Overview

Most town squares are busy places, bustling, full of noise and people, but not this one. True, it was busy but only because it was market day, but of bustle, there was, as always, a singular lack. Much of this could be put down to there being no traffic in this town square. Indeed, there was no traffic anywhere in this whole town, a curious fact explained by the even more curious fact that there were no roads leading to it. If it was completely cut off during that great winter of Mrs. Pengelly's forearms, it remained only partially less so after the icicles had wasted away and the snow had melted into a raging torrent that rushed down the hillsides to give the Somerset Levels ghosts a wet surprise. This was no accident of history, still less the result of a wilful act of aloof disregard on the part of the rest of the world: through a combination of its precarious location in an inhospitable nook of the Mendip Hills and the hardness of the local stone, a formidable alliance between geography and geology had conspired to cause many a road builder to scratch his head and think twice before committing navvies and reputation to such a tenuous venture as the building of a road to such a tenuous destination as Wuzzle-over-Mendip. After all, they reasoned, who would wish to go there? And given what they could expect to find on arrival, why would they wish to go there? So it was that, taking comfort from the knowledge that the few meagre cart tracks that led to the town would guarantee at least some form of transport until it inevitably withered and died, road builder after road builder smiled politely and turned away, turned to other more certain and therefore more profitable ventures. But the town did not wither and die. If anything, it flourished. And it flourished with the coming of the railway...

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