The entrance to Stowey from the direction of Bridgwater is particularly imposing. You come downhill, and then sharply round a bend to the right, where a group of Scotch firs introduces Stowey Court and the adjoining parish church: the view up the road towards the village made majestic and old-world by another grouping of firs beyond the curious early eighteenth-century gazebo that looks out in stately fashion from the garden wall of the Court. From this, and from similar summerhouse-like buildings, our great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers glanced from their walled gardens upon the coaches and the road-traffic of a bygone age. The roofs and gables, and the uppermost mullioned windows of the Court are glimpsed over the tall walls. Although Stowey Court dated originally from the fifteenth century, when it was built by Touchet, Lord Audley, and although it formed an outpost of the Royalists during the struggles of Charles the First with his Parliament, the building is not nowadays of much interest, and the church is of less, having been rebuilt in 1851, with the exception of the tower. The romantic promise of this prelude to Stowey is scarcely supported by the appearance of the village street. It is a long street of houses for the most part of suburban appearance, running along the main road, with a fork at the further end, along the road to Taunton, where stands a modern Jubilee clock-tower beside the old village lock-up. The clock-tower seems to most people a poor exchange for the small but picturesque old market-house that until comparatively recent years stood in the middle of the street, with a streamlet running by. To Leland, writing in the reign of Henry the Eighth, Stowey was “a poore village. It stondith yn a Botom emong Hilles.” The situation is correctly described, and no doubt the condition of Stowey was all that Leland says of it, but no one could nowadays describe it truthfully as “poor,” although it would be altogether correct to write it down as desperately commonplace. There is nothing poetic about the village at this time o’ day, and its position on a much-travelled main road has brought a constant stream of fast-travelling motor-cars and waggons, together with a frequent service of Great Western Railway motor-omnibuses, with the result that a loathsome mingled odour of petrol and fried lubricating oil and a choking dust pervade the long street all the summer. The local hatred of motor-cars—a deep-seated and intense detestation of them and those who drive them and travel in them—is, perhaps, surprising to a mere passer-by, who may just mention the subject to a villager; but it is only necessary to stay a day and a night in Stowey, and then enough will be seen and heard and smelt to convert the most mild-mannered person to an equal hatred.