Things to do in Somerset

Burnham-on-Sea is a small seaside town on the Somerset coast at the southern end of Bridgwater Bay, whose most distinctive feature is an unusual wooden lighthouse built on stilts directly on the beach, a structure that stands as one of the most peculiar and characterful lighthouses in Britain. The Low Lighthouse, as it is known, was built in the early nineteenth century to guide vessels into the mouth of the River Brue and sits on nine wooden legs above the beach, its platform and lantern house elevated above the tidal sands in a design that has more in common with a pier pavilion than a conventional lighthouse tower. The lighthouse is one of a pair that served Burnham, the other being the High Lighthouse built further inland which provided the second light needed for vessels to take a safe bearing into the channel. The wooden pile structure of the Low Lighthouse represents an engineering response to the soft, muddy character of the Somerset coast, where conventional stone foundations were impractical, and the resulting structure has a character all its own that makes it one of the most photographed minor maritime buildings on the west coast of England. The town of Burnham-on-Sea faces west across the Bristol Channel toward Wales, and the very low gradient of the intertidal zone means that the sea retreats enormous distances at low tide, exposing a vast expanse of sand and mudflat that can be walked but requires care in relation to the tides. The sunsets over the Bristol Channel and the views toward the Welsh hills across the water can be spectacular, and the combination of the unusual lighthouse, the wide expanse of beach and the Somerset Levels stretching inland gives Burnham a distinctive character. The Somerset Levels, the extensive low-lying wetland landscape behind the town, provide excellent birdwatching particularly in winter when the flooded fields attract large numbers of wading birds, wildfowl and wintering starling murmurations that can number in the millions.

Dulverton is the southern gateway to Exmoor National Park, a small market town on the River Barle in Somerset whose combination of the independent shops, the excellent cafes and restaurants serving local Exmoor produce, the Exmoor National Park visitor centre and the walks directly from the town into the Barle Valley woodland and moorland above creates one of the most rewarding and most welcoming small towns in the national park. The town serves as the administrative centre of the national park and its character reflects the pastoral and market town traditions of south Exmoor. The River Barle flowing through the town provides the natural focal point and the riverside walk upstream from the town through the ancient oak woodland of the Barle Valley is one of the finest accessible walks from any Exmoor town, the combination of the clear river, the sessile oak woodland and the red deer that inhabit the valley creating a wildlife and landscape experience of considerable quality within easy walking distance of the town centre. The deer grazing in the fields above the town and in the woodland of the surrounding hills provide a direct connection to the red deer population of Exmoor, one of the finest herds in England and the subject of the stag-hunting tradition that has been a controversial but central part of Exmoor's social culture for centuries. The Exmoor pony herds visible on the high moor above the town provide another characteristic element of the Exmoor landscape.

Dunkery Beacon is the highest point on Exmoor and the highest point in both Somerset and the Exmoor National Park, a summit of 519 metres above sea level on the central moorland of Exmoor whose combination of the open heather moorland, the panoramic views and the accessibility from several directions makes it the most visited summit in the national park. The views from the beacon extend on clear days to Wales, the Mendip Hills, the Quantocks and the Bristol Channel coast in a panorama that encompasses the full extent of the southwest peninsula and the northern Somerset coast. The walk from the Webber's Post car park near Cloutsham provides the most popular approach, a straightforward moorland path through heather and across the characteristic deep peat of the Exmoor central moors that takes approximately forty-five minutes to the summit cairn. The summit cairn marks the highest point and the open country in every direction, unobstructed by trees or buildings, provides the complete Exmoor moorland experience in its most concentrated form. The red deer herds for which Exmoor is most celebrated are frequently visible on the moorland around Dunkery, particularly in the early morning and evening when the deer descend from the higher ground to graze in the valley below. The autumn rut, when the stag roaring can be heard across the moorland in October, is the most dramatic season for red deer watching and the Dunkery area is one of the most reliable sections of Exmoor for observing the spectacle.

Dunster is one of the most attractive and most completely realised medieval small towns in Somerset, a settlement in the Vale of Porlock below Exmoor whose combination of the castle on the hill above, the octagonal Yarn Market in the broad main street, the medieval priory church and the working watermill creates one of the most complete and most visually rewarding historical townscapes in the southwest. The castle, the market and the mill are all managed by the National Trust and the combination of these three properties in a single visit provides an excellent introduction to the medieval economic, social and defensive life of a Somerset market town. Dunster Castle occupies a commanding hill above the village and the combination of its medieval origins and its seventeenth-century domestic conversion into a comfortable country house creates an interior of considerable interest and quality. The plaster ceilings, the carved staircase and the leather wall hangings of the principal rooms reflect the domestic ambitions of the Luttrell family who occupied the castle for six centuries, and the National Trust has preserved these interiors with exceptional care. The Yarn Market of 1609, an octagonal market building in the middle of the High Street, is one of the finest surviving examples of a medieval market building in England and provides the visual centrepiece of the town's historic streetscape. The watermill below the castle, the last working watermill in Somerset, produces stoneground flour that is sold in the mill shop.

