Good morning, Mendips! It's a big weekend across the area — from a note-perfect R.E.M. tribute in Frome to a village hall crowned by the biggest mangelwurzel in the Polden Hills — and today's Feature Article takes your dog down one of the most fascinating walks in the Mendips. Here's everything you need for Friday 18 September.

📅 What Shall We Do For The Weekend? — festivals, gigs and one giant mangelwurzel

📰 Hot News - Mendips Style — housing option dodged · Frost Fayre sells out in a day · allotment rents rise · speeding caught at Cheddar Gorge

🐾 The Best Dog Walk in the Mendips Is an Ancient Industrial Site — this week's Feature Article

🔤 Uxbridge English Dictionary — today's entry

📆 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

This weekend the Mendips are doing double duty as market town and music venue, with gardens, gigs and greasy-spoon food festivals all jostling for your Saturday. Here's where to point the car.

Friday evening belongs to Frome, where Cheese & Grain hosts R.E.M by Stipe — the UK's leading R.E.M. tribute act, playing since 1996 and reportedly praised by Michael Stipe himself on The One Show. Expect note-for-note Losing My Religion and Everybody Hurts from 7pm; it's the sort of gig that rewards getting there early for a spot near the front.

If theatre suits your evening better, Chew Valley School Hall hosts Pieces of My Life at 7.30pm, Kirris Riviere's autobiographical solo show about grief, identity and his mother's fierce optimism — part of Valley Arts' 10th Fringe Festival, with a free under-18 ticket for every adult one.

Saturday is the big one. Down in Blagdon, the Yeo Valley Organic Garden Festival wraps up its third and final day with talks, plant stalls and a 'Mission Possible' theme about getting the next generation into gardening — a good one for anyone who spends their weekends elbow-deep in a border.

Bargain hunters should head instead to the Bath & West Showground in Shepton Mallet, where the Antique & Collectors Fair runs all weekend, and families will find the Clarks Village Food Festival in full swing in Street, with Greek, Mexican, Persian and Jamaican stalls, live music and outlet discounts of up to 60% running both Saturday and Sunday.

Sunday has its own quieter charm: over in Edington, The Great Polden Hills Mangelwurzel Day turns a friendly bet over who could grow the biggest root vegetable into a full village festival, complete with Morris dancing, a specially composed Mangelwurzel song and a hurling competition using crocheted mangelwurzels made by the village's own crochet group — as daft and lovable a way to spend a Sunday afternoon as the Mendips offer.

Whatever you choose, get out and enjoy it while the weather holds. Times, venues and the full day-by-day breakdown of everything else running this weekend — sold-out festivals, minor events and all — are in the What's On This Week section below.

Somerset Council officers have rejected a draft planning option that would have banned new housing across nine towns sitting in sensitive river-pollution catchments — including Wells, Glastonbury, Street and Shepton Mallet. The approach would have cut the number of viable development sites from 176 to just 72, and officers called it "unrealistic," warning it couldn't meet housing need while still protecting the county's waterways.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

More than 250 traders applied for a stall at this year's Glastonbury Frost Fayre within 24 hours of applications opening — proof, says Mayor Zoe Price, of how popular the festive market has become. This year's Fayre runs on Saturday 28 November from 10am to 6pm, with outdoor stalls across the town centre, indoor trading, five stages of live entertainment and a park-and-ride service from Herbies Field.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Nub News)

Shepton Mallet Town Council has confirmed a £5-a-year rise across all its allotment plots from 1 October — small plots going from £30 to £35, medium from £45 to £50 and large from £60 to £65. The council says the increase was flagged more than a year ago, honouring a rule that any change to allotment terms must be notified at least 12 months in advance.

Read full story → (Shepton Mallet Nub News)

Avon and Somerset Police caught five drivers exceeding the 30mph limit through Cheddar Gorge over the weekend of 12-13 September, some clocked at more than 50mph. An unmarked speed enforcement van recorded the violations in the newly restricted zone, with police warning that the gorge's blind bends and narrow sections make excessive speed especially dangerous for cyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists.

Read full story → (Somerset Leveller)

If you want a weekend walk that keeps a dog thoroughly entertained and doesn't involve a single stile-hopping scramble, take them down Velvet Bottom.

It sits on the floor of a dry valley below Charterhouse, a long narrow ribbon of rough grassland running down towards Cheddar Gorge. The main path along the bottom is level, sheltered and easy going, which is a gift on a blustery Mendip morning.

Park at Blackmoor, near the Charterhouse Centre, and the Wildlife Trust's own suggested loop takes in Ubley Warren too: roughly four miles, about two and a half hours at dog-sniffing pace. Or start at the other end, through the Black Rock gate on Cliff Road in Cheddar Gorge.

A few sensible notes. Cattle graze Ubley Warren through spring and summer, so leads on around livestock. The ground is uneven, with exposed rock, shallow quarries and old mineshafts about. Cave entrances and shafts are locked and firmly off limits. And on a warm still day Ubley Warren has adders, so a dog with its nose in the heather deserves half an eye.

Now, the reason it looks like that.

Every lump, trench and hollow underfoot is man-made. There's a local word for it — gruffy ground — meaning uneven ground left by mining. Those long straight gullies are rakes, cut by miners following the best veins of ore along the surface. The low black mounds that glint oddly in low sun are slag heaps.

They were digging for lead, and they were at it a very long time. Ore was probably worked here in the late Iron Age, but the Romans industrialised it with startling speed: they were mining at Charterhouse by AD 49, within six years of arriving in Britain at all.

Mining never really stopped. The heyday came in the 17th and 18th centuries, all shallow pits and small workings, and in 1844 Cornish miners arrived to chase the ore deeper. It pinched out on them, so they turned round and resmelted the slag their predecessors had abandoned, working until 1878. Most of that black glassy ground is theirs, not Rome's.

The lead left one last mark. Centuries of contamination in the lower valley stopped trees taking hold, which is why Velvet Bottom is open grassland rather than woodland — and why the warren above grows rare specialists like spring sandwort and dwarf mouse-ear, plants that tolerate lead-rich soil where most things give up. The old shafts, meanwhile, belong to the bats now.

So it's a lovely walk, and a strange one. Quiet grassland, wildflowers, a happy dog — laid out on an industrial site that once supplied an empire.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of Friday 18 September

A cloudy, breezy start to the weekend, with highs of 18-20°C and a chance of a shower on Friday afternoon, brightening into sunny intervals by Sunday. Expect a mild, mostly dry start to next week too, with temperatures holding in the high teens to low twenties and the wind easing off through Monday and Tuesday.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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