Good morning, Mendips! Today we're stepping back in time with the elephant painter who bought a railway at Cranmore, plus Wells racks up a string of national nods, new mobile breast screening units roll into Wells, the mystery of Windsor Hill's missing tunnel doors, Street FC's cup heroics, and the city gets ready to swing as its first ever Jazz and Blues Festival hits four venues this week.

📅 Featured Event — Through The Ages returns to Glastonbury Abbey

📜 Feature Article — the elephant painter who bought a railway at Cranmore

📰 Hot News - Mendips Style — new breast screening units for Wells · Wells racks up national nods · the mystery of Windsor Hill's tunnel doors

🔤 Uxbridge English Dictionary — today's entry

📅 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

Nearly 2,000 years of history return to Glastonbury Abbey this weekend, as Through The Ages brings historical encampments spanning the Roman, Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman, Medieval and Civil War periods back to the abbey grounds.

Across Saturday and Sunday, visitors can wander through living history displays and watch arena demonstrations of weaponry and technology from across the centuries, tracing how life in Glastonbury transformed from its earliest origins right through to the upheavals of the English Civil War.

It's included with abbey admission or membership, and under-16s go free — organisers recommend booking ahead, and note that some displays include loud noises.

→ Full details

Somerset NHS Foundation Trust has unveiled two brand-new mobile breast screening units, officially opened in Wells by nurse and breast cancer survivor Deb Roan. The state-of-the-art vehicles replace units that had clocked up 15 years of service, swapping noisy old generators for a quieter hybrid battery system that makes appointments more comfortable. Around 77,000 women across Somerset aged 50 to 71 are eligible for screening, with the units continuing to rotate between communities so care stays close to home.
Aged 50 - 70?
Enquire about breast screening - 01923 342425

Read full story → (Somerset Leveller)

Two Victorian railway tunnels beneath Windsor Hill, near Shepton Mallet, once carried the Somerset & Dorset Railway — until closure in 1966 and a stranger second act testing Rolls-Royce engines for Concorde. Two 15-foot steel doors fitted for that testing vanished without trace in 1992 and were never found, despite a police investigation. The tunnels are now being worked into a new walking and cycling route.

Read full story → (Shepton Mallet Nub News)

Street FC (AKA The Cobblers) put six past Ilminster Town in the FA Vase, with Callum Laird grabbing a brace as the young Somerset side booked their spot in the first round proper at the Tannery Ground. Manager Craig Laird, who co-manages alongside son Scott, praised a squad averaging just 19 years old for handling the step up to senior football.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Nub News)

Wells's first ever Wells Jazz and Blues Festival swings into town from Thursday, bringing 24 bands across four city-centre venues for a weekend of live music. It's a bold debut for the city, and organisers are hoping it becomes a fixture on the Mendips music calendar — full day-by-day details are in What's On below.

Read full story → (Wells Jazz and Blues Festival)

David Shepherd was one of the most commercially successful wildlife artists Britain has produced — elephants, rhinos, big cats, prints on a great many 1970s living-room walls, later a serious conservationist with an OBE. He also loved steam engines enough to buy some, and then discovered that owning steam engines creates a problem: they need somewhere to run.

His solution was Cranmore. The East Somerset Railway grew out of Shepherd's need for a base for his own locomotives — including the 9F 92203, which he named Black Prince — and he began giving people rides on them in 1974. Fifty years later, in March 2024, the railway marked its half-century with a gala at Cranmore station and an exhibition dedicated to its founder, opened by his daughter and titled The Man Who Loved Giants. Shepherd died in 2017, aged 86. A heritage centre in his memory stands on the second platform.

Today it is a two-and-a-half-mile standard-gauge heritage line, and the engineering going on there is not modest. The locomotive Lady of Legend was recreated from parts in 2019. Betton Grange — a class of engine that no longer existed, rebuilt from scratch over 21 years by volunteers — made its maiden trip on the line in 2024. That is the part worth stressing to readers who think heritage railways are just a nice day out with a tea room: this is a shed full of people rebuilding extinct machines by hand.

There is a good local irony in it too. The branch that the East Somerset Railway preserves is the same East Somerset line that, a few miles east, carries millions of tonnes of Mendip stone away every year. One end of it is a museum. The other is one of the busiest freight operations in the country.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 22 September

It's a lovely week ahead for the Mendips — sunny intervals through Tuesday and Wednesday with highs around 21-23°C, brightening to full sunshine on Thursday, and staying largely dry with just a small chance of a shower late on Friday and Saturday. Nights turn crisp, dipping to single figures by midweek, so an extra layer for those Jazz and Blues Festival evenings wouldn't go amiss.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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