Dunster Castle Somerset is one of those places that quietly captures the character of the British landscape. The surrounding landscape changes beautifully with the seasons, giving the location a slightly different character throughout the year. Photographers often appreciate the changing light conditions, particularly during sunrise and sunset. Local walking routes and nearby viewpoints make it a rewarding place to explore on foot. The surrounding landscape provides a strong sense of place that helps visitors understand the character of the region. Wandering around the area reveals small details that are easily missed when simply passing through. The location works particularly well as part of a wider scenic journey through the region. Visitors often find themselves spending far longer here than expected because the scenery invites slow exploration. Even during busier periods there are usually quieter corners where the scenery can be appreciated at a slower pace. Many visitors return repeatedly because each visit offers something slightly different. The atmosphere can shift dramatically depending on the weather, with bright sunlight revealing colours and textures that are easy to miss on overcast days. Because of its setting, Dunster Castle Somerset often becomes one of the highlights of a day spent exploring the surrounding region.

Exmoor National Park on the Somerset and Devon border is one of the smallest but most varied of England's national parks, a 693-square-kilometre landscape of high moorland, deeply incised wooded valleys, small farms and villages and a dramatic Atlantic coast that together create one of the finest upland landscapes in the southwest. Designated in 1954, the park combines the openness and wildness of its moorland core with the intimate, sheltered quality of the combes and valleys that cut into it, providing a contrast of landscape characters unusual within such a compact area. The high moorland of Exmoor, particularly the central plateau around Dunkery Beacon which rises to 519 metres as the highest point in the park, has the character of genuine upland wilderness: open, exposed and subject to Atlantic weather that can transform conditions rapidly in any season. The red deer of Exmoor, the largest wild land mammal in Britain, are the most celebrated wildlife of the park and herds of these animals on the open moorland or in the valley woodlands are one of the defining experiences of any Exmoor visit. The Exmoor pony, an ancient native breed of great hardiness, has grazed this moorland for centuries and small herds can be seen across the open ground. The Exmoor coast between Minehead and Combe Martin forms the highest sea cliffs in England, with the Great Hangman reaching 318 metres above the Bristol Channel, and the South West Coast Path traversing this section provides walking of exceptional quality with continuous Atlantic views. The Valley of the Rocks near Lynton, where enormous rock towers punctuate a dry valley running parallel to the coast, is one of the most dramatic geological features in the southwest. The wooded combes running down from the moor to the sea, particularly at Watersmeet, Doone Valley and Horner Wood, provide sheltered walking of quite different character to the open moorland and contain one of the finest surviving stands of temperate rainforest in England.

Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset is one of the most historically significant and most atmospheric monastic ruins in England, the remains of what was once the wealthiest and most prestigious Benedictine abbey in medieval Britain, a house claiming foundations by Joseph of Arimathea himself and the burial of King Arthur and his queen Guinevere, traditions that made it one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Christendom and the focus of a mythology of extraordinary power that persists to the present day. The ruins of the great abbey church and the surviving domestic buildings stand in extensive grounds in the centre of Glastonbury town. The abbey's claim to be the oldest Christian foundation in Britain rested on the tradition that Joseph of Arimathea, who according to the Gospels donated his tomb for Christ's burial, travelled to Britain after the Crucifixion and established the first Christian community at Glastonbury. This tradition cannot be historically verified but was accepted as genuine throughout the medieval period and gave Glastonbury an authority in the English church second only to Canterbury. The discovery of the supposed tomb of Arthur and Guinevere in the abbey grounds in 1191, suspiciously opportune following the destruction of an earlier church by fire in 1184, reinforced the abbey's claims and stimulated a surge of pilgrimage and royal patronage. The ruins of the Lady Chapel, the oldest surviving structure on the site, retain their Romanesque arcading and decorative stonework in a form that gives a powerful impression of the quality of the twelfth-century building before Henry VIII's dissolution destroyed what was then the largest and most elaborate monastic complex in England. The Abbot's Kitchen, a remarkable fourteenth-century octagonal building surviving almost intact, is one of the finest medieval domestic buildings of its type in Britain.

