ON OTTERY EAST HILL. 133 



Quantock hills and the moist valleys of Westmoreland, to the 

 cloud-cuckoo-land of his own ideal Pantisocracy, and perhaps 

 above all to Highgate, with the benign friends who there cheered 

 the closing scene of the large-browed seer. 



One or two of the large farms round Ottery are sufficiently 

 memorable to find a line in this survey. Cadhay is a fine old 

 stone hall with quadrangle, the ancient seat of the Haydons. 

 Thorn was the inheritance of Gaulterus de Spineto in the reign 

 of Henry III. Sunk in a depression below us is another old 

 house, garlanded with ivy, and Virginian creeper containing a 

 dining-hall which well deserves inspection. This is Knight- 

 stone, once the residence of the Shermans. Far to the left, 

 beyond the river, may be seen a row of pollard limes, which 

 are just swelling into a myriad of ruby-budded shoots, and 

 every here and there unfolding leaves which only Millais could 

 paint. They extend along the front of Bishopscourt, once, 

 says Lysons (ii. 378), the abode of Bishop Grandisson himself. 

 Enlarging our view, many goodly names rise before us. 

 Beginning on the right, for instance, in Luppit parish, near 

 Honiton, was Mohuns Ottery, the seat of the Carews, who were 

 amongst the oldest of Devonshire families. In the sixteenth 

 century this house was described as impregnable except by 

 cannon, and filled with magnificent furniture. Soon the eye 

 reaches Fenny Bridges over the Otter, where, July 27, 1549, a 

 sharp skirmish took place between the Cornish insurgents, Lord 

 Russell and the Carews, in which either side suffered equally. 

 The little meadow wherein the rebels were encamped is dear 

 to the trout fisher, and the stream of human interests which 

 used to flow along this road from the West of England and 

 return thither from London, has been diverted from it by the 

 rail, leaving Honiton and its melancholy-looking inns to testify 

 to the mutability of fortune. From Fair Mile, where stood in 

 old time "a gallows at the hill-top," we may gather the need 

 of this object of terror as the eye passes on to Straight-wood 



