The main road from Clevedon to Kingston Seymour trends sharply inland, passing the little village of Kenn. Seaward the flat and featureless lands spread to an oozy shore; Kenn itself, an insignificant village, standing beside a sluggish runnel of the same name. From this place sprang the Ken family, which numbered among its members the celebrated Bishop of Bath and Wells, who owed his preferment from a subordinate position at Winchester to his having, while there, refused to give up his house for the accommodation of Nell Gwynne. Charles the Second was a true sportsman. He respected those who were true to themselves, whether it were an unrepentant highwayman, whom he could pardon and fit out with a telling nickname; or a Church dignitary whose conscience forbade him to curry favour by housing a King’s mistress. So, in 1684, when a choice was to be made of a new Bishop of Bath and Wells, the King declared that no one should have it but “the little black fellow that refused his lodging to poor Nelly.”

The Ken family finally died out in the seventeenth century, after having been settled here over four hundred years. A small mural monument to Christopher Ken and his family, 1593, remains in the little church, rebuilt in 1861 and uninteresting; but with a pretty feature in the unusual design of the pyramidal stone roof of its small tower.

Beyond Kenn, in a lonely situation midway between Yatton and the coast at the point where the waters of the Yeo estuary glide and creep, rather than fall, into the sea, stands the village of Kingston Seymour. The country all round about is more remarkable for the rich feeding its flat pastures afford the cows than for its scenic beauties. If it were not for the luxuriant hedgerows and the fine hedgerow trees, it would be possible to say, with the utmost sincerity, that this corner of Somerset was tame and dull. But the dairy-farmers who occupy it so largely draw great prosperity from these flat meadows.

Within the beautiful and delicately graceful old church of Kingston Seymour are tablets recording the floods once possible here, and the destruction wrought by two such visitations, in 1606 and 1703. An epitaph records the odd bequest of a certain “J. H.,” in bequeathing “his remains” to his acquaintance, and their still more singular joy at the legacy:

The centre of this district is Yatton, which now draws all surrounding traffic by reason of its junction station on the Great Western Railway. Here the traveller changes for Clevedon, or for Cheddar and Wells, or for Wrington Vale. Yatton takes its name from the river Yeo, which oozes near by, and itself hides in that form of spelling the Celtic word ea, for water, akin to the modern French eau. Thus Yatton is really, derivatively, the same as Eton, near Windsor, the water-town beside the river Thames; Eaton by Chester, on the river Dee, and many other places throughout the country with the affix of “ea” or “ay.” An alternative derivation, as arguable as the first, makes Yatton derive from the “gate,” or gap, in the neighbouring hills, through which the Yeo drains on its way from Wrington. The village itself stands somewhat high, but overlooks a very considerable tract of low-lying country, formerly in the nature of a creek, as proved by modern discoveries of a Roman boat-house and similar waterside relics near by.

The business brought by the junction-station of the Great Western Railway at Yatton has effectually abolished the village-like rustic character of the place. It is more by way of a townlet of one long street, remarkable for the unpleasing prominence of blank walls enclosing the grounds of residents whose desire for privacy appears to be excessive.

The great feature of Yatton is, however, its fine church. No traveller can have journeyed much on the Great Western Railway without having noticed, as his train approached Yatton, the singular effect produced by the tall tower of this fine building, surmounted by a spire that has lost the last third part of its original height, and has been finished off with small pinnacles. The effect is almost uncanny, but by no means unpleasant, and the proposals that have from time to time been made to complete the spire are altogether to be deprecated. No records remain by which it can with certainty be said that the spire was ever completed when the church was at last finished, after building operations that extended from 1486 to 1500; but the evidence afforded by the Late Perpendicular cresting and pinnacles that finish off the incomplete structure, and are contemporary with it, seems to point to one or other of two hypotheses: that funds finally proved insufficient, almost on the eve of the works being brought to a conclusion; or that the builders were alarmed by signs of their having already placed as much weight upon the tower as it could possibly bear.

It is a noble church, designed in the last phase of pure Gothic architecture, with some few remains of Early English and Decorated from a former building, demolished to make way for this larger and more splendid place of worship. Here in the De Wyke chantry is the altar-tomb of Evelina de Wyke and her husband, c. 1337; and near by is that of Sir Richard Cradock Newton, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 1448, and his wife, Emma, or Emmota, Perrott. The recumbent effigies of the Judge and his lady are very fine. He wears the robes of his office and a collar with links of “S.S.,”—mystic letters generally considered to signify “Souveraigne,” and to be a badge of Lancastrian loyalty. This example is considered to be the earliest known. The “garbs,” or wheatsheaves of the Judge’s coat-of-arms, may still be traced, as also the arms of his wife—three pendant golden pears on a red field, in punning allusion to “Perrott.”

Here also is the tomb of the Judge’s eldest son, Sir John Newton, and his wife, Isabel Chedder. All these had, in their time, greatly to do with the rebuilding and beautifying of Yatton church.

A curious epitaph in the churchyard, to the memory of a gipsy who died in 1827, reads:

Prominent, close by, is the boldly stepped base of a churchyard cross, of which the shaft has long disappeared. Surviving accounts prove it to have been erected at a cost of £18, in 1499.

