NEXT to its verdant freshness, which, we are told, we owe to that moist climate of which we are not seldom tempted to complain, the greatest charm of our English landscape is its extraordinary variety. Within a narrow compass, and on a small scale, our island contains almost every kind of scenery of which the temperate zone is capable,-mountain and valley, hill and dale, fen and forest, park and garden, cliff and sand, form an inexhaustible succession of beauty, varied by just that amount of plainness and sterility which seems best calculated to enhance its effect.

This charm of variety, which properly belongs to the whole country, is now and then repeated, in an inferior degree, in the general aspect of a single county; indeed, I do not believe that any county, either in England or Scotland, is entirely without it, though some possess it to a far greater degree than others; and in none is this more conspicuously the case than in the county of Somerset.

First there is the great background, or landward portion of the county; which consists of a large undulating tract of country, well-wooded, fertile, and highly cultivated, abounding, as such tracts of country are wont to do, in parks and gardens, and pleasant country-houses. Then, stretching towards the Bristol Channel, the N.W. boundary of the county, we find two ranges of hills, the Mendips and the Quantocks; the former barren of trees, rugged, and precipitous, cleft by the deep defile of Cheddar Cliffs, and dipping into the sea at Brean Down to reappear in the islands of the Steep and Flat Holmes half way across towards Wales; the latter of soft and rounded outline, wearing on their sides a rich mantle of purple heath and golden gorse, whilst their innermost recesses are green with woods, and musical with the never-ceasing ripple of countless springs and rivulets.

bury Tor.

Between these two ranges of hills lies a broad tract of perfectly flat country, stretching inland many a mile from the Bristol Channel to the foot of GlastonThere is another smaller range, the Polden Hills, which juts out, like a peninsula, into the centre of this plain, whose flat expanse, viewed from the Roman road which is carried along the crest of these Polden Hills, looks like the uncovered basin of some huge lake, or inland sea, with here and there an island or two, of greater or less size, rising abruptly out of it. And there is little doubt that there was a time, long, long ago, when the thick turbid waters of the "Severn Sea,"-Tennyson's "yellow sea,"-as tawny as a lion's mane, covered nearly the whole tract that lies between the Quantocks and the Mendips; and, if we may trust the old legend, it must have been over this plain that Joseph of Arimathæa and his companions came sailing to Glastonbury, when they landed at the foot of the Tor-once the mysterious Isle of Avalon-and their leader planted the magic thorn, whose offshoots, to this very day, persist in bursting into leaf and trying to blossom at Christinas. Even now, the rivers which fall into the Bristol Channel between the Quantocks and the Mendips. are carefully en banked for many miles; and, not two hundred years ago, when an unusually high tide made a breach in the sea-wali at Huntspill, the waves once more rolled triumphantly across the plain to Glastonbury, where, for many years, a stone was to be seen at the foot of the tower of one of the churches, which was set to mark the utmost limit to which the waters reached.

Almost all the land of which this great plain is composed has been long ago drained and enclosed, and converted from waste land into flourishing pastures, in which are situated the dairy farms where most of the so-called Cheddar

cheese is made. Much as the value of the land and the prosperity of its inhabitants have been augmented by these improvements, those of them that have been carried out in recent years were generally received, when first proposed and set on foot, with the most violent opposition. The discontented traversed the country in bands, expressing in threatening words and gestures their anger at the enclosure of the waste, and singing rude songs, of which there was one with the refrain :

"Let Zadgemoor bide as a be."

The land must have been partially drained a long while before it was enclosed. It is intersected by a multitude of ditches, and also by several large lykes, called in the dialect of the country "rhines" or "rheens." My

readers will no doubt remember that it was on the banks of one of these "rhines" that the issue of the battle of Sedgemoor was decided. About twothirds of the plain is composed of these rich pasture-lands, the home of some of the most prosperous farmers to be found in all England; the remaining third, though not without a value of its own, is as conspicuous for its barrenness as the rest is for its fertility, and yet it is concerning this barren tract that I wish to awaken your attention, and excite your interest.

If you have ever travelled by the Somerset Central Railway from Highbridge to Glastonbury, you must have passed through it, wondering, perhaps, to be carried for miles through such a desolate waste, resembling a miniature Irish bog, set in the midst of English cultivation and prosperity.

This curious tract is generally known by the name of "The Turf Moor," just as the fertile plain above described is called "The Marsh." If you would see it to advantage you must not approach it from the railway, but come down into it from the Polden Hills, along whose base it lies, stretching towards the Mendips in rich bands of colour, chocolate and brown and dark green in the foreground, and deep purple and iris

blue beyond. The view is bounded by the Mendip Hills, whose naked sides are beautiful in the distance with every variety of tint and hue that light and shade, falling on scanty herbage and broken masses of grey rock, can produce.

