Friday 15 July 2005. I've been giving a day's workshop in Weston-Super-Mare and am heading homeward. Having promised Miss Franny that I'd try to get some clotted cream I stop off in Axbridge just around 5 o' clock and buy some tubs.
King John's Hunting Lodge was built for a wool-merchant's house around the year 1460, just a tad after King John's death in 1216... At one time in its history part of the building served as the King's Head pub. In a time before the vast proportion of the public became literate, pubs had signs to denote their name. The sculpture of the King's Head on the corner of the building is a replica, but the original according to Wikipedia is still kept inside. The building is now a museum.
The town, named for a bridge over the River Axe, has a long history, being listed in a contemporary Anglo Saxon document as one of King Alfred's burghs.
The church of St John the Baptist is 13th century and whilst built mainly of limestone, the steps are a conglomerate commonly known as pudding stone where rounded pebbles of various colours have been cemented together into large blocks or faces of stone as a natural process by a contrasting finer-grain cement or binding.
Just around the corner from the foot of the church steps are the town wells. Curious to see if they were still fed by spring water, I went for a closer look...
Oh yes, very appetising. The tadpoles in particular seemed to be thriving! I was lucky in that the one and only grocery shop had a couple of tubs of clotted cream left. It was 5:30pm and I had a five or 6 hour journey home. It was scorching, but in the car it was freezing as I had to have the aircon on full to keep the clotted cream refridgerated!
