Exmoor forms a physical barrier for travellers leaving Somerset to the west and is Britain's smallest and probably most attractive national park. Two-thirds of its 267 square miles lie within Somerset, including the whole of the original Exmoor "forest", not a large wood but a name for a royal hunting preserve.
If you’re up on Exmoor, then the ‘Secret Valley’ is a must. Here you’ll find the remote village of Oare with its church immortalized in Lorna Doone.
From the south, the Brendon Hills present another impressive spectacle, climbing to around 1,000 feet before plunging precipitously down to the Bristol Channel coast. Up here the climate is harsher, the landscape more rugged, with huge beech hedges planted around fields to shelter livestock from the scything winter winds. There is, they say, at least an overcoat’s difference in the weather up here compared to more temperate conditions down on the lowlands. Now given over largely to grazing, the hills were until a century ago, home to a thriving iron ore industry. Shafts and adits were hacked out of the hills by miners, and ore shipped to ironworks in South Wales down a specially-constructed railway to Watchet.
The community and the mining have long since faded away and nature has healed most of the scars but some reminders remain, including ruined engine houses, the miners' chapel (still in use) near Raleigh's Cross and the remains of the great winding house at the head of the mineral railway's quarter-mile long incline.
Other beautiful features of Somerset worth visiting include: Glastonbury, Dunster,the Blackdown Hills, the Lorna Doone Secret Valley, Forde Abbey, the Mendip Hills, Porlock and Porlock Weir, the Quantock Hills, the Somerset Levels and Wells. |
