Westbury Beacon

The precise location is marked 'settlement', with 'tumuli', a little north-west from Westbury Beacon. It isn't easy to access, because of a few walls and gates to climb. To get there, go to Draycott on the Cheddar-Wells road, and climb the lane up the Mendips signposted 'Gliding Club'. At the top, with the gliding drome on your left, stop at a barn and gate on your right. Cut over the fields and a few walls to get to the settlement.

This is not suitable for the disabled or for those with an allergy to levitating over barbed-wire! This isn't a public right of way. Visit when the weather is benign and the wind low. Great for picnics in springtime - lots of flowers. A happy, light place for meditation.

There's not much to see on the ground at Westbury Beacon - just a few bumps - but two things stand out. The view is just fantastic - fifty miles on a clear day. And the feeling is - to me - clearer than in most places. That is, at times I have felt the villagers who lived here, and tasted their lives - the place-memory seems strong.

And what a desirable residence they had! On the escarpment edge of the Mendips, with beechwoods behind them and a vista over the Somerset Levels before them, this was a blessed place to live. In those days the climate was marginally warmer, and this place will have been free of flies, forest shadows and damp, safe, pleasant and inspiring. It probably had a wooden stockade around it to keep out the wolves and keep the kids and sheep in, but clearly defensibility was not an issue.

It might have been the summer residence of people who lived down below in winter, on the edge of the Levels, where the fishing would be plenty and the timber, hunting and forage good. Or it was people from a few miles inland (see Mendip Summits and Priddy), from the lead-mining areas and their villages.

The view stretches from the East Somerset hills to the Dorset heights, rightwards to the Blackdowns and Quantocks, and then again to Exmoor and the Severn Sea. From here you look down on Glastonbury Tor, Brent Knoll and Nyland Hill, and across the Moors, for miles. In former days this will have been a fine panorama, when rivers and lakes surrounded with reedy marsh and boggy woodland gave the Levels far more character than they have today. A fine place for a gaggle of roundhuts and an extended family of, say, 30-50 people.

- Palden Jenkins