Travellers to or from the West by the Great Western Railway are generally much impressed, between Yatton and Bridgwater, by the strange solitary hill of Brent Knoll that rises abruptly from the plain of Burnham Level, and looks oddly like some long-extinct volcano with its cone shorn off or fallen in. Fast trains do not stop at the little wayside station also called “Brent Knoll,” and while passengers are still gazing curiously at the hill, they are whirled away in midst of other interesting scenery. Brent Knoll stands out prominently by virtue of its height of 457 feet, as well as by its isolated situation in the great alluvial plain through which lazily meander the muddy streams of Brue and Axe to their outlets at Uphill and Highbridge. It is one of those many scattered heights that are so strangely disposed about the neighbourhood of Sedgemoor, and give so romantic an appearance to these wide-spreading levels. Of these the most prominent, geographically and historically, is the famed Glastonbury Tor, which with its volcanic outline, crested with the tall tower of the ancient Chapel of St. Michael, is prominent for many a misty mile, like some Hill of Dream. Then there is the Mump at Boroughbridge, by the crossing of the Parret into the Isle of Athelney; Borough Hill, near Wedmore; and many smaller, together with those scarcely perceptible hillocks amid the marshes that are now the sites of villages, whose very names of Chedzoy, Middlezoy, Westonzoyland, and Othery, tell us that these, together with the larger hills, were all, “once upon a time,” islands in a shallow sea that stagnated over the whole of what is now called “Sedgemoor,” but is properly “Sedgemere.” Centuries of draining, of cutting those long, broad and deep dykes called “rhines,” that cross the moor for many miles, in every direction, and so carry away the waters, have converted what had become, after the sea had retired, an almost impassable morass into a fertile plain. The industry of peat-digging in the heart of the moor shows the nature of the soil in these parts, and modern discoveries of prehistoric lake-dwellings at Meare, whose very name contains evidence of the mere, or lake that once existed, indicate the manner of life these ancient inhabitants lived. King Arthur seems a dim and distant figure to us, but long before his time there lived a race of people on the islands of this inland sea; folk who, although they frescoed themselves liberally with red ochre, were by no means without a more artistic knowledge of decoration than implied by that crude form of personal adornment. They certainly made earthenware pottery of graceful forms, decorated with ornament of excellent design and execution. Their other habits were primitive. Largely a fish-eating folk, they often lived, as described earlier in these pages, in wattled huts built on piles or stakes driven in the waters. These forms of dwellings were readily adapted for