THE ISLE OF ATHELNLY (p. [68]).
THE PARRET AND THE LOWER AVON.
The PARRET: Its Source—Muchelney Abbey—The Tone and Taunton—Athelney Island and Alfred the Great—Sedgemoor—Bridgewater—Burnham. The LOWER AVON: Escourt Park—Malmesbury—Chippenham—Melksham—Bradford-on-Avon—Bath—The Frome—Beau Nash—Bridges at Bath—The Abbey Church—Bristol—St. Mary Redcliffe and Chatterton—The Cathedral—“The Chasm”—Clifton Suspension Bridge—The Lower Reaches—Avonmonth.
OF the even, placid course of the PARRET one sententious writer has said, “There is nothing remarkable in it, the country being flat.” A spark of imagination and the merest glimmering of historic interest would have spared us this dull commonplace. Surely the stream which saw the dawn of intellect in England, which witnessed the very beginnings of our modern civilisation, which watered the self-same mead where walked the first royal patron of learning that the country boasted, is notable, even if it does not attain to higher rank among our English rivers.
The Parret—Pedred of the Saxon Chronicle—is not of native Somerset birth, since it has its uprising a mile over the southern boundary, at Cheddington Copse, in the Dorsetshire parish of South Perrott. Flowing in a south-easterly direction, by Crewkerne and the Dorsetshire border, its basin occupies that portion of the Bridgwater Level lying between the Mendips and the Quantock Hills. At Crewkerne we have wide glimpses of its broad green valley, the busy little market town itself rising in the midst of the natural amphitheatre formed by the distant, unpretentious hills, lying low, like shadows on the horizon. The fine cruciform church of St. Bartholomew, whose only real rival among Somersetshire churches is that at Ilminster, in precisely the same style of architecture, occupies a pleasant situation westward of the river.