Good morning, Mendips! Today we're heading south to Blagdon for the Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival, catching up on a busy week of council news from Wells to Street, and finding out why Wookey Hole has spent fifty years pretending to be somewhere else entirely.

📅 Featured Event — Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival opens in Blagdon

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📰 Hot News - Mendips Style — Wells's run of national accolades · Glastonbury's £1.4m town deal reshuffle · Shepton Mallet council's growing role · Street's graffiti mystery

🔤 Uxbridge English Dictionary — today's entry

Is it Wookey, Eternos or Skelator’s castle?

📆 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

The Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival returns to Holt Farm in Blagdon for three days this week, Thursday 17 to Saturday 19 September, and organisers say a handful of tickets are still up for grabs. It's the second running of the festival after last year's sell-out, with two main stages, a Yurt turned over entirely to bees, and drop-in talks scattered round the garden for anyone who fancies dipping in and out.

TV gardeners Joe Swift and James Alexander-Sinclair open proceedings with a live recording of their podcast, and each day has its own theme: Thursday digs into soil health and biodiversity, Friday is all about colour and planting design, and Saturday looks at getting the next generation into gardening. The bill also features Arit Anderson, Frances Tophill, Dave Goulson and a long list of designers and growers from across the country.

It's a proper day out rather than just a lecture series — expect a run of plant nurseries worth the visit alone, plus food and drink stalls. It's about 15 miles south of Bristol off the A38, with car parking on site (book your free pass in advance).

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Wells has had a good year for headlines it didn't have to write itself. The Agria Dog Walk Index named it the UK's third-best city for dog walking, World Atlas put it among the best places in the country to retire, and Booking.com's Traveller Review Awards singled it out as one of the UK's most welcoming towns and cities. Even Wells Cathedral's Jesse Window got a national nod, finishing fourth in the Nation's Favourite Stained Glass Window vote.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

More than £1.4m of Glastonbury town deal funding is being reshuffled after several projects stalled or were scaled back, Somerset Council has confirmed. The biggest change strips £650,000 from a shelved solar farm scheme and hands it to the Beckery Island Regeneration Trust to finish phase one of its £6.3m project at Baily's Buildings, while smaller sums go to Glastonbury Abbey, St Dunstan's House and the Somerset Rural Life Museum.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Nub News)

Shepton Mallet Town Council says it may need to take on even more local services as Somerset Council's finances stay under pressure. It already runs the town centre toilets and the Friday Charter Market, and its latest annual report flags further land and facilities — potentially including West Shepton Playing Fields — that could be passed down next.

Read full story → (Shepton Mallet Nub News)

Crispin Hall in Street has put out a good-natured appeal after graffiti featuring three names — Davi, Lola and Layla — appeared on its wall near the bus stops on Leigh Road. A spokesperson said it's "tricky, time consuming and costly to remove", and asked anyone with a Davi, Lola or Layla at home to have a gentle word.

Read full story → (Somerset Leveller)

Wookey Hole has spent the last fifty years pretending to be somewhere else, and it is extremely good at it.

The caves have the perfect qualifications for it. A river running through the dark, chambers big enough to swing a camera crane in, a constant 11°C whatever the weather is doing outside, and — crucially — a look that reads instantly as "not Earth". Directors have been taking advantage since the 1970s.

Doctor Who got there first. In 1975, Tom Baker's Doctor stalked through Wookey Hole for Revenge of the Cybermen, and the caves stood in for the tunnels of a hollowed-out asteroid. Somerset limestone, doubling as deep space. The serial has been affectionately mocked ever since, not least in The League of Gentlemen, but the location work still looks terrific.

Then everyone else arrived. Blake's 7 filmed there in 1978, Robin of Sherwood in 1983, and Doctor Who came back in 2009 for The End of Time — the caves this time serving as the underground home of the Ood, in David Tennant's final story as the Doctor. In 2009 the Most Haunted team also spent an episode there, drawn in by the legend of the Witch of Wookey Hole, which is the sort of booking the caves could probably have made without an agent.

And this year, they went properly big. Masters of the Universe, released in cinemas on 5 June, filmed in Somerset — with Wookey Hole among its locations alongside Wells Cathedral. Reports from the production had the caves used for a scene involving Skeletor's castle, with the site also serving as the unit base while filming was under way. Over at the cathedral, more than 200 crew were on site building sets, and the visual-effects team took things a step further: Eternos, the royal city of Eternia itself, was modelled on Wells Cathedral.

Read that again. The capital city of an alien planet, in a Hollywood blockbuster starring Idris Elba, is Wells.

It is a neat trick of geography that the Mendips can offer a film crew a cathedral, a gorge and a cave system within a few miles of one another — the same compact variety that makes the area pleasant to live in makes it efficient to film in. Somerset Council even runs a filming service and lists Cheddar Gorge and its caves on the books.

So next time you're shuffling through the show cave behind a school party, look past the stalagmites. You are standing in an asteroid, an Ood colony, Sherwood Forest and Skeletor's front room, all at once.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 15 September

It's a mixed, mostly damp week ahead for Wells. Light morning rain gets Tuesday going with highs around 11°C, and further showers follow through Wednesday and Thursday. Friday and Saturday look wetter still, with a 60–70% chance of rain and highs dipping to 9–11°C — pack the waterproofs if you're heading out to any of this week's events.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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