From the old Roman road already spoken of a multitude of lanes, all more or less steep and narrow, lead down into the moor. Choosing one of these, you make your way between mossy, violetscented banks, overshadowed by elmtrees, or surmounted by high, irregular, hawthorn hedges, past orchards, and pastures, and gardens, until suddenly and abruptly all these things cease: you reach the bottom of the hill, and you find yourself on the very edge of a brown, level waste of heather and fern and fir-trees, and dark, conical stacks of turf, where there are no elms and no hedgerows, and where never a violet grows; where the sides of the ditches which border the road are of the deepest chocolate colour; where the houses are mere cabins, because the ground is so soft and unsteady that it will not bear the weight of a second story; and where, in seasonable weather, you may meet almost all the inhabitants of the district out of doors; all, from the eldest to the youngest, somehow or other engaged in the business of getting turf, their brown faces wearing, for the most part, a singular air of contentment and satisfaction with their peculiar mode of life.

The Turf Moor has, however, undergone many changes within the last fifteen or twenty years. Roads have multiplied, churches and chapels have been built, and schools established; and by intercourse with their neighbours the moorfolk have gradually become much less rough and uncivilized, and, in general, much more like other people, than they once were. In places, too, where all the turf has been dug out, the land has been brought into cultivation, and patches of poor-looking pasturage and scanty crops are to be seen, encroaching upon the barren moor to such an extent that it is impossible not to suspect that the time may be slowly but surely approaching when the whole tract will lose its wild

character, and become tame and agricultural.

That day, however, must be yet far off. Although the great-grandfathers of the present generation would, no doubt, hardly believe their eyes if they could see the advances that civilization has already made even in the turbaries; still, compared with the social standard of the day, they are yet wild enough to contrast strongly with the prosperous agricultural villages that cluster round Polden Hill. They have still a flora of their own, including, I have heard, many rare plants that grow nowhere else in England; rare birds still make the moors their occasional haunt in the winter; and their inhabitants are still almost a distinct race, with customs and traditions of their own, obstinately attached to their native place, and loving, with all their hearts, the out-of-door freedom and independence that they enjoy.

But it is not to talk of botany or ornithology, or even to introduce you to the brown, picturesque inhabitants, that I have led you into the Turf Moor, and wearied you, it may be, with this long attempt to give you an exact idea of its locality, lying in the midst of the agricultural districts of Somersetshire, like a gipsy child found asleep in the house of a prosperous farmer.

I have done so in the hope that my description may enable you to realize the situation, and to go back in imagination into the distant past, to the times when the wild, half-inundated moors and marshes of Somerset must have been an inviolable retreat, an impregnable refuge for many a generation of hunted fugitives; to the unknown time, in short, when human hands made, and human feet used to tread, the curious buried pathway that I am about to describe to you.

It is now some years ago that I first heard a clergyman, living on the borders of the Turf Moor, mention the "Abbot's Way." This name, he said, was given to a road or pathway which was said to extend for several miles below the surface of the Moor. Since that time

I have often heard the Abbot's Way spoken of; but, although the tradition of its existence was familiar to many people, no one appeared to know any thing further about it, nor to be able to tell why the Way, if indeed it really existed, should be called the Abbot's.

Had it been made, hundreds of years ago, by the orders of some Abbot of Glastonbury? Or was it the legacy of yet earlier ages which the Abbey took upon itself the task of keeping in repair? Or, again, is the name simply a result of the habit of associating every relic of the past, whose history is at all mysterious or obscure, with the great abbey that once dominated the whole district?

These questions still remain unanswered, although the buried road itself has been laid open to the light of day.

About three years ago a gentleman who is the owner of some land in the Turf Moor, and who was then engaged in writing a short paper on the geolo gical peculiarities of the neighbourhood, determined to investigate the old tradition of a buried road, and to ascertain for himself whether such a road existed, and what it was like.

He began by making inquiries amongst the turf-cutters employed on his own ground, whether they had ever "heard tell of the Abbot's Way, and, if so, whether they knew in what direction it lay.

They at once declared that they were perfectly well acquainted with the situa tion of the buried road, as they frequently struck into it with their spades in digging for turf; and, upon this information, he set some of them to work to dig for it, desiring them to lay some yards of the Abbot's Way open for him to see.

The popular traditions, as well as the turf-cutters consulted on the subject, all agreed in describing the road as a wooden one, but the accounts were so vague that it was impossible to form any clear idea of the kind of road that it was supposed to be. When it was actually, for twenty yards or so, uncovered to his view, this gentleman was not only sur

prised, but far more interested than he had expected to be.

It lies about six feet below the present surface, and may be described, for want of a better comparison, as a miniature example of the log roads, composed of the trunks of trees, which are common, at the present day, in America.

The Abbot's Way is composed, not of the trunks of trees, but of birchen poles, three feet long, split, and laid close together, and fastened at intervals with pegs about twelve inches long. Whether the poles are also fastened in any way with thongs I am not able to say. In describing the road I wish to describe only what I have myself seen, and I did not observe anything of the

kind.

