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Motor Tours in the West Country

Chapter 34: FOOTNOTES
By Mrs. Rodolph Stawell
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About This Book

A practical and evocative travel guide for motorists exploring England's West Country, offering route-by-route itineraries, distances, road conditions, and maps alongside descriptive accounts of scenery, towns, churches, castles, and coastal views. Each chapter outlines recommended runs across Somerset, Devon (heart, north, south) and Cornwall, pairing hands-on driving advice with historical and antiquarian notes and plentiful photographic illustrations. The author balances practical details—gradients, surfaces, ferry points—with literary reflections on landscape, local curiosities, and suggested detours, making it useful for planning tours and for armchair readers seeking a vivid sense of the region.

TAUNTON CASTLE.

Such are some of the memories of quiet, prosperous Taunton. Nor is the rest of its long history much more placid. The eighth-century castle of wood to which King Ina of the West Saxons called his “fatherhood, aldermen, and wisest commons, with the godly men of his kingdom, to consult of great and weighty matters,” only survived for twenty-one years. In the twelfth century the Bishop of Winchester built another, which was improved and enlarged by his successors, and has partly weathered the many storms and stresses of its long experience: Wars of the Roses, invasion by Perkin, and the siege of the Civil War. Taunton held for the Parliament, consistently, but at the first not very stoutly. No sooner did the royalists come near the town, says Clarendon, than two “substantial inhabitants” were sent out to treat with the general; while the garrison settled the matter by departing, like Perkin on a former occasion from the same castle, “with wonderful celerity.” A year later, however, the Parliament took Taunton again, and making Blake its defender, kept it. For Blake, who afterwards summed up a sailor’s duty in memorable words—“It is not for us to mind state affairs, but to keep the foreigners from fooling us”—knew the duty of a soldier too. “As we neither fear your menaces nor accept your proffers,” he answered the summons to surrender, “so we wish you for time to come to desist from all overtures of the like nature unto us.” Wyndham, Goring, Hopton, Grenville, all did their utmost in vain. It remained for Charles II.’s spite to ruin Taunton’s defences. The castle that defied the King was dismantled, and the town-walls utterly wiped away.

Of the Augustinian Priory that was founded by Bishop Giffard of Winchester and supported by so many noteworthy people—by Henry de Blois and the Mohuns, Montacutes and Arundels, William of Wykeham and Jasper Tudor—there is nothing left but a barn, the priory church of St. James, and the splendid chapel of St. Mary Magdalen, now the parish church. The graceful tower from which Macaulay looked out over a land flowing with milk and honey was shortly afterwards taken down, but the present one, with its three tiers of Decorated windows and its pinnacles and parapet, is exactly copied, it is said, from the original.

From Taunton we pass, through pretty undulating country, by way of Hatch Beauchamp to Ilminster. After the wild scenery of Devon this quiet land is not exciting; but there are pleasant woods here and there, and the villages of Somerset need fear no comparisons with any in England. The towns are less attractive, except in the matter of churches. Ilminster, for instance, is clean and old-fashioned, but has no real beauty save the church of yellow stone with the fine tower. When Monmouth made his successful progress through this country in his youth, from hospitable house to flower-strewn town, he came to this church one Sunday morning from White Lackington. He saw the tower with the triple windows and Sir William Wadham’s fifteenth-century transepts; but the nave has been rebuilt since then, and betrays the fact. In the northern transept is the enormous tomb of the builder, inlaid with brasses; and near it is the ponderous but unlovely monument of Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham, founders of Wadham College. They “lie both interr’d under a stately monument,” says Prince, “now much defaced, the greater is the pity, by the rude hands of children and time.”

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.

[5] It is a repliqua of the one at Tavistock.

[6] Open to the public on one afternoon a week, but not always on the same day.

[7] The King’s General in the West—more often called Granville: but as his family is so often mentioned in these pages I thought it best to keep to one form.

[8] “History of Dunster,” by Sir H. Maxwell-Lyte.

[9] “Old Falmouth,” by Miss S. E. Gay.

[10] “Pendennis and St. Mawe’s,” by Captain Oliver.

[11] “Old Falmouth,” by Miss S. E. Gay.

[12] “History of the Granville Family,” by Roger Granville.

[13] “History of the Granville Family.”

[14] “Copyed from oone accounte in Maisster Alston’s Seamanshyppe Booke.”

[15] From “History of the Granville Family.”

[16] See “The Vicar of Morwenstow,” by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould.

[17] Do not take the road to the left, marked Lynton on the signpost, for it goes down the notorious “Beggar’s Roost” hill, roughly one in three.

[18] Most of the facts relating to the history of Dunster are derived from Sir H. Maxwell-Lyte’s “History of Dunster.”

[19] “The Holland House Circle,” by Lloyd Sandars.

INDEX