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. [Illustration: THE RECTORY. CONGRESBURY.] 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”: