Somerset: the county that has it all
From the watery Levels and mystical Glastonbury Tor to the wild, heathery hills of Exmoor, Somerset is a vast, mainly rural county with origins that stretch back through the mists of time, says Rupert Uloth
From the Levels and Glastonbury Tor to wild Exmoor, this is a vast, mainly rural county with ancient origins, says Rupert Uloth
IN early morning, as wisps of ethereal condensation rise from the damp, flat lands of the often-flooded Somerset Levels and cattle graze nonchalantly in the foreground, look north from Cow Bridge Road to Glastonbury Tor. The image of the conical hill topped by St Michael’s church tower will transport you back millennia from the physical mist into the mists of time.
Some believe this is King Arthur’s Avalon. Legend has it that this is where Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail. Today, it’s revered for its major intersection of Ley lines. There’s an embedded sense of ancientness all over this county: the Frome hoard is the largest collection of Roman coins ever found in a single container. The hoard might now be in The Museum of Somerset at Taunton, but other visible landmarks include the Tarr Steps near Winsford on Exmoor, which, at more than 2,000 years old, is the oldest working bridge in Britain. At 500ft deep, Cheddar Gorge is the site of the discovery of Cheddar Man, the oldest complete skeleton found in this country.
Although England’s seventh biggest county by area, Somerset is only the 22nd largest by population and retains a strong rural complexion. As a map, it looks like a raggedy pixie boot, with Exmoor filling the toe, the laces jammed up against the Bristol Channel and the heel poised over Dorset. The conurbation of Bristol looms to the north.
It’s a county of two halves, dividing neatly at Taunton. To the east, the lower-lying land of the Levels and Bath’s Georgian sophistication. To the far west—it’s nearly a twohour drive from the border with Wiltshire to that with Devon—is the almost uninhabited high ground of the Quantocks and Exmoor. In between, there are three other ranges of hills—the Mendips, the Blackdowns and the Brendons.
‘Some believe this is King Arthur’s Avalon. There’s an embedded sense of ancientness’
These physical characteristics have determined the way people have lived their lives. The rich grasslands have fed the cows that produce creamy milk and the famous Cheddar cheese, and rare is the man who can drink a glass of cider without embellishing his speech with the rich, rounded vowels native to ‘Zoomasairt’: there are more than 30 farms devoted exclusively to making cider. If you’re a proper native, you will probably say ‘gi’s a gurt big pint of thee best zider’. What is wet in winter flourishes in the warmer months; the Saxon name for the area arose because the land could only be worked in the summer.
I remember my first visits to Exmoor as a boy, following the Devon & Somerset Staghounds in a pocket of England that’s strangely accessible, but which, once you’re there, feels extremely remote. Riding back in the dusk with only heather-clad hillocks and deep combes to negotiate, you feel a strong sense of peace—unless, of course, in a place where roads and houses are few, you are lost. This is where Capt Ronnie Wallace, considered by many to be the 20th century’s greatest huntsman, chose to spend the final decades of his hunting life, with the Exmoor Foxhounds.
You can hunt six days a week if you also go out with the Dulverton Farmers, the West Somerset Foxhounds, the West Somerset Beagles and the Quantock Staghounds. Further south, followers of the Blackmore & Sparkford Vale are faced with the biggest, blackest, most fearsome thorn hedges of anywhere in the country. No wonder the county dominates National Hunt racing—paul Nicholls, David Pipe and Philip Hobbs all train within its boundaries and Colin Tizzard is a regular with the Quantock Staghounds.
Literary giants such as William Wordsworth, who rented a house at Alfoxton on the Quantocks, have also found inspiration here. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who lived nearby in Nether Stowey, was famously interrupted
by the ‘person from Porlock’—the harbour village that writers Michael Holroyd and Margaret Drabble have made home—when he was writing Kubla Khan. The moor cast its spell on R. D. Blackmore, author of the classic and tragic 1869 novel Lorna Doone.
Moorland Mousie, Golden Gorse’s story of an Exmoor pony, with illustrations by regular hunting pilgrim Lionel Edwards, is one of The Duchess of Cornwall’s favourite books.
As well as ponies and foxes, other distinctive creatures share the moor. The atavistic roar of the cow-sized red-deer stags can be heard booming in the rut. The Exmoor Horn sheep with their curly horns and cheerful white faces were developed in the 1800s, but descend from a breed that roamed here for centuries.
Man has made his own mark, too, to great effect, with more than 10,000 listed buildings and 500 ancient monuments. The National Trust’s Tyntesfield in the north of the county is a Victorian Gothic masterpiece built by the Gibbs family, who made their fortune in the guano trade; 16th-century Montacute house, surrounded by its delightful ham-stone village, has the longest Long Gallery in Europe and an enviable collection of Tudor and Jacobean portraits on loan from the National Portrait
Gallery. Grade I-listed Culbone church below the Porlock-lynmouth coast road is reputed to be the tiniest parish church in England.
Wells is England’s smallest city, with its Bishop’s Palace surrounded by a moat where resident swans ring the bell when they’re hungry. The Blackadder generation had its ecclesiastical introduction to this place with the ‘baby-eating’ Bishop of Bath and Wells, a post held in recent times by George Carey, later Archbishop of Canterbury.
Yeovil, although founded in the 8th century, is not famed for its beauty, but its association with Yeovilton Air Station connects it to an important part of naval air history with the Fleet Air Arm, and it remains one of the busiest military airfields in the country. The Somerset Light Infantry, now part of The Rifles, has an illustrious record stretching