Christopher Somerville

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window

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It’s not every day you celebrate your 300th ‘A Good Walk’ for The Times, and Jane and I wanted to make it something really special. Our good friend Alan came up with a tempting-looking route through the deep leafy combes and over the brackeny brows of the Quantock Hills – Wordsworth and Coleridge country. A sight of the sea, a proper draught of moorland air. That was just the ticket.

We set off from Beacon Hill, nine walking buddies talking nineteen to the dozen as we dropped steeply down under sweet chestnut trees to Weacombe. From there a long track led south under scrubby banks flushed purple by the overnight emergence of thousands of foxgloves. From the depths of Bicknoller Combe we looked up to see the western sky a slaty blur of rain. Soon it hit, and soon it passed, leaving us shaking off water like so many dogs in a pond.

Up on Black Ball Hill a faint sharp hooting carried to us on the wind. A steam train on the West Somerset Railway was panting its way down the valley towards Minehead, but locomotive and carriages stayed hidden from sight in the steep green countryside.

We sat on the heather among Bronze Age burial mounds to eat our sandwiches with an imperial view all round, north over the Severn Sea to Wales, east to the camel hump of Brent Knoll, west into Exmoor’s heights. By the time we’d brushed away the crumbs, serenaded the skylarks with mouth organ tunes and descended among the trees of Slaughterhouse Combe, the sun was backlighting oak leaves and pooling on bracken banks where bilberries and star mosses winked with raindrops.

Thunder ripped across the sky, a last sulk of the weather gods, as we walked west up Shepherd’s Combe – a favourite ramble of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and their friend and fellow poet Samuel Coleridge. A bank of sundews lay pearled with rain, their tiny pale flowers upraised on long stalks above sticky scarlet leaves. One minuscule blob of a sundew’s insect-trapping mucilage is capable of stretching up to a million times its own length. Biomedical researchers are looking for ways to exploit that remarkable property as a platform for healthy cells in the regrowth of damaged human tissue. This is the sort of thing Jane knows.

We climbed to Bicknoller Post on its wide upland with a wonderful prospect north-west to the stepped flank of Porlock Hill and a sea full of shadows and streaks of light. Our steps quickened along the homeward path – not to unload nine souls full of immortal verse, but to beat the clock into Holcombe for the cream tea we suddenly knew we’d earned.

Start: Beacon Hill car park, Staple Plain, Hill Lane, West Quantoxhead, Somerset TA4 4DQ approx. (ST 117411)

Getting there: Jct 27; A39 (Bridgwater-Minehead); at West Quantoxhead, just past Windmill Inn, left (‘Bicknoller’). In 350m, left up Hill Lane (‘Staple Plain’). Continue for ⅔ mile to car park at end of track.

Walk (5½ miles, moderate, OS Explorer 140): From NT Staple Plain info board walk back through car park. Don’t go through gate of left-hand fork of tracks, but turn left downhill beside it (green NT arrow), steeply down through trees. At bottom (117408), right on grassy track. Continue to descend, keeping downhill at junctions, for 500m to cottage beside track (111408). Left (‘Quantock Greenway’, arrow with quill), through gate and up track. In 200m, through gate; in another 150m, go over cross-track (113404) and continue SSE beside Haslett Plantation.

In 500m, arrow post points right (115399); but go left here (east) and continue up Bicknoller Combe, keeping ahead over all crossing tracks. In 1 mile, reach top of ascent at crossing of tracks from Bicknoller Post, Paradise Combe, Bicknoller Combe and Slaughterhouse Combe (130398 – just west of ‘302’ on map). Keep ahead on stony track towards Slaughterhouse Combe. In 200m, just past low wooden post on left, fork left onto less obvious grassy track with some ‘kerb’ stones at its entrance (131397) – as a marker, look half right to see two trees, one on either side of the stony track you have just left.

