x its twelve churches its shrines chantries hospitals its gabled freestone mansions-- all now ruthlessly swept away--throw the visitor even against his will into a pensive melancholy which the stimulating atmosphere and limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel. The spot was the burial-place of a king and a queen of abbots and abbesses saints and bishops knights and squires. The bones of King Edward the Martyr carefully removed hither for holy preservation brought Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every part of Europe and enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far beyond English shores. To this fair creation of the great Middle-Age the Dissolution was as historians tell us the death-knell. With the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a general ruin: the Martyr's bones met with the fate of the sacred pile that held them and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain; but strange to say these qualities which were noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated are passed over in this and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England stands virtually unvisited to-day.It has a unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp rising on the north south and west sides of the borough out of the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor the view from the Castle Green over three counties of verdant pasture--South Mid and Nether Wessex-- being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller's eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs, http://www.cheapvansshoessales.com - vans shoes sale . Impossible to a railway it can best be reached on foot next best by light vehicles; and it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the north-east that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that side.Such is and such was the now world-forgotten Shaston or Palladour. Its situation rendered water the great want of the town, http://www.cheapevansshoes.co.uk - where can i buy vans shoes ; and within living memory horses donkeys and men may have been seen toiling up the winding ways to the top of the height laden with tubs and barrels filled from the wells beneath the mountain and hawkers retailing their contents at the price of a halfpenny a bucketful, http://www.cheapvansshoessales.com - vans store .This difficulty in the water supply together with two other odd facts namely that the chief graveyard slopes up as steeply as a roof behind the church and that in former times the town passed through a curious period of corruption conventual and domestic gave rise to the saying that Shaston was remarkable for three consolations to man such as the world afforded not elsewhere. It was a place where the churchyard lay nearer heaven than the church steeple where beer was more plentiful than water and where there were more wanton women than honest wives and maids. It is also said that after the Middle Ages the inhabitants were too poor to pay their priests and hence were compelled to pull down their churches and refrain altogether from the public worship of God; a necessity which they bemoaned over their cups in the
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