We also passed through Cofton, a small village
noted for its cockles, which the women gathered along the shore in a
costume that made them resemble a kind of mermaid, except that the lower
half resembled that of a man rather than a fish. About two miles from
Cofton was the village of Mamhead, with its obelisk built in 1742, one
hundred feet high, on the top of a spur of the Great Haldon Hill. The
rector of the church here at one time was William Johnson Temple, often
mentioned in _Boswell's Life of Johnson_. He was the grandfather of
Frederick Temple, Bishop of Exeter at the time we passed through that
city, afterwards Bishop of London, and finally Archbishop of Canterbury,
to whose harsh voice and common sense we had once listened when he was
addressing a public meeting in Manchester. In the churchyard at Mamhead
was an enormous yew tree, over eight hundred years old. In 1775, when
Boswell came to see Lord Lisburne at Mamhead Park, and stayed at the
vicarage, he was so much impressed by the size and magnificence of this
great tree, that he made a vow beneath its great branches "never to be
drunk again"--a vow he soon forgot when he was out of sight of the tree.
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