Mr. Sweetland said his father talked of the old war, and the soldiers marching after the battle to King's Down.
The Squire of Warleigh Manor showed me two cannon-balls found in Claverton Manor. The villagers told me these little stories as if it had all happened a few years ago.
October, 1902.
[These traditions probably refer to the skirmish of 3rd July, 1643. The Parliamentary forces under Waller held Bath, and were attacked by the Royalists under Hopton, who had marched from Chewton, north of the Mendips, eastwards to Frome, and then northwards by the valley of the Avon, on their way to join the King. On the 3rd July they "drew a small body of the enemy out of Monkton Farleigh, on the high ground to the north of the river, but Waller's main army was on the other side of the valley, under Claverton Down, and they neither dared to cross the river in the face of the enemy, nor to pursue their way to Bath, leaving him in the rear." They therefore pushed on through Monkton Farleigh and worked round to the north-west of Bath, where the indecisive battle of Lansdown was fought on July 5th. (Gardiner's History of the Civil War, i., 198.) It does not appear that the King was present. Collinson's History of Somerset (1791) says of Claverton: "The manor-house is a noble old building adjoining to the Church In the Civil Wars temp. Car. I., when Sir William Basset, Sir Edward Hungerford, and other gentlemen, were dining in this house, a cannon ball, directed from the hill opposite, pierced through the outer wall of the hall, and passing over the table at which they sat, lodged in the breast wall of the chimney without doing further mischief," (vol. i., p. 146).—Ed.]
Death and the Herb Thyme.
In William Thornber's History of Blackpool, 1837, p. 38, it is said that the "boggart" of Staining Hall, near the town, was "the wandering ghost of a Scotchman, murdered near a tree, which has since recorded the deed by perfuming the ground around with
