At silent noon, and eve and early morn
The sea’s faint murmur.
Now he would hear only bus engines, for a big garage is opposite to the cottage where he lived.
Great writers have come to Clevedon ever since the Elton family bought Clevedon Court in Queen Anne’s reign. Successive Eltons who seem always to have been men of taste and vision, improved the town throughout the last century, Clevedon Court where the Eltons still live is said to be the oldest inhabited house in England. Most of what one sees from the Bristol road looks Tudor, Jacobean and later, but parts of it go back to Edward II. Terraced gardens rise to oak and ilex, beech and ash woods. These form a dark and satisfying background to the house which is of honey-coloured and silvery limestone, battlemented and irregular.
Much of Clevedon looks as though it were a continuation of the private park of the Court, thanks to skilful planting and planning in Victorian times. Roads wind among trees, there is plenty of open space. Skylines are often left undisturbed by building. Elton Road and Hallam Road leave little doubt about who the original owners were. Albert, Victoria and Alexandra roads give one a good idea of the dates of others. The earliest development is to be found in simple late Georgian houses of stucco washed cream or white and set down below the crest of Dial Hill, where they peep from myrtle bushes and ilex trees. What a comment on our civilisation it is that these modest houses actually beautify the hillside, while a few yards above them, a row of pre-war villas, commanding fine views no doubt, ruin the skyline for miles with their shapelessness and alien red brick among all this silvery stone. Such vandalism would never have been allowed under the benevolent liberalism of Elton control. The prevalent style of house in the older, mid-Victorian parts of Clevedon is Gothic or Italianate, built of local greyish-blue stone, sometimes flecked with pink or honey-yellow. Bargeboards adorn gables, roofs are slated, trees surround lawns and hang over garden walls. It is all as though many comfortable vicarages had been set down here among trees within sound of the sea. Well-designed Victorian lamp posts, instead of boa constrictors in concrete, adorn the streets. Walks and shelters and flowering shrubs and parks decorate the sea front.Only the sea itself is a bit of a failure. It is often muddy with that chocolate mud one sees at Weston and which seems to clog the waves and dye their thin tops a pinky-brown. This mud lies upon the rocks. Bathing in the marine lake at Clevedon I accidentally touched some with my toe—it had the feeling of a dead body.
But stand on Castle Hill three hundred feet above the town, in the octagonal ruin of Stuart times called Walton Castle, and view the landscape round. The gables of Clevedon rise from the spur of hills below us. Clifton is only twelve miles away behind us. Backbones of hill leading home to Bristol are dark with waving woods. Beyond the town towards Weston run flat and pale green moors till they meet the blue outline of true Mendips like the background of a Flemish stained-glass window. The Bristol Channel is a bronze shield streaked with sunlight. Flat Holm and Steep Holm are outlined to the west, and to the north the coast of South Wales stretches out of sight. What was a tidal river has become a huge dividing sea. This wonderful view from Castle Hill is all Georgian enjoyment of the picturesque, especially when seen through an ivy-mantled arch.
But at the other end of the town, where the old parish church stands sheltered between two grassy hills at the sea’s edge, the atmosphere is older and even Celtic. The cruciform church built of dark grey slate, with storm-resisting central tower, the windy churchyard, the low bushes blown landward, the brown grass, cliff plants and nearby thud and thunder of water, all make me think I am in Cornwall.
Clevedon is saved by being on the way to nowhere. The dear old light railway which connected it with Portishead has been ripped up by modern progress, which here means buses. But buses don’t go with Clevedon, any more than do modernistic arcades of shops and the new Post Office at the cross roads in the town. Now only a Great Western branch from Yatton serves the town. Let the chars-à-bancs and megaphones and multitudes roar down distant main roads to Weston and to Cheddar Gorge. Clevedon will then still be left as it is, a civilised and decorative seaside town, shunned, thank heaven, by modern barbarism, a refuge in time of trouble, a beautiful haven of quiet. Highworth
I have never seen Highworth given due praise in guide books for what it is—one of the most charming and unassuming country towns in the West of England. It is unspoiled by the vulgar fascias of chain stores, concrete lamp posts don’t lean above its houses like seasick giants spewing orange light at night that turns us all to corpses, the roaring hideousness of main roads has left Highworth undisturbed. The only ugly things about it are some fussy red modern villas on the outskirts and too many electric light and telegraph wires zig-zagging across its High Street.
Highworth is extraordinary because it has more beautiful buildings than it has ugly ones. It is mostly a Cotswold-coloured place of pale grey stone gathered round its church high on a hill, with a High Street and Market Place, a street at right angles, a Georgian doctor’s house in red brick with a fine white wooden porch and doorway, and one more grand brick house—and these Georgian brick houses look as beautiful and ripe as autumn apples among all this silver stone of the streets.
Then Highworth is full of old inns
