Villages of Britain

At the gates of the monastery
How inconceivable it must have seemed to the inhabitants of Cerne Abbas in 1530 that within a decade the rich Abbey that gave its name to the village would become defunct, its abbot and monks expelled. The West Country was dominated by monasteries. Above Cerne, the club-wielding giant of prominent masculinity – thought to represent Hercules in honour of the Emperor Commodus – which is etched onto Giant Hill demonstrates that people had been living here long before the monks came. But the Abbey was an ancient foundation, William of Malmesbury ascribing its origin to St Augustine himself. Like many early Christian sites, it had pagan associations: a ‘silver well’ attracted St Edwold, brother of King Edmund, to live beside it as a hermit in the ninth century. And the Abbey was rich: Henry VIII, who would abolish it in 1539, had himself given it land twenty-six years earlier. The village depended on the Abbey for its existence. It knew its place, clustering at the Abbey’s skirts.
In its heyday, Cerne Abbey educated John Morton, Henry VII’s chancellor (the inventor of Morton’s Fork) and a cardinal. In 1535, its farms kept nearly six thousand sheep. But even before the Dissolution, complaints were being made by a disgruntled monk about the brothers’ gross immorality (they were said to keep loose women in the cellars), not to mention neglect of duty. (A legend would grow up that the giant depicts the last Abbot, as a commentary on his lust.) It is therefore no surprise that he surrendered the Abbey without a fuss, retiring on a comfortable pension of £100 a year.

Road safety for toads
The year 2009 was a good one for toads in the village of Charlcombe. Nearly two thousand of them were put into buckets and carried across Charlcombe Lane, together with 570 frogs and a quantity of newts. Since 2003, normal traffic has been suspended on the road every February and March, in favour of the amphibians. Toad numbers across Britain have fallen since the 1970s, due to loss of habitat. Dense forestry plantations allow little room for toads; thousands of ponds and boggy places across Britain have been drained in the interests of farming. The human urge to tidy up its surroundings by building garden walls, as well as houses, has deprived the toad of free passage over what had previously been its terrain; untold numbers are squashed on roads.
Toads need fresh, clean water, preferably in large, deep ponds, to breed in; after they wake from hibernation, they try to return to the

St Non or Lady Nonna is supposed to have been St David’s mother, an aristocratic Welsh nun who was seduced or raped by a Welsh prince and then gave birth to a baby that was surrounded by dazzling light. There is another St Non’s well, with a statue and ruined chapel, at Caerfai in Pembrokeshire, where the event took place. It is thought that she herself came to Cornwall from Wales around 527.

Near the church is a holy well. There are wells and springs with special properties all over England and particularly in the West Country. Some had prophetic qualities: a glut of water from a spring at Boughton in Northamptonshire foretold doom,

You might not have thought that either disguise was particularly well adapted to building work; nevertheless, it was a deer and a hare that, according to legend, carried the stones of the church being raised at West Carne to Altarnun.