Glastonbury Tor rises with dramatic abruptness from the Somerset Levels, its conical form topped by the tower of St Michael's Church creating one of the most immediately recognisable landmarks in England and one of the most spiritually charged places in the British Isles. Standing 158 metres above the flat plain surrounding it, the hill is visible for remarkable distances across the Somerset landscape and the tower at its summit, all that remains of a medieval church, has served as a landmark, a place of pilgrimage and a focus of mythological and spiritual speculation across many centuries. The Tor's significance in the wider story of Glastonbury and its legends is inseparable from the town below. The whole complex of myths connecting Glastonbury with Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, the Arthurian legends and the oldest Christian foundation in Britain places the Tor at the spiritual centre of a tradition that has attracted seekers and pilgrims from many traditions for centuries. In contemporary spiritual culture the Tor is one of the principal sites of the pagan, Wiccan and earth mysteries movements alongside the more mainstream Christian pilgrimage tradition, and the combination of these overlapping traditions gives the hill a vibrancy of human significance unusual in any landscape feature of its modest physical scale. The terracing on the slopes of the Tor, particularly visible on the southeast face when the light catches it at a low angle, has generated sustained scholarly and popular interest. Proposed explanations include medieval strip cultivation of the slopes, a prehistoric ritual spiral path ascending the hill, or simple natural erosion processes, and no consensus has been established despite considerable investigation. The walk to the summit, approximately fifteen minutes on well-maintained paths from the National Trust car park in the town, passes through the terraced slopes and provides progressively expanding views over the Levels.

Jacob's Ladder is a dramatic series of 274 steps ascending the cliff face at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, providing direct access from the gorge floor to the cliff-top plateau above and offering increasingly spectacular views over the gorge and the Somerset levels as the climb progresses. The steps form part of the Cheddar Gorge and Caves visitor complex, one of the most visited natural heritage sites in England, where the spectacular limestone gorge carved by glacial meltwater, the cave systems containing Palaeolithic remains including Cheddar Man, and the cliff-top viewpoints together create an exceptional natural and archaeological destination. From the top of Jacob's Ladder the path leads along the clifftop with vertiginous views directly down into the gorge some 450 feet below, providing one of the most dramatic walking experiences in the English lowlands.

Longleat House in Wiltshire is one of the finest Elizabethan country houses in England and the home of the Marquesses of Bath, a house of 1572 that stands in Capability Brown parkland and has combined the distinction of its historic fabric with the commercial boldness of the Longleat Safari Park, opened in 1966 as the first drive-through safari park outside Africa, to create one of the most visited and most commercially innovative historic estates in Britain. The house was built for Sir John Thynne between 1568 and 1580 to designs attributed to Robert Smythson, the master mason responsible for several of the finest Elizabethan houses in England. The south front of Longleat is considered one of the masterpieces of the Elizabethan style, its symmetrical arrangement of large windows, classical pilasters and roofline of turrets and chimneys expressing the Renaissance architectural principles of proportion and classical ornament within the native English building tradition. The interior contains a sequence of rooms of considerable splendour, including the Red Library, the Saloon and the state rooms, furnished and decorated over four centuries of family occupation. The safari park, created by the seventh Marquess of Bath in 1966 on land adjacent to the house, was a genuinely revolutionary idea that transformed the business model of the country house estate. Lions, tigers, giraffes, rhinos and other large mammals roaming enclosures through which visitors drive their own vehicles remains the core experience, and Longleat's safari has been the model for similar facilities across Britain and the world. The grounds also contain a maze, a hedge maze that is one of the most complex in Britain, and various other attractions that make Longleat a full-day family destination as well as a house of considerable historic importance.

Minehead is the largest seaside resort on the Exmoor coast, a town at the foot of North Hill above the Bristol Channel providing good sandy beach, Victorian and Edwardian seafront buildings and an excellent position as the starting point of the South West Coast Path. The town serves as the principal gateway to Exmoor, the combination of coastal and moorland walking creating one of the most complete coastal and upland visitor bases in the southwest. The South West Coast Path begins at Minehead, the waymarker post on the seafront marking the start of the longest National Trail in Britain extending 1,014 kilometres to Poole Harbour in Dorset. The first section from Minehead along the Exmoor coast toward Porlock provides some of the finest and most demanding walking of the entire route. The North Hill above the town provides excellent walking accessible directly from the seafront, the combination of the wooded combes and the open heather moorland of the upper hill creating a miniature version of the Exmoor landscape immediately above the coastal resort.

Montacute House in Somerset is one of the most beautiful and most completely preserved Elizabethan country houses in England, built for Edward Phelips around 1600. The combination of the extraordinary Ham stone facade, the long gallery, the collection of Tudor and Jacobean portraits from the National Portrait Gallery and the formal garden creates one of the National Trust's most satisfying and most completely realised historic house experiences. The facade, built from the warm golden Ham stone of Somerset, is the finest and most accomplished Elizabethan domestic architectural facade in England. Its symmetrical composition of gabled bays, mullioned windows, heraldic carvings and the extraordinary figures of the Nine Worthies above the east porch combines all elements of the mature Elizabethan decorative vocabulary in a single breathtaking composition. The long gallery on the top floor, 52 metres long and the longest surviving Elizabethan long gallery in England, houses the National Portrait Gallery's Tudor and Jacobean portraits in a space whose architectural quality and historical period perfectly match the paintings displayed within it.

