62 PAPERS, ETC. 
or any one Somersetshire peculiarity. All these, it may 
be observed, have diagonal buttresses. The tower on the 
Tor Hill at Glastonbury has buttresses more like the usual 
kind, but has a mere plain battlement, and is otherwise 
very anomalous. 
SPIRES. 
Of perfect spires, I imagine the number to be exceed- 
ingly small; I have myself only seen Congresbury and 
Bridgwater,* thereby shewing how much less keen my 
vision must be than that of Mr. Macaulay’sf ideal stranger 
in the days of “ King Monmouth” who when he “ climbed 
the graceful tower of St. Mary Magdalen, owned that he 
saw beneath him the most fertile of English valleys. It 
was a country rich with orchards and green pastures, 
among which were scattered, in gay abundance, manor- 
houses, cottages, and village spires” And the remark T 
am next going to make will, I think, tend to show that 
their loss is not to be laid to the charge of Kirke’s Lambs 
or the Bloody Assizes. There is to be seen in Somersetshire 
and Gloucestershire, a remarkable class of imperfect spires. 
I only actually know of five, St. Mary Redclifte, Yatton, 
Minchinhampton, one in Gloucester, and if my memory 
does not greatly deceive me, Shepton Mallett ; but these 
five, in a region where spires are comparatively uncommon, 
*T have since seen another, Worle, Iam obliged to the Editor for a list 
of eight others, Frome, Whatley, Doulting, Croscombe, Chiselborough, 
East Brent, Stokecoursey, and Pitminster, the last of which, it seems, is a 
graceful and eonspieuous object in the view from St. Mary Magdalen. If 
his wider observation can supply only this small number, even supposing 
the list isfar from exhausting the whole county, the number still remains 
exceedingly small, as compared not only with the counties of North- 
ampton, Leicester, or Lincoln, but even with Gloucester and Oxford, 
where the spire is far less general. 
+History of England, i. 581. 
