County in England
Somerset
Somerset gave the world Cheddar cheese, the Glastonbury Festival and a legend of King Arthur, and its cider farms once paid workers partly in pints.
Key information
- County
- Somerset
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 982,000 for the ceremonial county including Bath and North East Somerset and North Somerset (2021 Census); about 572,000 excluding those two areas
- Known for
- Cheddar Gorge, cider, Glastonbury Festival, the Somerset Levels, Wells Cathedral
- What locals are called
- Somerset folk; historically also "Sedgemoor men" or "Zomerzet" in dialect jokes
- Famous people
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Fielding, Ernest Bevin (born in Winsford, Somerset), Marcus Trescothick (Somerset and England cricketer)
- Football clubs
- Yeovil Town, Bath City, Taunton Town, Weston-super-Mare
About Somerset
The county that gave cheese its most famous name
Somerset's most travelled export is probably a cheese. Cheddar, the village at the foot of the Mendip Hills, lent its name to what is now the most widely made cheese on Earth. The reason is the caves: the gorge's cool, constant temperatures were ideal for maturing great wheels of curd. Cheddar Gorge itself is England's largest gorge, with limestone cliffs rising about 120 metres. In 1903 workers found a skeleton in Gough's Cave that became known as Cheddar Man, roughly 10,000 years old and Britain's oldest complete human skeleton. DNA studies later suggested he likely had dark skin and blue eyes, which made headlines around the world. The village shows how Somerset works: a small place, a big idea, and a landscape doing a lot of the work.
A land that floods, and a legend that floats
Drive across the Somerset Levels and the land goes flat and wide, with willow-lined rhynes (drainage ditches) cutting the fields. In winter, large areas can turn to shallow lakes. In the great floods of 2013–14 villages such as Muchelney were cut off for weeks. People have lived with the water for thousands of years. The Sweet Track, a wooden walkway built across the marshes around 3807 BC, is among the oldest engineered roads in the world. It was found by peat workers in the 1970s. Then there is Glastonbury. Medieval monks claimed to have found the grave of King Arthur and Guinevere there in 1191, and Glastonbury Tor, a hill topped by the tower of St Michael's church, has been tied to Avalon ever since. Stories also link the town to Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail. Mystery sells well here, and always has.
Why a Somerset dairy farm hosts the biggest party in Britain
In 1970 Michael Eavis held the first Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm near Pilton. Tickets cost £1 and included free milk. Marc Bolan headlined, and around 1,500 people turned up. It has since grown into one of the largest music festivals in the world, with a capacity of well over 200,000. The Pyramid Stage, the Park and the Stone Circle are fixtures of British summers, and the BBC's coverage is a ritual in its own right. The festival takes place on a working dairy farm, and cows still graze there when the crowds go home. Eavis, a farmer first and a festival boss second, became one of the best-known farmers in Britain.
Cider, wassailing and the art of blessing an apple tree
Somerset is cider country, and the orchards around Taunton, Shepton Mallet and the Levels have been pressing apples for centuries. Varieties have glorious names such as Kingston Black, Dabinett and Yarlington Mill. For generations farm labourers received part of their wages in cider, a custom that survived into the twentieth century. Every January, villages hold wassails to wake the apple trees and scare off evil spirits. Toast soaked in cider is hung in the branches, shotguns are fired into the air, and people sing to the orchard. The Carhampton wassail, on 17 January, is among the best known. For something louder, there are the Somerset carnivals. Bridgwater Guy Fawkes Carnival, every November, features huge illuminated floats powered by generators and has been running for over 400 years.
Cathedrals, spas and a very small city
Wells is England's smallest city, and its cathedral has a west front with hundreds of medieval statues. Inside is the scissor arch, a bold piece of fourteenth-century engineering that props up the central tower. The astronomical clock, from the late fourteenth century, features jousting knights that charge round every quarter hour. The Bishop's Palace next door is surrounded by a moat, and its swans have been taught to ring a bell on the gatehouse when they want food, a tradition dating back to the 1850s. On the coast, Minehead, Burnham-on-Sea and Weston-super-Mare keep the seaside tradition alive. Weston has one of the biggest tidal ranges in the world: the Bristol Channel can retreat so far that the sea seems to vanish. Exmoor National Park covers the west of the county, home to wild ponies and red deer.
Cricket, rugby and one of sport's great waiting games
Somerset County Cricket Club, based at Taunton, has produced some of the game's biggest personalities, from Ian Botham and Viv Richards to Marcus Trescothick. The club has never won the County Championship, and the long wait has become part of its character, and a source of dry jokes among fans. In 2019 Somerset finished runners-up to Essex, and won the Royal London One-Day Cup that year. In football, Yeovil Town became famous for the sloping pitch at Huish, its former ground, and for giant-killing FA Cup runs. Huish Park replaced it in 1990. Bath, famous for rugby, sits just across the county's northern edge in the public imagination, and its Recreation Ground rings with noise on match days.