So there we perceive the accumulated monuments of centuries going in one plunge into the melting-pot. [Illustration: RELIQUARY IN KEWSTOKE CHURCH (BACK)] An interesting discovery was made during the restoration of Kewstoke church in 1849. A block of stone sculptured with a half-length figure, supposed to represent the Virgin Mary, built firmly into the north wall under the sill of a window, had long been a curious object of the interior of the building, and was by some antiquaries considered to be a heart-shrine. The greatly defaced figure appeared to be holding a shield. To satisfy curiosity, the stone was removed, disclosing a small arched hollowed-out chamber at the back, in which was a greatly decayed oak vessel, or cup, partly split open by warping. At the bottom of this was a dry black incrustation, pronounced to be congealed human blood. It was supposed, from the circumstances of the founding of Woodspring Priory, and from the fact of a cup, or chalice, forming a part of the Prior’s seal, that this relic was nothing less than a precious portion of the martyr’s blood—the greatest treasure owned by the Priory. It was further thought that the monks, foreseeing the troubles of the dissolution of the religious houses, caused the relic to be secretly removed and placed here, in Kewstoke church. It is now in Taunton Museum. The Kewstoke woods, largely of scrub-oak, closely woven and interlaced and compacted together by the winds off the Channel, descend in tangled thickets to the water’s edge. At the end of them, a picturesque toll-gate marks the beginning of the modern pleasure-resort of Weston-super-Mare. No one need have the remotest shadow of a doubt that he has arrived, for the crowds of excursionists here and on that Walhalla of noisy enjoyment, Birnbeck Pier, make themselves very fully seen and heard. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VIII WESTON-SUPER-MARE WESTON-SUPER-MARE has frequently been styled the “Western Brighton.” It matters little or nothing to those who invent these impossible parallels that the places thus compared with one another have nothing in common; and certainly Weston (for few there be who give it the longer name) is as little like Brighton as any place well can be. Weston fringes the bold curve of the shallow and sandy Weston or Uphill Bay, sandy inshore: a mile-broad expanse of mud at low water. Brighton is built on a straight coastline, part of the town standing on the clifftops of Kemp Town, and the narrow beach is exclusively shingle. At the back of Brighton run the treeless chalk hills of the South Downs; behind Weston stretch the levels that extend further inland as far as Sedgemoor. Brighton took its rise in the middle Georgian period, about 1780; Weston remained an insignificant village until the first quarter of the nineteenth century.