You probably can guess, if you don’t already know, that as a great reader, and as a great book buyer, I gravitate towards second-hand bookshops, and also charity shops which are a great source of old books. I know many people who not only buy books but also sell them – I’m not one of those, too disorganised for a start, but I do find it really difficult to part from books once they are on my shelves. I was looking through one of my bookcases and came across an interesting little Penguin guide book “Somerset” which was priced at two shillings when it was originally for sale in 1949. It had first been published ten years earlier six pence – written by S. E. Winbolt, edited by L. Russell Muirhead.
I deviated to look up the interestingly named Mr Samuel Edward Winbolt, and discovered he was born in 1868, and not only a Classics and history master at Corpus Christie College in Oxford, but was also an archaeologist. Winbolt wrote many books and guides as well as my little Penguin guide, and was no doubt a very interesting man. His wife Evelyn seems to have been a very interesting woman too and an archaeologist – as was their daughter Rosalind.
Back to my little guidebook to Somerset. I lived here briefly for two years from when I was sixteen to eighteen, and returned twenty-five years ago and have lived here ever since. Somerset (now covering a different area from When Mr Winbolt was writing about it) is actual two areas, Somerset in the south and North Somerset in the area from the River Axe northwards to Bristol.
“We are now going South to Uphill…The name Uphill is not derived from “hill”; in Domesday it is Opopille, pill or pyll meaning creek, as so often in Somerset, with Old English uppan, and so ‘the place above the pill or creek‘. The knoll close by explains the popular version. Rather a neat sample of the distorted descent of our place names! The only thing ‘up-hill’ is the remains of the originally Norman church on the end of the Down. There is a ferry across the Axe to Brean Down. The interest of Uphill is historical. Under the name Axium it was the harbour from which much of the produce of the Roman lead mines on Mendip was exported in long cargo boats. The land route which ran to the South East coast to Dover and Folkestone was by the road which has been traced from Uphill to Old Sarum. It went then by the North or South chalk Downs. Four Roman pigs of lead were lost, and found last century near Pulborough in Sussex. Between Bleadon Hill (the end of Mendip) marked by a clump of pines, and the sea flats, is a pretty stretch of road.”
There are a couple of things Mr Winbolt doesn’t mention, which presumably he didn’t know, but which I think they are significant, including the fact that prehistoric animal bones were found in Uphill caves, dating back 28,000 years, and the pill was navigable inland for several miles and there may have been a landing stage at the Uphill end. However, he was giving the readers of his guide a snapshot and the headlines of the places he mentions in his interesting little book!
My featured image is looking across the mouth of the pill to Brean Down, the rocky promontory – last of the Mendip chain, protruding into the sea.
Lois Elsden 