The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Torn between Devon and Cornwall? Try Somerset
Stuck in the shadows of its showier neighbours, this overlooked county gives them a run for their money in springtime, says James Litston
Spring has definitely sprung in the RSPB’s Swell Wood nature reserve. Its oak, ash, hazel and hornbeam trees are beginning to burst into leaf. Beneath them, among the wood anemones and bright yellow celandines carpeting the ground, the first of this year’s bluebells are in bloom. Birdsong is everywhere: the two-tone twitter of chiffchaffs and a robin’s trill are familiar, though a blackcap is outdoing them all, pouring his joyful babble from a hidden perch in the undergrowth. After a long and dreary winter, his serenade to the fresh new season feels all the more uplifting.
As lovely as this may be, though, my attention is elsewhere. Beyond its blossom-and-birdsong appeal, Swell Wood offers a hilltop vantage point over the flatlands below. This is West Sedgemoor, part of the Somerset Levels and Moors. As the UK’s largest wetland, it’s fantastic for wildlife. And the star attraction? Wild cranes.
Absent from Britain for four centuries, just shy of 100 cranes were released on West Sedgemoor in the early 2010s. Scanning with binoculars, I spot a pair in the distance, their 3fthigh forms hard to hide in the meadows’ short sward. I’d been hoping to catch their famed dancing behaviour, but they are clearly not as full of the joys of spring as my blackcap, still warbling loudly. Nevertheless, they are a treat to observe; and all the more remarkable in their rarity.
Somerset often gets overlooked in the race to reach better-known Devon and Cornwall, but its birding opportunities are just one way in which the county stands out. The West Country’s reintroduced crane population has now reached 23 breeding pairs; but the birds were common both here and nationwide in the Middle Ages. Frequently served at medieval feasts, they had disappeared by the 1600s through hunting and habitat loss. Drainage of Somerset’s wetlands began in Roman times and was expedited centuries later by Glastonbury’s monks. It’s a story that I learn the next day in Glastonbury itself: that famously counterculture town perched beside the Levels.
“Back in medieval times, this view would have been very different,” explains tour guide Cheryl Corcoran, who is showing me around. We are standing on Glastonbury Tor, the tower-topped hill well known to fans of the famous music festival. “All that lowlying land would have been inundated,” she says, gesturing at the Levels. “This higher ground was an island – the Isle of Avalon – and Glastonbury Abbey was the wealthiest in England.”
Cheryl says Avalon derives from the ancient Welsh for apple orchard; and indeed, apple trees still grow on the Tor’s lower slopes, their branches heavy with mistletoe. She points out the ryhnes (drainage ditches) that carve through the landscape: dug to transform the Levels from boggy wetland to productive pasture. Though not fully drained until the 17th century, their watery past is remembered through the legends of King Arthur and tales of King Alfred, who battled the Danes from his secret redoubt in the swamp. Even the name Somerset references this landscape: summer, when the floodwaters subsided, granted access to seasonal meadowlands.
Descending the Tor, Cheryl tells me how Glastonbury was established on a convergence of ley lines: electromagnetic maps along which ancient sites (including Stonehenge) were built. Their spiritual significance is reflected in the preponderance of crystals and fantastical art for sale on the high street. Pagan origins were later supplanted by other beliefs: Glastonbury’s abbey was Britain’s first Christian monastery. Even in its ruined state, it remains impressively grand; a testament to the extraordinary wealth that prompted a jealous Henry VIII to dissolve such institutions.
All this medieval history and its New Age vibes inform Glastonbury’s sense of time and place, but the clock dials forward a few miles up the road. Holiday cottages here tend to verge on the twee, so it’s a breath of fresh air to be staying at the Bolt: one of two units on the edge of the Mendips, overlooking the Levels. Carved from a former chicken shed, the Bolt places urban-industrial, loft-style living amid sheep grazing right outside the windows.
“There were times when we were slapping on paint and we’d ask ourselves, ‘Is this going to work?’,” owner Emily Sutherland told me when I checked in. She needn’t have worried. Inside, the Bolt is all slate-grey walls and poured concrete floors mixed with plush upholstery, pendant lamps and pops of sunshine yellow, with a few kitsch pieces here and there for a look that’s personal and playful. I love it. Outside, a terrace with hot tub and loungers looks past the sheep towards the Quantock Hills: a view best enjoyed at sunset from the egg chair suspended from a birch tree.
Swinging in the chair and watching the lambs play by day may be charming, but there’s a catch. Sunrises are heralded by bleating, so I take advantage of the wake-up call one morning. Early risers at this time of year can be enthralled by birdsong, for which Avalon Marshes is the Levels’ go-to spot. It’s a large expanse of meadows, woodland, reeds and open water where songbirds are joined in their dawn chorus by another bird that, like the cranes, is a Somerset Levels emblem.
I hear its call – a single booming note like the sound made when blowing into a bottle – echoing across Ham Wall, the RSPB’s reserve on Avalon Marshes. It’s a bittern: a rarely seen heron whose plumage matches the reeds in which it skulks. Ham Wall’s reedbed was created especially for them on land once stripped bare for peat extraction. “We can’t recreate what’s been lost, but we can do our bit to help nature recover,” one of the wardens tells me over the bitterns’ haunting calls. “When we acquired this land in 1990, Somerset hadn’t seen bitterns for decades and Britain had fewer than 20 booming males. Our count last week revealed 22 at Ham Wall alone.”
It’s a conservation success that has restored historical magic to the Somerset Levels. In a landscape whose stories incorporate Romans, abbots, druids and Alfred the Great, it’s even more atmospheric in spring with the booming of bitterns and bugling of cranes.