoke, and see St. Michael’s Tower above us on the right.
It was this sugar-loaf hill that prompted William de Mortain the swashbuckler to name his castle Montacute, when he built it where the tower now stands. His father Robert de Mortain, who had come successfully through many battles with the standard of St. Michael borne before him, regarded that saint as the particular patron of his family. It was he who dedicated “the guarded Mount” in Cornwall and gave the monastery to its namesake in Normandy, “for the health of his soul.” His son, whose piety was peculiarly spasmodic, not only built his castle here, but founded the Cluniac priory whose lovely fifteenth-century gatehouse still stands at the foot of the hill. Everything at Montacute is lovely: this gatehouse with the oriel windows and the towers and creepers: the church with its many styles of architecture, from Norman to Decorated: the village square with its houses of warm yellow stone, and all its windows made beautiful with drip-stones and mullions: above all, the splendid Tudor front of Montacute House, and its formal, parapeted garden.
The Summer-land, as we leave it, is not beautiful, nor is Yeovil an interesting town. But the road is very good; the engine is singing softly; and as for us—we are remembering.
FOOTNOTES
[1] See “Wells and Glastonbury,” by T. S. Holmes.
[2] See Prince’s “Worthies of Devon.”
[3] German schelm.
[4] See “Plymouth Armada Heroes,” by M. W. S. Hawkins.