Issue #11 | Friday 3 July 2026

Good morning, Mendips! It's the opening night of Party at the Palace in Wells, Frome Festival turns 25 down the road, and Sunday brings the Mendips' biggest slice of Italy at the Wells Italian Festival — full weekend guide below.

Today - starting our “Mysterious Mendips” feature of local legends - with the Phantom Choir of Wells Cathedral.

🎉 What Shall We Do For The Weekend? — your guide to Friday to Sunday

📅 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

🎬 The legend of the Phantom Choir of Wells Cathedral.

Wells weighs up a 24-hour Budgens

Glastonbury's B&Q was the council's best-selling asset

Glastonbury Abbey's apple juice crowned best in Britain

Street McDonald's shuts its doors — over the toilets

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

Three days, seven events, and barely a gap in the diary between Wells, Frome and Shepton Mallet — this is one of those weekends that fills itself. Here's what's actually worth turning up for, from Friday teatime through to Sunday evening.

🎪 Party at the Palace, all weekend — Bishop's Palace, Wells The Palace grounds turn into an open-air festival for three nights running, and each one has its own personality. Friday's Country Superstars Theatre Tour (gates 7pm, £25 adult/£15 child) brings a full live band and West End-trained cast through Dolly, Cash and Garth Brooks — reportedly Dolly Parton-approved. Saturday's the big one: East 17 headline a 90s night alongside Dave Finnegan's Commitments and Eurovision runner-up Sonia — bring the nostalgia and the earplugs in equal measure.

Sunday afternoon flips it entirely for the kids: Pop Queens Live do Taylor, Miley and Olivia Rodrigo from 4pm (£18 child/£12 adult/£50 family) — about the easiest way there is to guarantee a small person's best afternoon of the summer. Each night is ticketed separately, so pick your night (or all three). → Full lineup and tickets

🇮🇹 Wells Italian Festival, Sunday — Palace Farm One of the biggest Italian festivals in the South West lands practically on our doorstep, and it's the kind of thing you forget about until you're queuing for a cannolo, wondering why you don't do this every weekend. Food, wine, live music and culture from 12:30pm — a good one for a lazy Sunday that doesn't need much planning. → Details and tickets

🍜 Frome Festival Food Feast, Saturday — Market Yard, Frome Frome's biggest free event of the year returns from 5pm as part of the town's 25th Frome Festival: street food from around the world, live bands including Buffalo Gals and Just4Fun Concert Band, and — genuinely — a giant puppet from Sovereign Nature wandering the crowd. Free to get in, you just pay for what you eat, so it's an easy one to fold into a Saturday evening out. → More info

🏎️ AutoFest UK, Friday to Sunday — Bath & West Showground, Shepton Mallet The Showground's 10th anniversary AutoFest returns for a full weekend of modified cars, the UK's only amateur drift display, high-speed drift passenger rides, indoor Show & Shine and an Inflatable City for the kids. Gates 8:30am–5pm each day, dogs on leads welcome. → Tickets and info

🕳️ Wookey Uncovered, all weekend — Wookey Hole Caves If the weather turns, this is the fallback that doesn't feel like a fallback. Guided tours through the ancient caves and the Victorian papermill keep kids properly entertained rather than just dragged along, and it runs daily right through summer — so no pressure to squeeze it in this particular weekend if Saturday's already spoken for. → Wookey.co.uk

🎻 WOWFest fringe concerts, Fri–Sun — various Wells venues Free classical concerts continue as part of Wells Orchestral Weekend's fringe programme, with young musicians from as far afield as the USA, Brazil and the Netherlands playing at the Cathedral, Cedars Hall and St Cuthbert's. A lovely, low-key hour to fill if you're already in town for the Palace or the Italian Festival. → wellsyouthmusicfest.co.uk

🖼️ Hilliard Society Miniaturists Exhibition, Saturday — Wells Town Hall Worth ten minutes if Saturday brings a shower: a free display of miniature paintings — pencil, watercolour and oil — so small and so detailed you'll be leaning in from a foot away. Free entry, but note it's closed on the Sunday. → wellstownhall.co.uk

Whatever combination you land on, it's a proper busy one this weekend — get out and enjoy it while the sun's out.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

There are, if you stop to think about it, worse ways to spend eternity than singing evensong. Which may be exactly why the choristers of Wells Cathedral appear to have no particular intention of stopping.

