Good morning, Mendips! Today we've a special guest feature on the secret wartime hideout beneath Ebbor Gorge, Glastonbury's Queen of Cups earning a place among the UK's best restaurants, and a busy run-up to the weekend with music, theatre and autumn workshops across the Mendips. Let's get into it!

📖 Feature Article — Churchill's Secret Army Under Ebbor Gorge

🎨 Featured Event — Cultural Connections at Shoemakers Museum

📰 Hot News - Mendips Style — Queen of Cups named among UK's best restaurants · Wells Cathedral School's new headmaster · Free exercise classes launch · 40mph plans for Wells-Shepton road

🔤 Uxbridge English Dictionary — today's entry

📆 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

This year's Somerset Art Weeks Festival theme, “Cultural Connections”, has found one of its most inventive homes at Shoemakers Museum in Street, where two new Somerset Art Works micro-commissions run right through to Saturday. Step by Step, an immersive installation and live performance by local artists Helen Ottaway and Melanie Thompson, transforms the museum's corridor spaces with recorded and live sound, movement, found objects and drawing, drawing lines between Somerset's prehistoric past and its present. Alongside it sits Hybrid Selves, an exhibition by Kirsten Madeira-Revell and Polly Hall exploring identity through part-sculpture, part-story mythological creatures.

The standout dates are the three Saturday performances of Step by Step — 19 and 26 September already past, with a final outing this Saturday, 3 October, at 12pm and 2pm. It's a free drop-in event for museum visitors, though places are limited by the size of the corridors, so it's worth arriving a little early to be sure of a spot.

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Queen of Cups in Glastonbury has been named the second-best restaurant in the UK in Time Out magazine's list of the 20 best places to eat in 2026. Chef Ayesha Kalaji's restaurant on Northload Street, set in a 17th-century coaching inn and holding a Michelin Bib Gourmand, was praised for a menu blending Middle Eastern flavours with local Somerset produce. The Three Horseshoes at Batcombe, near Shepton Mallet, also made the list at number 11.

Read full story → (Somerset Leveller)

James Davies has formally been installed as the 86th headmaster of Wells Cathedral School, during a Choral Evensong at Wells Cathedral. The ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Wells, the school's chair of governors and former heads, marking what organisers called the beginning of a new chapter for the historic school.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

The West Mendip Primary Care Network is teaming up with Somerset Activity & Sports Partnership to offer free Saturday exercise classes at St Dunstan's House in Glastonbury, starting 3 October. The ten-week programme includes gentle sessions for beginners and a "Stronger for Longer" class for the over-50s, open to patients registered with surgeries across Glastonbury, Wells and Street. Booking closes 30 September, with limited places at westmendippcn.co.uk.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Nub News)

Somerset Council has opened a consultation on a new 40mph limit along stretches of the Wells–Shepton Mallet corridor around Beacon Cross, covering Old Frome Road and the A37 Long Hill on both approaches. The council says the change aims to improve road safety and reduce the likelihood and severity of collisions. The consultation closes on Wednesday 7 October.

Read full story → (Shepton Mallet Nub News)

Ebbor Gorge is one of the quietest corners of Mendip. In 1940, six local men were getting ready to fight a war from underneath it.

Woodland, limestone, a trickle of stream and the occasional muddy spaniel. The gorge is hard to picture as a front line. But in 1940, with a German invasion expected at any moment, it became exactly that.

The men belonged to the Auxiliary Units, better known as Churchill's secret army. Small patrols of trusted locals were recruited to stay behind if the Germans landed. They would vanish underground, then come out at night to sabotage the invaders. Members were known only to each other. If the invasion had come, their expected life expectancy was about two weeks, and their rations were planned accordingly.

The Ebbor Gorge Patrol, part of the Wells group, reads like a cross-section of ordinary local life. Its leader, Second Lieutenant Percival Lunnon, was a water engineer who specialised in artesian supplies. Among his men were a printer's foreman, a dental mechanic, a journalist and a farmer's son. Most served from June 1940 until December 1944.

Their hideout was a masterpiece of Mendip craftiness. Patrol member Harold Lane remembered them blowing up a large ash tree to start the hole, then carrying the soil away in bags so there was no giveaway spoil heap. A 20-foot shaft with a ladder dropped to a tunnel and a chamber of corrugated "elephant iron".

Down there were bunks and an escape tunnel, which happily was never used, plus a telephone line running across the valley. Explosives were kept separately in a rock crevice nearby. The entrance was a weighted tray covered with wire, soil and flowers. So they wouldn't wear a tell-tale path, the men slept in a gypsy-style caravan beside the track.

It worked almost too well. Lane recalled picnickers settling down practically on top of the hidden entrance while the patrol sat underneath, presumably trying not to sneeze. His other memory was less heroic: the place was always soaking wet with condensation. Fellow member Tony Loxton called the hide "marvellous", then admitted he never actually slept in it.

There's a neat postscript. In 1967, Mrs G.W. Hodgkinson of Wookey Hole gave the gorge to the National Trust in memory of Winston Churchill, the man whose secret army had once been dug into its hillside. Today it's a National Nature Reserve.

So next time you unpack a flask and a sandwich on the Ebbor path, spare a thought for what might be under the leaf mould. Just don't go looking with a spade. It's a protected reserve, and some secrets are best left buried.

Did a relative serve in a Mendip Auxiliary Unit? Hit reply. We'd love to hear their story.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 29 September

Expect a classic early-autumn mix through the week ahead: a blend of bright spells and scattered showers, with mornings turning noticeably cooler as we head into October. Worth keeping a coat handy for evening events.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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