Good morning, Mendips! The Vikings are invading the Bishop's Palace this weekend, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Inspiral Carpets headline Night at the Abbey in Glastonbury, and the Tor Charter Fair rolls into town. Plus a spine-tingling look at the Mendips' ghost stories, and all your usual local news, events and weather.

🌟 Featured Event — Vikings invade the Bishop's Palace this weekend

📰 Hot News - Mendips Style — Johns' Boys choir at Wells Cathedral · Lux Tanning's business final · Tor Charter Fair · Wells Soup

👻 Featured Article — Black Dogs and Phantom Coaches: The Mendips After Dark

📅 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

The Bishop's Palace in Wells turns Norse this Saturday, 12 September, from 9.30am to 5.30pm, as its History Alive series brings a full Viking living history weekend to the medieval grounds. Across the historic Palace, visitors can wander a bustling encampment and get a feel for what life may have looked like in Viking-era England, from domestic crafts and camp cooking through to military drills and staged skirmishes — all presented in a family-friendly format built for wandering and dipping in and out at your own pace.

It's included with standard admission, so the day can easily be combined with everything else the Palace has to offer: the medieval Palace buildings and Undercroft, the 14 acres of RHS-partner gardens, family multimedia tours, the Dragon's Lair play area for younger visitors, and refreshments at the award-winning Bishop's Table café. Annual Pass holders, Day Ticket holders, and anyone with a Joint Ticket covering Wells Cathedral are all welcome to just turn up and join in.

The Palace says further details — including exactly which re-enactment groups are taking part — will be released closer to the date via its social media and email newsletter, so it's worth keeping an eye out if you want the full run-down before the weekend. Either way, expect swords, shields, and a genuinely hands-on slice of the Dark Ages in the middle of Wells.

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One of Britain's best-known male voice choirs is heading to Wells Cathedral for a special concert next year. Johns' Boys Welsh Male Choir will perform on Saturday, 13 February 2027, from 7.30pm to 9.30pm, bringing a sound that has featured on Britain's Got Talent, the Royal Variety Performance and the Last Night of the Proms. The Welsh ensemble is also the first and only British male voice choir to win the Pavarotti Choir of the World title, with its Wells date part of a wider 2027 programme taking in Liverpool Cathedral, St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin and London's Union Chapel.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

One of Britain's longest-running fairs returns to Glastonbury town centre from Friday to Sunday, with rides and stalls setting up for the annual Tor Charter Fair. The fair traces its roots back centuries to traders and merchants gathering at the foot of Glastonbury Tor, and remains a firm fixture of the town's autumn calendar.

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—Wells Cathedral hosts the next Wells Soup community crowdfunding dinner this Saturday from 12.45pm to 3pm. Diners pay a small entry fee for soup, bread and a chance to hear pitches from local community projects, then vote on which one takes home the pooled grant — a simple format that's quietly funded dozens of small local causes.

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If you've ever walked a Mendip lane after dusk and felt distinctly watched, you're in good company. This corner of Somerset has its own long-running tradition of things that shouldn't be there — and top of the list is the Gurt Dog.

That's the old West Country name for it: not Black Shuck, not Barghest, just the "great dog," a huge black hound with a habit of appearing at gateways and stiles on lonely stretches of road. Unlike some of its more murderous cousins elsewhere in England, the Gurt Dog has a mixed reputation — plenty of tellings have it walking companionably alongside lost travellers rather than menacing them, seeing them safely home before vanishing at the parish boundary.

Not every encounter ends so gently, though: one of the more unsettling accounts on record involves two witnesses who reported seeing a phantom black dog in Somerset in 1960, both of whom died not long afterwards. Whether that's grim coincidence or something the old stories would call an omen depends entirely on how brave you're feeling on the walk home.

Then there are the coaches. Somerset's roads carry more than one version of the classic phantom-coach story — a black carriage, sometimes drawn by headless horses, sometimes driven by a headless coachman, appearing suddenly out of the dark and vanishing just as fast. The Wellington to Taunton stretch of the A38 has its own well-worn version, complete with driverless horses thundering across the carriageway and startled motorists swerving to avoid a collision with something that was never really there.

Further into Somerset, similar tales attach themselves to lonely stretches near Brockley and Cutcombe, often tied to a long-dead local figure — a coachman, a landowner, occasionally a highwayman — supposedly condemned to ride the same road for eternity as punishment for some sin nobody quite agrees on any more.

Nobody can say for certain why black dogs and phantom coaches turn up again and again across the same kind of landscape: quiet crossroads, old droving routes, the sort of lane that feels older than the tarmac laid over it. Maybe it's simply that dark, empty roads have always invited stories to fill the silence. Either way, next time headlights catch something large and shaggy trotting along the verge ahead of you on a Mendip back road, you now know exactly who to blame.

→ Book at Wells Film Centre

Here's the week ahead for Wells BA5:

Wednesday brings sunny intervals and a gentle breeze, high 18°C, after this morning's rain clears through. Thursday turns cloudier and breezier with a few showers moving in later, high 19°C, before Friday dries out again with sunny spells and a light breeze, high 20°C. The weekend starts bright — Saturday sunny intervals, high 20°C, turning cloudier into the evening — and Sunday rounds off the week as the warmest day yet, sunny intervals and a moderate breeze, high 21°C.

→ Full BBC Weather forecast for BA5

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