“The Ship” Inn, Porlock 254 Porlock Weir 258 The Lodge, Ashley Combe 261 Culbone Church 263 Oare Church 287 Near Robber’s Bridge 288 Interior of Oare Church 290 Malmsmead 293 Badgworthy Valley 295 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: THE SOMERSET COAST] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: THE SOMERSET COAST] CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY 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, or 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.