Porlock Hill is one of the most notorious road climbs in England, a gradient of one in four at its steepest section on the A39 road descending from the Exmoor plateau to the village of Porlock and the sea on the Somerset coast, whose combination of extreme steepness, sharp bends and the possibility of brake failure on a descent has made it a landmark for generations of motorists and a subject of both dread and satisfaction in motoring folklore. The hill descends approximately 400 metres over approximately three kilometres with several hairpin bends on the main road, and a toll road alternative provides an easier gradient for those whose vehicles or nerves cannot manage the main route. The view from the top of Porlock Hill, where the A39 crosses the edge of Exmoor at the characteristic moorland landscape of heather and gorse, is one of the finest coastal viewpoints in Somerset, the Bristol Channel visible below and the Vale of Porlock in the middle ground with Porlock village and its church visible in the valley and the coast extending toward the west. The descent of the hill itself provides a series of changing views of the vale and coast that reward the concentration required to drive safely in conditions where the gradient demands very careful use of gears and brakes. The village of Porlock at the bottom of the hill is one of the most attractive on the Somerset coast, its thatched cottages and medieval church of considerable charm, and the Porlock Weir harbour a short walk west provides a picturesque small harbour with direct access to the pebbly beach of the Exmoor coast. The Exmoor coastal walking from Porlock Weir along the South West Coast Path provides some of the finest cliff walking in the southwest, the English Channel opening toward the west as the path climbs above the shore.

Porlock Weir is a small harbour hamlet on the Somerset coast at the western end of Porlock Bay, a collection of whitewashed cottages, a small tidal harbour and an ancient shingle ridge that creates one of the most evocative and most unspoiled coastal settlements on the Exmoor coast. The combination of the picturesque harbour, the ancient shingle ridge protecting the salt marshes behind it, the oakwood climbing the steep hillside above the shore and the views across the Bristol Channel to the Welsh coast creates a setting of concentrated natural and human beauty that rewards an unhurried visit. The harbour at Porlock Weir was once an active fishing port and a landing place for coal from Wales, the Bristol Channel trade making this small harbour a significant economic link between Somerset and the industrial regions across the water. The tidal nature of the harbour, which dries completely at low water, means that the character of the place changes dramatically with the tide, the moored boats settling on the mud at low water and the harbour basin filling again with the remarkable speed of the Bristol Channel tides that produce some of the greatest tidal ranges in the world. The ancient shingle ridge that connects Porlock Weir to the main Porlock coast to the east was breached by storms in 1996, creating a tidal lagoon behind the ridge that has been managed as a wildlife habitat since then, its saltmarsh and open water providing habitat for waterfowl and waders. The breach and the subsequent creation of the lagoon habitat illustrates the dynamic nature of coastal systems and the often unexpected wildlife benefits of natural processes. The Exmoor oakwood above the harbour, part of the ancient woodland that once covered much of the Exmoor coastal strip, provides walking of the finest quality with views over the channel to the Welsh hills.

Simonsbath is a small hamlet at the heart of the Royal Forest of Exmoor, the former hunting forest that forms the ancient core of Exmoor National Park, a settlement of isolated farms and the old hunting lodge that was the seat of authority over this remote area of upland Somerset for centuries. The hamlet stands in the valley of the River Barle at one of the most central points of the moor, surrounded by open moorland and the deep wooded combes that are characteristic of the Exmoor landscape, and provides one of the most genuine encounters with the remote heart of this national park available to visitors. The history of Simonsbath is inseparable from the story of the Royal Forest and its exploitation. The Forest of Exmoor, originally a royal hunting ground, passed through various private ownerships and was purchased in 1818 by John Knight, who attempted to transform the moorland into productive farmland through a programme of enclosure, drainage and lime application that created the pattern of fields and farmsteads visible in parts of the moor today. The Knights' experiment in moorland improvement, while partially successful, demonstrated the limits of the thin moorland soils and the difficulties of farming at this altitude and latitude. The Exmoor red deer, the largest native land mammals in Britain, are at their most accessible around Simonsbath, particularly in the valley of the Barle where the woodland and moorland edge provides ideal habitat. The stag rutting season in October, when the dominant males establish their territories and herd females in encounters of considerable drama, can be observed from the roads and paths around the hamlet.