Follow this grassy track east over brow of Black Ball Hill, past tumulus (134396) and descend. After 600m, look for fork; take right-hand path. In 100m it swings 180o to the right (138397), descends SW for 250m to meet stream (137395) and bends left to descend for ½ mile to bottom of Slaughterhouse Combe (143401). Left along bridleway WNW under Lady’s Edge and up Sheppard’s Combe for 1 mile, ascending to Bicknoller Post (128403). Right (north) along broad stony track; in 200m, fork left; in 50m, left again to meet The Great Road track (126407). Left, descending to car park.

Lunch: Picnic

Accommodation: Rising Sun, West Bagborough, TA4 3EF (01823-432575, risingsuninn.info) – excellent, well-run pub

Info: Taunton TIC (01823-336344)

satmap.com; ramblers.org.uk; visitengland.com

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window


Where the Severn Estuary merges with the Bristol Channel is a moot point, but the tidal water is always full of energy, swirling in purple and chocolate at high tide, then retreating with the ebb to expose vast sand and mud flats.

Off Steart Point the turbid River Parrett enters the tideway. At low tide the mud flats here stretch two miles out into the estuary, a haven for feeding birds. But flood tides are another story. The mud and sand are swallowed up, the Bristol Channel brims, and inundation can threaten the farmland and small settlements along the coast and far inland.

We set off at low tide along the coast path from the scattered hamlet of Steart. The dimpled miles of mud flats gleamed. The distant island of Steep Holm appeared marooned in mud and sand. In the southwest the Quantock Hills stood beyond the giant cranescape of half-finished Hinkley Point nuclear power station, while in the east rose the green whaleback of Brent Knoll and the long spine of the Mendip Hills.

The shoreline path ran on rabbit-riddled sands, turf and crunchy pebbles. A pale yellow bloom on one of the coastal fields turned out to be a solid mass of cowslips. Wild birds were everywhere – greenfinches and linnets on the bramble stems, shelduck assiduously hoovering the mud for crustaceans with sideways sweeps of their bright red bills, and a reed warbler complaining with unending chittering in the reedbeds.

At Steart Point a tall hide looked out across this remote landscape of flat fields, far hills, upstart knolls and tidal flats. From here the River Parrett Trail led back inland, the mud-slimed banks of the Parrett shining silver in the sun and wind. Here the Wildfowl & Wetland Trust had been working with Environment Agency to create anti-flooding buffer zones with flood banks built to encourage new saltmarsh to grow to the seaward – a bold initiative that works with nature rather than trying to strongarm it into submission.

We followed the trail down to where a breach has been cut in the Parrett’s defences. New mud, marsh, reedbeds and creeks show the effectiveness of the work. Pochard cruised a big pool where three herons stood on one leg apiece and regarded us with grave suspicion.

A grassy path led back to the shore. The morning mist shredded away to reveal the hills of South Wales far across the rising tide, and a flight of golden plover flickered low over the rapidly vanishing mudflats where the Parrett met the sea.
How hard is it? 6 miles; easy; shore paths

Start: Steart car park, Steart, Bridgwater TA5 2PX (OS ref ST 276459)

Getting there: A39 (Bridgwater-Minehead); at Cannington, right (‘Hinkley Point’, then ‘Steart Marsh’). Pass Steart church; car park in 500m on left (gate).

Walk (OS Explorer 140): From car park follow green lane north to sea wall (274460). Right (‘Steart Point’) for ⅔ mile. At Steart Point, right past tall hide (283467); right (‘Wall Common’). In 150m, left (kissing gate/KG); follow River Parrett Trail/RPT. In 700m at Manor Farm, ahead along road (278462); by Dowells Farm, left (276458, KG, RPT) to river wall; left to breach and hide (280454). Return to KG; dogleg left/right along river wall (‘Steart Gate, Polden Hide’), following RPT. Pass turning to Steart Gate car park (267454); in ½ mile, signpost ‘Polden Hide 0.71’ points left (261449), but keep ahead to cross road. On between 2 marker stones on grassy path to shore (254451); right (‘Steart’) to car park.