Yatton church, as we have seen, has a spire, an unusual feature with Somerset churches. Here, however, a small group of spires or spirelets occurs, including also those of Congresbury, Kingston Seymour, Kenn, and Worle. Congresbury spire is the most prominent of all, both from its own height and from the position it occupies in the vale below Yatton.

“Coomsbury”—for that is the local shibboleth—is a considerable village, taking its name traditionally from “St. Congar,” son of some uncertain “Emperor of Constantinople.” This really very autocratic personage endeavoured to marry his son to a person whom the young man could not love, and he fled his father’s Court; wandering in wild and inclement lands, until he came at last to this then particularly wild and unwholesome region. We cannot avoid the suspicion that the lady must have been a terror of the first water; or, alternatively, that Congar was not altogether weather-proof in the upper storey. He is said to have founded a hermitage here, A.D. 711, and a baptistry at which the heathen were admitted to the Church; and King Ina, we are told, became his most powerful patron. At last he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and died there; but his body was conveyed back to Congresbury.

Thus the legend, which has no historical foundation whatever, and appears to be an ancient, but entirely idle tale: the name of Congresbury being really, in its first form, an Anglo-Saxon KÖnigsburg; or, in modern English, Kingston. But “St. Congar,” although he finds no place in learned hagiologies, is still a belief at “Coomsbury,” and the villagers point to the stump of an ancient yew-tree as “St. Congar’s walking-stick.”

The church itself is large and fine, but not so fine as that of Yatton. In the churchyard is the base of an ancient cross, and in the village itself a tall shaft of the fifteenth century, with the cross replaced by a ball.

The rectory was until towards the end of the eighteenth century wholly a fifteenth-century building; but the clergy of that time, little disposed towards archÆology, and with marked leanings towards a certain standard of stately comfort and display, procured the building of the present large but ugly parsonage, and degraded the old building into a kitchen and outhouse. The expansive (and expensive) ideas of that time have for some generations past proved expensive indeed to the incumbents of Congresbury, for the large house and great lofty rooms cost much to keep in repair, and the ideas of the present-day clergy are not so nearly as they were like those of the old-fashioned free-handed country squires.

In Congresbury churchyard a lengthy epitaph upon a former inhabitant incidentally tells us that belated highwaymen still troubled these parts in 1830, a period when most other regions had long seen the last of those unknightly “Knights of the Road”:

He was of such courage that being attacked by a highwayman on the heath in this parish, Oct. 21st, 1830, and fearfully wounded by him, he pursued his assailant and having overtaken him in the centre of this village, he delivered him up to Justice.

The old rectory, happily still standing, was built about 1446. Its chief interest lies in the projecting porch; the doorway surmounted with a sculptured panel enclosing the figure of an odd-looking angel with a cross growing out of his head, holding in his hands a scroll inscribed “Laus Deo.” The archway is pointed in the manner of an Early English arch, and sculptured with an imitation of the “dog-tooth” moulding of that period. Stone shields bear the arms of Bishop Beckington, and of the Pulteney family.

From Congresbury it is possible to again approach the coast, coming by level roads that run through flat alluvial lands to Wick St. Lawrence, a small and solitary village standing near the banks of the Yeo estuary.

The writer grows tired of writing, and the reader doubtless as weary of reading, of the richness of the land in these parts; but the occasion for and the necessity of this continued allusion are at least proofs of the fertility of Somerset and of the abundance of the good gifts bestowed upon this fortunate county, whose soil even oozes plentifully out at its river-mouths and in the way of muddy deposits conspicuously advertises this form of wealth. There can be no possible doubt of the great importance the dairying business has assumed in these parts. It has already been noted at Yatton, and here again the traveller by road, who thus sees the country intimately, is impressed, not only with the rich pastures, but with the beautiful stock he sees in them or driven along the road; and also with the numbers of carts he observes, with from one to half a dozen milk-churns, driven smartly across country to the nearest railway-station, to catch the up trains for Bristol or London.

The road to Wick St. Lawrence—i.e. St. Lawrence’s Creek—after crossing the Great Western Railway midway between Yatton and Puxton, winds extravagantly between high hedges, passing only an occasional farmhouse. Rarely the stranger in these parts meets any other wayfarers than farming folk, and the children of Wick St. Lawrence at sight of him stand stock-still, with fingers in mouths, quaint figures of combined curiosity and shyness, clad in the old rustic way in homely clothes and clean “pinners.”

The remains of a many-stepped fifteenth-century village cross stand opposite the church: all steps and not much cross, ever since some village Hampdens in the long ago showed their hatred of superstition by leaving only about a foot and a half of the shaft. The church itself, with tall and rather gaunt tower, is a Late Perpendicular building, with elaborate stone pulpit. Here is an epitaph which would seem to have its warnings for those who might feel disposed to extend their explorations to the mud-flats of the Yeo estuary at low tide:

To the memory of James Morss, of this parish, yeoman, who dy’d November ye 25th 1730, aged 38 years.

Beyond the village, the road winds again in fantastic loops, and is crossed, without the formality of gates by the W. C. and P.L.R. This weird concatenation of initials sounds like a mass-meeting of household sanitary appliances, but those readers who have diligently persevered through the earlier pages of this book will understand that the Weston, Clevedon and Portishead Light Railway is meant. Thenceforward, after more windings through a thinly peopled district, the road wriggles on to Worle; sending off a branch to the left hand for Woodspring, Swallow Cliff, and Sand Bay.