Other 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.

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.

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.

Stourhead in Wiltshire is one of the supreme masterpieces of English landscape garden design, an early eighteenth-century garden created around an artificial lake in a wooded valley by Henry Hoare II between 1741 and the 1780s that established many of the principles of the English Landscape style and remains one of the most perfectly composed and most visited gardens in Britain. The garden takes its inspiration from the classical landscapes of the Roman campagna as painted by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, placing temples, grottoes and bridges around the lake in a series of composed views designed to evoke the pastoral Arcadia of ancient literature. The circuit walk around the lake is the defining experience of Stourhead, each step revealing new composed vistas that place the classical buildings in calculated relationship to the water, the surrounding woodland and each other. The Pantheon, a domed temple modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, provides the visual climax of the garden seen from across the lake, its reflection in the still water completing a composition of extraordinary harmony. The Temple of Apollo on the hillside, the Grotto with its sleeping nymph, the Gothic Cottage and the Bristol High Cross imported from Bristol to add a medieval element to the classical programme complete a circuit of remarkable concentrated beauty. The surrounding woodland, planted by Henry Hoare with a variety of deciduous and evergreen trees, provides the framework within which the classical buildings are set and changes character dramatically across the seasons. The spring flowering of rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias transforms the garden with colour from April through June, while the autumn foliage of the beech, oak and other trees creates a quite different but equally spectacular seasonal display. The Palladian house at Stourhead, managed separately by the National Trust, contains a significant collection of furniture, paintings and Chippendale furniture of international importance.

Stourhead in Wiltshire is one of the most complete and perfectly preserved examples of the English landscape garden tradition, a composition of water, trees, classical temples and carefully engineered viewpoints created in the 1740s by the banker Henry Hoare II that has been widely regarded as a masterpiece of the Georgian pleasure ground since its creation. The garden surrounds a central lake formed by damming the River Stour, and the walk around the lake passes through a sequence of scenes composed to suggest an idealised version of the classical landscapes painted by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin that Hoare had studied during his Grand Tour of Italy. The design principle is one of deliberate visual narrative. As you walk the lakeside circuit, each turn reveals a new composition: the Pantheon reflected in the lake, the Temple of Apollo on the ridge above, the Palladian Bridge crossing an inlet, the grotto and its reclining river god beneath the cliff. Each view was calculated to suggest a particular mood or literary reference, and the sequence of spaces creates an experience more like moving through a painted landscape than walking in a garden in any conventional sense. The classical buildings are an essential element of the composition. The Pantheon, modelled on the Roman original, serves as a focal point for views from multiple points around the lake. The Temple of Flora, the Temple of Apollo, the Bristol Cross brought from the city and re-erected as a garden feature, and the Gothic Cottage all contribute to a landscape that seamlessly combines different architectural traditions in service of an overall aesthetic rather than historical coherence. Autumn is the most celebrated season at Stourhead, when the collection of North American trees planted by later generations of the Hoare family colours the landscape with the full range of maple and liquidambar reds and golds reflected in the lake. Spring is equally spectacular when the azaleas and rhododendrons flower in sheets of colour among the mature trees. Stourhead House itself, a Palladian villa built in the 1720s, contains fine collections of furniture and art and is included in the National Trust admission. The village of Stourton adjacent to the estate provides a pub and a picturesque church that adds English vernacular character to the classical and Romantic landscape of the garden.

Wells Cathedral in Somerset is the smallest city in England's cathedral church, a building of exceptional quality and completeness that represents one of the finest achievements of English Gothic architecture. Construction began around 1175 and progressed steadily through the Early English Gothic style that gives the cathedral its characteristic light, pointed elegance, producing a building that is internally consistent in a way that cathedrals subject to more prolonged and varied construction histories often are not. The result is a building of remarkable harmony and clarity. The west front of Wells Cathedral is the supreme achievement of English medieval sculptural programmes, a screen of around 300 figure sculptures arranged in registers across the full width of the facade in a carefully organised theological programme that once formed the most complete example of medieval figure sculpture in Britain. The figures, ranging from small figures of prophets and angels to large standing apostles and bishops and a central tier of scenes from the New Testament, were originally painted in vivid colours that have long since faded, but the scale and ambition of the programme remain entirely impressive even in their weathered state. A restoration programme has cleaned and conserved the surviving figures and given them the best possible protection against further deterioration. The interior of the cathedral reveals the scissors arches at the crossing, one of the most celebrated and distinctive pieces of architectural engineering in any English medieval building. The pair of inverted arches placed across the eastern crossing to counteract the subsidence of the crossing tower in the fourteenth century created a structural solution of considerable ingenuity that is simultaneously an aesthetic feature of extraordinary visual power, their interlocking X form framing the view toward the quire in a way that draws the eye and holds the attention in ways that purely conventional Gothic architecture rarely achieves. The medieval chapter house, reached by a magnificent spiral staircase from the north transept, is one of the finest in England, its central pillar spreading into a palm of ribs supporting the octagonal vault above.