[Illustration:  BATCOMBE.]

The short five miles of road from Yeovil to Sherborne passes over the curiously named Babylon Hill.  A proposal was made at an Academy dinner a short time ago to label the small towns and villages of Britain with artistic signs giving the name of the place and denoting pictorially or otherwise its leading characteristic.  The idea is a good one, though it is capable of being carried to extreme lengths and abused.  In wandering over the English countryside one is often at a loss, even with a good map in the pocket, to know the name of the hamlet or village one is entering.  It is insulting to the villager and humiliating to oneself to ask “What place is this?” The well-known black and yellow signs of the Automobile Association label such villages as stand on a high road.  But the obscure by-way hamlet, perhaps of more interest, is quite incognito.  However, Babylon Hill is clearly marked on the map if not on the roadside, and we proceed through a pleasant country quite unlike the district we have just traversed and partaking more of the character of Leicester and the “Loamshire” of the novelist than of Somerset.  The beautiful Abbey Church of Sherborne, the town of the “Scir bourn” or Yeo, is not well seen from the approach on the west, for we are on the wrong side of the long slope on which it is built.  The town itself is attractive and pleasant, and has several old and beautiful houses to delight the traveller, but every other interest is dwarfed by its magnificent Abbey.  Originally founded as the Cathedral of the see of Sherborne in 705, it had as its first bishop the great and learned Aldhelm.  At this time the then city was the capital of the new western extension of Wessex and an important and strategic stronghold in the long and bitter struggle with the Danes.  The earlier bishops were not only priests but soldiers, and seem to have acquitted themselves well as leaders in battle and generals in council in the many engagements that took place between the Channel and the Severn.  More than one fell fighting and one, Bishop Ealhstan, totally defeated the invaders and did much to keep Wessex for the English.  A successor of his—­Asser—­reverted to the tradition of learning established by the first of the Saxon prelates; he was the contemporary of Alfred, and to him we owe a great deal of our knowledge of the King.  During this period the trade and industry of the city (it had an important manufactory of cloth) had grown steadily with its rise as a military and ecclesiastical centre, but when the see was removed to Old Sarum in 1075, Sherborne received a blow from which it never recovered.