Owing, I suppose, to the antiseptic properties of the peat in which it has for centuries lain buried, the wood is in a wonderful state of preservation, although so soft and spongy as to be easily cut with a spade. The delicate silvery bark is still visible on the pieces that are used as pegs.

On asking the turf-cutters, and other inhabitants of the Moor, what they supposed to be the general direction of the Abbot's Way, a variety of answers were received. Some affirmed that the road was to be traced right through the moor, from the Glastonbury or landward edge of it to the sea-coast; others, on the contrary, held that the so-called "Way" was, in truth, a network of several pathways, leading from one to another of those points in the Moor that are drier than the rest, and always above water during inundations. These are sandbanks, and they are always chosen for the site of the better sort of dwellings that are to be found in the Moor; and it is against these sandbanks that most of the trunks of trees, generally oak, that are often found in the peat, are imbedded.

Another suggestion sometimes made about the Abbot's Way is that it was used by the Glastonbury monks as a means of access to the little chapels and churches which it was their duty to serve; a suggestion which can only be

But it is the province of the present writer, not to offer conjectures, but, by describing accurately what appears to be a very curious relic of antiquity, to provide food for the conjectures of others.

I do not know whether, by those who understand such matters, it would be considered worth while to uncover a much longer portion of the Abbot's Way than the few yards that have been already laid open, in the hope of wringing from the silent pathway some note of the generations that once trod it. Once, in the turbaries, near Edington Burtle, at what depth below the surface we are not told, nor whether at all in the vicinity of the Abbot's Way, a square box, or coffer, of maple wood, was found, scooped within into an oval shape, and containing, as I find from a paper in a volume of the "Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archæological Society," for the year 1854, a torque, evidently from its size and lightness intended for the neck of a woman, two armlets, with finger rings of the same pattern, several other rings, one of them supposed to be of the same pattern as the Irish jogh-drasch, or chain-ring of divination, and, lastly, several knives and celts.

Of all these articles there are drawings in the Archæological Journal, but the writer of the paper has not described with the accuracy that might be wished the exact situation of the coffer when found.

Some Druidical priestess, the writer suggests, traversing the moor in a boat, may have "lost" the coffer. It is impossible not to wish that we could know whether the nineteenth century turf-cutters who "found" it, found it anywhere near the buried "Way." The ancient Britons, we know, baffled, for a time, their Roman invaders by retiring

into impenetrable morasses, pathless, except to themselves. Was the British "Norma" the owner of the weird trinkets, suggesting all sorts of mysterious associations with spells, and prophecies, and wonder-working power, traversing the moor, not by water, but by the secret path, spread like a piece of wooden matting on the soft and yielding surface of the moor, upon which it floated, somewhat on the principle of George Stephenson's railway across Chat Moss?

But, alas! although British remains have been not unfrequently found in these districts, their discovery has never been, in any way, connected with the buried road. I should have no excuse for my mention of them, except that this slight sketch, by which I wish to introduce you to the locality of the "Abbot's Way," would not be complete without it.

It was, perhaps, unlikely, that by a lucky chance auy interesting relic of bygone humanity should be found in the very few yards of the "Abbot's Way" that have been uncovered. There was nothing lying on its surface except the débris of reeds, and the roots of plants looking like turf in process of formation; and amongst these débris, handfuls of hazel-nuts, as brown as bog oak from their long repose in their peaty bed, but in a wonderful state of preservation. Some have found relics of the hazel-bushes on which they

grew, such as twigs and leaves, all browned to the same dark chocolate colour. When I was present only nuts were found, but this was some time after the place had been exposed to the open air. The small brown nuts had evidently been buried when they were about half ripe, and it is a curious coincidence that similar nuts, in exactly the same stage of growth, are found in the submarine forest which stretches out into the Bristol Channel, and is supposed, if I am not mistaken, to be a continuation of the Turf Moor, once, no doubt, itself a forest also. The bare trunks of the trees may be seen at low water protruding from the thick mud which covers the bed of the great estuary of the Severn, and it is, I believe, deep in the mud and débris surrounding these barren trunks that the hazel-nuts have been found. been found. Similar nuts have been found on the coast of Cornwall, and also, I am told, in the North of France, and it is chiefly on the presence of these half-ripe hazel-nuts on the surface of the Abbot's Way that some have built the conjecture that the Way itself belongs to pre-historic times, times when those naked trunks bore boughs and leaves, and the Turf Moor was not.

This paper has been written in the hope of obtaining wider notice, both from the educated public generally, and more particularly from those whose special studies qualify them, in a special manner, to throw light upon the subject.

Ar the time this article was commenced war between France and Germany seemed to be a mere question of weeks, if not of days. Even now, though the Conference has averted the immediate danger of war, yet the danger seems only adjourned, not dispelled. It is clear that at one moment we were on

the eve of an European contest. If the French Government had insisted on the annexation of the Duchy of Luxemburg, or if that of Prussia had rejected all idea of conceding the fortress, war would have been inevitable. It is not my purpose to express any opinion as to the merits or demerits of the French or