Rough Guide to Bath, Brostol & Somerset (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Author:Rough Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, England
Publisher: Apa Publications
Published: 2020-03-18T04:57:54+00:00

Meare Fish House

St Mary’s Rd, Meare • Key available at any reasonable time during daylight hours from Manor House Farm, 350yds up the road, just behind the church • Free • EH • english-heritage.org.uk

The B3151 shadows a rhyne for 3.5 miles west of Glastonbury to the strung-out village of Meare, where the Meare Fish House once provided a bounty of roach and pike for the monks of Glastonbury Abbey. Built in 1330 by Abbot Adam of Sodbury (whose figure stands above the front door of the nearby Manor House), it was gutted by a fire in the nineteenth century but remains the only surviving monastic fishery building in England, with a central storage area, used for drying and salting fish, and an upstairs bedroom where the abbot’s water bailiff slept. Up to 25,000 fish and 5000 eels were netted each year in a vast pool – the “mere” that gave the village its name – which stretched for four miles beyond what is now the River Brue.

Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve

Entrances on the Westhay–Shapwick and Meare–Ashcott roads • Daily dawn–dusk • Free • 01458 860120, naturalengland.org.uk

The former commercial peat bogs of Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve, four miles west of Glastonbury, make up the largest reserve in the Somerset Levels, its trails cutting through a variety of hay meadow, reedbed and marshy fen. Together with adjacent Ham Wall. Shapwick forms a near-unbroken block of superb birding country: it’s home to over sixty species of birds, including marsh harriers, lapwing and water rail, easiest to see around the open waters of Noah’s Lake and Canada Lake, as the woodland enclosing the meadows gives that part of the reserve a much denser feel.

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