For centuries, visitors, vergers and residents of the surrounding cathedral precincts have reported hearing choral singing drifting from the nave when the building is demonstrably empty — the doors locked, the lights out, and every flesh-and-blood chorister safely tucked up in bed at Wells Cathedral School. The voices are said to be faint but unmistakable: a hovering, half-heard Kyrie or Magnificat, gone the moment anyone gets close enough to place it.

The phenomenon has a particular fondness for Vicars' Close, the improbably picturesque medieval street tucked behind the cathedral. On still nights, long-time residents describe "faint choral voices, too distant to locate but clear enough to unsettle" — which is a wonderfully English way of saying the neighbourhood is haunted but nobody wants to make a fuss about it. This is entirely fitting, because Vicars' Close was purpose-built in the 1340s by Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury to house the Vicars Choral: the professional singers whose entire job, in life, was to keep the cathedral's daily round of services going. Housed together, fed together, rehearsed together, and required to be at every service, the Vicars Choral spent their working lives within earshot of the choir stalls. If any ghost has a plausible motive for lingering after death, it is a medieval Vicar Choral wondering whether they can knock off early for once.

The legend has a pleasingly cyclical quality. The living Wells Cathedral Choir is one of the oldest in continuous existence in England, with roots stretching back roughly nine hundred years, so at any given moment, somebody in Wells is almost certainly singing psalms. The phantom choir simply picks up the harmony line whenever the actual choir goes quiet — a sort of celestial understudy who never gets a night off.

Sceptics have offered the usual explanations: the acoustics of a very large Gothic building playing tricks with drafts and pipework; the residual hum of an organ still cooling; the imagination of a verger who has been alone in a thousand-year-old cathedral after dark for slightly too long. And to be fair, the cathedral's stone vaulting is famous for its extraordinary sonic properties, which is precisely why choirs have chosen to sing there for the better part of a millennium.

But it says something rather charming about the character of Wells that its resident ghosts are not chain-rattlers or wailing grey ladies but choristers — polite, tuneful, and apparently keeping perfect time. In a town where the working choir sings evensong nearly every day of the year, the boundary between "cathedral music" and "the sound of the cathedral itself" has arguably worn a little thin. If some of that music has soaked into the stones and now leaks back out at odd hours, one can only conclude that the acoustics are working exactly as Bishop Ralph intended.

The most sensible advice, offered by generations of Wells residents, is this: if you are walking past the west front on a quiet evening and you think you hear the Nunc dimittis floating out through the locked doors, don't investigate. Just tip your hat, hum along if you know the tune, and keep walking. The phantom choir has been rehearsing since before your great-great-great-grandmother was born. They really don't need the notes.

Wells residents have only hours left to register their views on plans for the Budgens petrol station on Bath Road to open around the clock. Somerset Council's Planning Committee East meets on Tuesday 7 July to decide, with Wells City Council and the local ward councillor objecting over noise and light pollution — though planning officers are recommending approval.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

Glastonbury's B&Q has delivered Somerset Council its single biggest profit from a commercial property sale, even as the wider portfolio racked up more than £91m in losses. The site, together with a Costa Coffee unit in Glastonbury and Street Retail Park, was inherited from the old district councils and sold off as part of a wider clear-out. Officials say rental income makes the overall picture healthier than the headline loss suggests.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Nub News)

Glastonbury Abbey Apple Juice has taken the Best in Show title in the apple juice category at the British Cider Championships, held at the Royal Bath & West Show — with the Abbey's cider picking up silver for presentation too. The juice is pressed from apples grown in the Abbey's own orchard, first recorded on site back in the 1330s. It's on sale now from the Abbey Yard Gift Shop & Café.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Abbey)

Street's McDonald's has been closed after its toilets stopped working properly, with customers turned away at the door. The fast food outlet, just off the high street, has given no timeline for reopening — a very British reason for a very inconvenient closure.

Read full story → (Somerset Leveller)

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 3 July 2026

Wells enjoys a settled, sunny start to the weekend, with Friday warm and bright once any early cloud clears. Saturday and Sunday bring plenty of summer sunshine, light winds and temperatures climbing into the mid-20s°C — perfect for the Palace grounds or a market stroll. A more changeable, showery pattern may edge in for parts of next week, so make the most of the sunshine while it lasts.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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