Lunch: Picnic

Accommodation: Malt Shovel Inn, Cannington TA5 2NE (01278-653880, themaltshovelinn.com)

Info: wwt.org.uk/steart-marshes (01278-651090)

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window

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A perfect Somerset winter’s day of sharp blue sky. Sunlight gilded the roofs of Rowberrow, nowadays a quiet little village, but in times past a rough mining centre where men dug calamine for the brass-making industry. Martha More, visiting in 1790, judged the locals ‘savage and depraved, brutal and ferocious.’

The long shape of Blackdown, highest point of Mendip, looms on the southern skyline. Today its slopes were trickling with water. With a hollow gushing a stream tumbled into the chilly depths of Read’s Cavern, one of dozens of water-burrowed caves in Mendip’s limestone massif. When Read’s was excavated in the 1920s, a set of Iron Age slave manacles was unearthed, their story untold but ripe for imagining.

A broad track rises up the flank of Blackdown. We climbed through fox-brown bracken where cattle grazed and thirty-five semi-wild ponies snorted and cantered away in a bunch. From the ridge the view was enormous, from the Quantock Hills and Exmoor down in the southwest to the steely grey Bristol Channel with its twin islands, pudding-shaped Steep Holm and sleeping-dog Flat Holm.

Along the foot of Blackdown the muddy Limestone Link footpath took us sliding and squelching past Burrington Combe. Wild goats were grazing the grey striped cliffs of the gorge, their white coats contrasting with the scarlet berries of cotoneaster.

On the slopes opposite the combe the Reverend Dr Thomas Sedgwick Whalley, rich through a ‘good marriage’ in mid-Georgian times, developed a humble cottage into the Italianate extravaganza of Mendip Lodge, a massive country house with a state bedroom, mile-long terraces and a verandah nearly a hundred feet wide.

Mendip Lodge, like the good doctor’s wealth, eventually fell into decline. All we found of the grand design was a huddle of ruins behind an archway in Mendip Lodge Woods, beside the winding path that was once a fine carriage drive.

High above on the limestone upland of Dolebury Warren the sloping ramparts of a massive Iron Age hill fort encircle the western end of the ridge. Here we sat to catch our breath and gaze across the channel to the far-off hills of Wales.
Start: Swan Inn, Rowberrow, Winscombe, Somerset BS25 1QL (OS ref ST451583)
Parking: please ask, and give pub your custom.

Getting there: Rowberrow is signed off A38 between Churchill and Winscombe

Walk (8 miles, easy, OS Explorer 141): Left down School Lane. Just after right bend, left down track (453583); in 300m at T-junction, right (454586). In ¾ mile, right (465586, ‘Bridleway, Ride’, waymark post); in 100m, left on path through bracken. In 250m detour left to Read’s Cavern (468584). Resume bracken path, uphill to ‘Rowberrow Warren’ sign (469581); left through gate; right uphill. In 200m fork left (469579), upwards for ¾ mile to track on Blackdown ridge (477573); left to Beacon Batch trig pillar (485573). Left downhill to foot of slope; left (490577, waymark post, Limestone Link /LL) for 1¼ miles. On open ground 350m after crossing West Twin Brook, at crossing of broad grassy tracks, right downhill (473583). In 700m, near Link hamlet, left (475590, fingerpost) on path through Mendip Lodge Wood. In ⅔ mile pass Mendip Lodge ruin (466591); in 150m, left up bridleway. Pass gate/’Dolebury Warren’ sign on right; in 100m right (gate, blue arrow, ‘National Trust’) across Dolebury Warren (LL) for 1¼ miles, down to T-junction by Walnut House (446591). Left (LL) for ¾ mile; right (454586) to Rowberrow.

Conditions: Can be very muddy.

Lunch: Swan Inn, Rowberrow (01934-852371, butcombe.com)

Accommodation: Woodborough Inn, Winscombe BS25 HD (01934-844167, woodborough-inn.co.uk)

Info: mendiphillsaonb.org.uk; satmap.com; ramblers.org.uk