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Somerset has recorded its first-ever sighting of the yellow-legged hornet, also known as the Asian hornet, after a beekeeper in Ashcott, near Street, spotted one near their hives last week, prompting an immediate response from the National Bee Unit, according to the Somerset Beekeepers Association..

More hornets turned up the next day, and the unit tagged one electronically, tracking it — alongside traditional methods — back to its nest. On Friday 28 August, the nest was found deep in a bramble patch and was scheduled for destruction that week.

Lynne Ingram, master beekeeper and head of Somerset's Asian Hornet Action Team, said early reporting made the difference: "Because someone took a photo and used the Asian Hornet Watch app, the National Bee Unit — supported by our trained volunteers — was able to act quickly and plan to destroy the nest before new queens emerged" (Somerset Daily).

First detected in the UK in 2016, the species has spread steadily since. It's slightly smaller than our native hornet: an almost entirely dark brown or black body, bright yellow "socks" on the legs, and a single yellow-orange band near the tail. It poses no greater risk to health than a bee, but preys heavily on honeybees, bumblebees, hoverflies and other pollinators.

With Mendip well within range of Ashcott, local beekeepers are urged to stay alert. If you spot one, don't disturb it — take a photo, note the location, and report via the free Asian Hornet Watch app or online form. Click the Gov.uk link below.

Inarticulate
Stuck on the road to Dover.

Indite
Birmingham food that's within its sell-by date.

Internet
Where England footballers fail to put the ball.

Isolate
Should have left sooner.

Juniper
Did you bite that woman?

Up on the high ground near Priddy sit four giant earthwork rings, each nearly 200 metres across, laid out in a rough line stretching three-quarters of a mile. They're older than Stonehenge's first stones, built somewhere around 2900 to 2200 BC, and nobody has ever found so much as a scrap of pottery or a discarded tool inside them to say what they were actually for.

Archaeologists call them henges for want of a better word, though technically they're not quite that either — the ditches sit outside the banks rather than in, a layout so unusual it makes the Priddy Circles unique in Britain.

Three of the four are complete, and were clearly finished exactly as their builders intended. The fourth is not. Walk out to the northernmost circle today and you'll find only about two-thirds of a ring. The western arc simply isn't there, and never was.

Test borings in the 1950s found no trace of a bank or ditch in the missing section: no evidence it collapsed, was ploughed flat, or was later robbed for stone. The builders started, then stopped, and nobody came back to finish the job.

Why walk away from a monument you'd invested this much labour into? One theory points at the ground itself. The Priddy plateau sits on limestone riddled with natural sinkholes, and excavations have shown that circle three was built directly over several of them, requiring the builders to level the depressions first. Ground that stayed prone to subsidence for centuries afterwards. It's possible the fourth circle's crew simply hit worse ground than they'd bargained for and gave up rather than build on a monument that might swallow itself.

The archaeologist who excavated the site in the 1950s and 60s, E.K. Tratman, had a more dramatic idea. He wondered whether the arrival of the Beaker people — newcomers who reshaped religious life across Britain in the Late Neolithic — interrupted the builders mid-project, sweeping away whatever beliefs the circles were built to serve before the last one could be completed.

Either way, what's left is an oddly moving thing to stand in front of: a five-thousand-year-old building site, abandoned mid-shift, on a hillside that still won't quite hold still.

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