E. S. Tylee's 'The Witch Ladder' 1912

Duckworth first edition - 1912

The novel is subtitled A Story of Somerset in the later days of Victoria; in fact, it is set in the hilly Mendips, which I know well from living for several years at Holcombe and exploring the surrounding countryside by bicycle.  The story involves a shady and ruthless uncle linking up with a secret Mining Group to purchase his brother's farmland to exploit coal measures unknown to the latter and his family.

Apparently, there were at least 52 bell pits, some with deeper shafts, around Holcombe and nearby Coleford and Stratton-on-the-Fosse. The Romans may well have mined for coal in the Nettlebridge area, near to the Fosse Way (a Roman road is mentioned in the novel). Coal mining only really took off during the 1600s, usually only exploiting surface outcrops; by the 1790s, shafts up to 150 metres deep were being sunk. The arrival of the railways (a potential branch line is also mentioned in the story) caused some expansion; demand for coal only reached its peak in the early years of the 20th century, well after the novel's backdrop.

At first, I thought the novel would be a simple love story between Mary, the daughter of John Dolman, a middling farmer who can lift a piano easily, and Geoffrey Charteris, the slightly older son of the local Squire of Hinton Hay, St. John Charteris. Certainly, the first few chapters suggest this. It opens with her birth and her mother's resulting death. The father, after an initial animus against the cause of his wife's demise, has a dream epiphany which leads to Mary being the focus of his attention, and raison d'être, for the rest of his life: devoted to the one idea which had gained possession of his narrow, earnest, passionate nature. His motherless child became the centre of his existence, the object to which all his thoughts all his energies, were devoted. The years roll on. Chapter IV sees Mary aged nine; Chapter V she is around twelve; Chapter VII adding a further two years and upwards.

I found the story slightly muddled, in that characters would appear - such as Farmer Dolman's hearty sister, Mrs. Lovejoy (yes!) - and then fade into the background. Even Mary is 'lost' for much of the tale. Others would arrive later on and then take a central place - such as the tutor Brian Dudley (tutor by profession and poet by temperament), a down-at-heel orphan, and Geoffrey's sister, 23 year-old Sarah. The best example is John Dolman's uncle, Silas Barley, who appears in Chapter III as a fascinating specimen of miserly old age - he was a small man, well on his way through the seventies, with a face round and red as a sack-apple, criss-crossed with the innumerable fine wrinkles which were almost the only indication of his healthy old age. He reappears, as the cunning saving grace for not only the Dolmans but Geoffrey, dying in his nineties and leaving thousands of acres (including the land where the coal lies) to his nephew. Chapter XXVIII, the death-bed scene is another piece of fine writing.

There are sparks of humour, particularly in Chapter I - No Dolman was ever [an unbeliever] though we have some far-away cousins who are a very low sort of Baptists down near Chard; and Still, the Lord above made Wales, I suppose, like other countries, though it may have got a bit crumpled; Public schools, like doctors, enjoy the privilege of getting rid of their failures. A red and green parrot makes an amusing entrance (and swift exit) to attack the elderly butler Binney. The scene where the aged Barley threatens to shoot an obsequious but snooty lawyer Algernon Levy, who has arrived at the old man's Friday Farm in the dark, is reminiscent of Uncle Ebenezer in Kidnapped, but far more humorous.

A final few random thoughts:

The Zummerzet vernacular makes a change from the Scots' and helps to identify the class of the individual speaking. The fairy tale story of the Queen of the Rivers (the Severn and the Wye are beaten by the little Rheidol), told by Brian Dudley, whilst sat on a 'minstrel' throne' surrounded by Mary, Brian and Sarah contains some fine writing. The atmosphere of the Auction in the long room of the King George on his Throne in Somerford for the farms is also well done.  Uncle James Charteris, amiability incarnate but a full-blown rogue, and his shady involvement with the nefarious New Mendip Mining Company, is an entirely believable bad'un. There are some interesting observations about class and the barriers it erects to marriage: for Geoffrey and Mary, Sarah and Brian, Bob Parracombe and Phoebe Dance. It is the latter's mother who is accused by Bob's father, George Parracombe, of witchcraft (putting a witch 'ladder' in the straw of the farm's outhouse). All couples are given a happy ending, though. It is Sarah, seated on the most convenient hillock who looks towards the far southern landscape: That way the Downs broke suddenly into the orchard country neighbouring Avalon; and beyond, bright as a queen's scarf of threaded gold and silver, glittered the Severn Sea. The sword-blue eyes flashed as they gazed, with a patriot's pride, the spirit of the Somersaetas, who were a nation in days older than history; and half unconsciously she murmured: "Have you the heart to leave all this?"  Tyler's novel, too, is suffused with the love of the County and the Mendips.