Somerset

Picture narrow, hump-backed 'packhorse' bridges, inconvenient for the traffic of today but treasured nonetheless, Ching over rushing streams and rivers, joining together rolling wooded hills and carrying country lanes winding from The village with its thatched cottages to another, even more attractive. In the villages and towns joined by the lanes, Inns, -rving, as they have served since before people can remember, real country cider and delicious cheeses. The names of the places passed sounding, as they roll off the tongue, like the rich accents spoken by the people all around. Imagine mellow red sandstone walls seen against green fields, and on the moors sudden changes 'in the weather, from bright clear inshine to forbidding gloom, then back again to sunshine. The sudden great gash that is the Cheddar Gorge, seeming as though the lovely Mendip Hills must have been rent asunder, yet in the rending made more beautiful.

Memories of Loma Doone Blackmore's evocative story, seeming far more like fact than the fiction that it is, as places are half recognised by those familiar with the work. Memories too of a less endearing figure, Judge Jeffreys, and his 'Bloody Assizes', set up at Taunton to punish the many local followers of the ill fated Duke of Monmouth, after the Battle of Sedgemoor. Happier associations with the poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, who once strolled together through the lovely Quantock Hills. Legendary connections of course, inescapable as they are in the west country, with the ever resent figure of King Arthur, and his Camelot, perhaps at nearby Cadbury Hill?

This great profusion of well blended beauty, quiet solitude, history and dignity, is but a small taste of Somerset. A cunty both varied and romantic, essentially rural, yet able at the same time to present the traveller with both its rural harm and the magnificence of its cathedral at Wells, and the Georgian elegance that is Bath.