on confiding to personal friends, journalistic paragraphists, and other doubting thomases, professional sceptics, chartered cynics and indifferent persons, the important and interesting literary news that a proposal was afloat to write a book on the somerset coast, the author was assured with an unanimity as remarkable as it was disconcerting, that there is no coast of somerset.
this singular geographical heresy, although totally unsupported by map-makers, who on all maps and charts show a very well-defined seaboard, seems to be widely distributed; but it is not shared by (among others) the inhabitants of clevedon, of watchet (where furious seas have twice within the last few years demolished the harbour), of weston-super-mare, burnham, minehead, 2or porlock. the people of all these places think they live on the coast; and it would be really quite absurdly difficult to persuade them that they do not, or that they do not live in somerset.
this singular illusion, that there is no coast of somerset, is, however, but one among a number of current fallacies, among which may be included the belief that:
essex is a flat county.
london is dirty.
the virtuous are necessarily happy;
the wicked equally of necessity miserable.
all irishmen are witty.
scotsmen cannot see a joke.
and so forth. essex is flat, and london grimy, only comparatively. natives of huntingdonshire (which is an alternative term for flatness) no doubt think of essex as a place of hills; and although london may seem grimy to the eyes of a villager from devon or cornwall, it is as a city of light and purity to the sheffielder, the inhabitants of newcastle, and the people of other such places of gloom.
the coast of somerset, then, to make a beginning with it, opens with the great port and city of bristol, on the navigable estuary of the river avon, and ends at glenthorne, where the north devon boundary is met. the distance between these two points is sixty miles. throughout the entire length of this coastline, that of south wales is more or less clearly visible; the bristol channel being but four and a half miles wide at 3avonmouth; seven and a half miles at brean down, by weston-super-mare, and fifteen miles at glenthorne.
the foreshore of a great part of this coast is more or less muddy; the severn, which you shall find to be a tea or coffee-coloured river, even at shrewsbury a hundred miles or so up along its course, from the particles of earth held in suspension, depositing much of this, and the even more muddy rivers avon and parret contributing a larger proportion. the “severn sea,” as poetical and imaginative writers style this estuary, known to matter-of-fact geographers as the “bristol channel,” is therefore apt to be of a grey hue, except under brilliant sunshine.
but it would be most unjust to infer from these remarks, that mud, and only mud, is the characteristic of these sixty miles. indeed, the somerset coast is singularly varied, and has many elements of beauty. between the noble scene of its opening, where the romantic gorge of the avon, set with rugged cliffs and delightful woods, is spanned by the airy suspension bridge of clifton, and the wood-clad steeps of glenthorne, you will find such beautiful places as portishead and weston, whose scenery no crowds of vulgarians can spoil; and dunster, minehead, and porlock, which need no advertisement from this or any other pen. i have purposely omitted clevedon from the list above, for it does not appeal to me.
mud you have, naked and unashamed, practically 4only at pill and the outlet of the avon, and again at steart and the estuary of the parret, where those surcharged waters precipitate their unlovely burden. elsewhere, the purifying sea completely scavenges it away or kindly disguises it. nay, between weston and burnham we have even a long range of sandhills, as pure as the sand-towans of north cornwall or as the driven snow.[1]
1. but this depends largely upon the neighbourhood in which it has been driving.
and further, if we turn our attention to the scenery and the churches and castles and ruined abbeys, or to the associations, of this countryside, we shall find it an engaging succession of districts, comparing well with some better-known and more generally appreciated seaboards.
a specious air of eternal midsummer and sunshine belongs to the name of somerset. camden, writing in the first years of the seventeenth century, was not too grave an historian and antiquary to notice the fact; and we find him, accordingly, at considerable pains to disabuse any one likely to be deceived by it. he says, in his great work “britannia”: “some suppose its name was given it for the mildness and, as it were, summer temperature of its air.... but as it may be truly called in summer a summer country, so it has as good right to be called a winter one in winter, when it is for the most part wet, fenny and marshy, to the great inconvenience of travellers. i am more inclined to think it 5derives from somerton, anciently the most considerable town in the whole country.”
true, it did; for somerton was until the eighth century the capital of the tribe of britons known as somers?tas. their kingdom and their capital were finally swept away by the victorious irresistible advance of the great saxon kingdom of wessex, in a.d. 710. hence somerset, although we occasionally hear of “somersetshire,” is not really a shire, in the sense of being a more or less arbitrarily shorn-off division after the fashion of the midland shires—leicestershire, northamptonshire, and many others—but is historically an individual entity; the ancient kingdom of the somers?tas, remaining in name, though not in fact; just as wiltshire, wrongly so-called, is the ancient country of the wils?tas; devon the land of the damnonians, and cornwall the home of the cornu-welsh.
