A good day out: Glastonbury and the Somerset Levels

We started in Glastonbury where we had a delicious, wholesome, generously portioned and reasonably priced meal at our favourite Rainbows End Café. It’s always full of interesting people, as is the town itself which is a delightful mixture of locals and ageing hippies (in varying degrees of sanity). Everyone is friendly and no one minds what you look like and dogs are always welcome. Ellie adores the place and leads the way to the café, tail high, with the assurance of a regular. Today however because it was cold we were able to leave her in the car and have some time off.

    After lunch we wandered round the town. In summer it’s buzzing but today there was hardly anyone around, perhaps in part because of the biting wind. Two vaping locals sat outside a cafe and watched us.
    We’ve done the touristy bits such as the ruined Abbey and the Chalice Well Gardens, and climbed the Tor many times, so today we explored the shops, which are mostly New Agey, outside one of which we saw this board. I took a snap for one of Frog’s nieces who’s having a tough time at the moment, realising as I did so that all the good advice I give her is exactly what I should be telling myself . . .

I’d seen on the map a marshy area surrounded by public footpaths a few miles outside Glastonbury. There was no way they could stop us walking there with the dog, I thought, so we set off. The roads got rougher and rougher until at last we were wobbling along a track more pothole than tarmac with deep ditches either side. The sat nav lady had given up and showed us falling off the edge of the world. Next to some woods a little way off I could see an encampment of caravans. I felt as if we were venturing into a lawless, wild place. This is more like it, I thought (better than our most recent experience of walking on the Levels).

When we arrived at the parking area I’d earmarked we discovered that this was a nature reserve. What’s more, a national nature reserve. Oh dear, we thought. Will we be turned away like we were before?

When we pulled into the carpark however two women with dogs were getting out of cars and both species greeted us effusively. I rushed over to the information boards and they said nothing about dogs being banned. They didn’t even say that dogs had to be on leads. Hooray. (Having a dog on a lead means that I’m on a lead too.)

Westhay Moor National Nature Reserve

As this was our first time in the area, and because Frog had a slightly iffy foot (from wearing steel-toe-capped boots at a day learning how to lay hedges), and because the signs did ask that you kept dogs out of undergrowth and water so as not to scare wildlife, we kept to the main path.

The countryside was a mixture of pools, reeds and scrubby woodland. It had been reclaimed, the boards said, from old peat-workings and restored to what it would have been in the Stone Age. Rare creatures lived here, including otters, bitterns and Cetti’s warblers.

The day was quiet and wintry and we didn't see or hear any of the rare species listed (not that we were trying very hard) but we saw some birds (a red-beaked heron (?)*, a white egret, geese, ducks). We met only one other person and the views were lovely. I thought again of my vision last summer of joined-up reserves covering the country, so that wild nature was the norm.

We arrived at a small road, passed another enclave of what looked like people living semi-wild in caravans and then turned on to what we hoped was another footpath to take us back. We did begin to have our doubts however as it became muddier and muddier and we had to climb through a smallholding with very friendly goats. 

A smelly and noisy diesel pump spewed out water - presumably from the land to a 'drain' (drainage ditch). A white kid squeezed through the fence and followed us so Frog took it back. Luckily the route was his choice so he couldn’t complain.

Deep peaty holes (which we were careful not to fall into) appeared in the track . . .

. . . and then we arrived at this.

This was the peat-workings before restoration, we realised.

Work was obviously taking place to make banks and I wondered how any human, let alone a digger, could survive in such a morass. (Frog said that they would use wooden boards.)

Back at the carpark, vehicles were piling in and a man asked me if we'd seen the starlings, by which I presumed he meant the roosting displays. Again we were in the right place and now - unlike before - we could have stayed to watch, but we had an hour's drive home and didn't want to do it in the dark, and anyway I'd had my own private display a couple of weeks earlier.

As we drove along the road, we passed a man walking towards the reserve laden with camera equipment. That confirmed our decision. Who wants to do the same as everyone else? (Not Frog and me, anyway.)

Back home, I did some research. According to my 1980 bird book, the bittern had almost ceased to breed in Britain and Cetti’s warblers were occasional visitors. On the internet (I can't remember where) I read that large-scale restoration at Westhay started in 1990 when Fisons donated their peat-works to the Somerset Wildlife Trust, and according to Wikipedia it’s part of a 2009 scheme to create a network of reserves and join them join up, 'one of an increasing number of landscape scale conservation projects in the UK'.

How quickly nature can recover, given the chance, and how good to know that others share my vision and that it might one day come true. (It might have to.)

* A knowledgeable neighbour says this could have been a stork. Apparently a few have have turned up on the Levels of their own accord, which I find incredibly exciting.  Unfortunately ( for me) it was Frog who saw it, not me.