Issue #19 | Monday 13 July 2026

Good morning, Mendips! Wells Cathedral turns candlelit concert hall this Thursday as Queen's greatest hits fill the nave — and Westlife gets the same treatment three days later. Add a proper heatwave settling in, the Godney Gathering warming up for the weekend, and 28 local jobs up for grabs, and there's plenty to get through before Friday. Let's get into it.

🎻 Featured Event — Queen by Candlelight at Wells Cathedral
📅 What's On This Week — day by day, all week, and coming up
🎬 This Week at Wells Film Centre
📰 In Other News
🌡️ Weather

Wells Cathedral turns candlelit concert venue this Thursday 16 July at 7:30pm, when a live band and vocalists take on Queen's greatest hits beneath the nave's soaring stone arches. Expect "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Don't Stop Me Now" and "We Are The Champions" reimagined by candlelight — a setting about as far from Wembley Stadium as you can get, and arguably better for it.

It's part of a bumper week for the cathedral, which hosts The Music of Westlife by Candlelight the following Friday (17 July) and is running its Mythical Creatures Trail for families throughout the summer holidays (see All Week, below).

Doors typically open around an hour before curtain, and past candlelight concerts here have sold well in advance — so if you're tempted, don't leave it to the last minute.

→ Tickets & full details

The diary is a little thin around midweek this week. Could be the summer lull - but if you know of a notable event we should include Please let us know all about it here.

Click to Promote your event.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

July 13–20 — a week that's never been boring around here

If you think nothing much ever happens in Somerset, think again. The third week of July has — over the centuries — served up a rebellion, a beheading, a biblical flood, and a sparkling perry that conquered the nation. Not bad for a corner of England that most people associate mainly with cider and cathedrals.

Let's start with the dramatics.

In the summer of 1685, the rather optimistic Duke of Monmouth decided to overthrow his uncle, King James II. His plan involved landing at Lyme Regis with a small army of West Country farmers — mostly armed with pitchforks — and marching through Somerset gathering support. It was not, historians agree, a well-considered scheme.

His rebel army tramped through Shepton Mallet and arrived in Wells on 1st July, where the men helped themselves to the lead on the roof of Wells Cathedral to melt down for bullets, stabled their horses in the nave, and smashed the organ for good measure. Glastonbury got similar treatment. Whatever you think of the Monmouth Rebellion, it was extremely hard on church furniture.

The whole enterprise fell apart spectacularly at the Battle of Sedgemoor on the night of 5–6 July — the last pitched battle fought on English soil. Monmouth fled and was found hiding in a ditch in Hampshire, disguised as a peasant. On 15 July 1685, he was beheaded on Tower Hill. It took five blows of the axe. History does not record who was more distressed about this — Monmouth, or the axeman.

Back in Somerset, militia units were passing back through Wells and Glastonbury during this very week, hanging rebel prisoners as they went. Worse was to come in the autumn, when Judge Jeffreys arrived for the Bloody Assizes and sent hundreds more to the gallows or the sugar plantations of Barbados. The Mendips had seen better summers.

Rewind forty years, and things were similarly lively.

On 10 July 1645, the Battle of Langport — just south of the Mendips — handed Parliament control of the entire West Country. Parliamentarian troops then occupied Wells and, in the spirit of religious reform, proceeded to use the cathedral's medieval statues for musket practice. Wells Cathedral has been having a rough time of it, historically speaking.

Fast forward to 10 July 1968.

A summer storm of almost biblical ferocity hit the Chew Valley, dropping nearly seven inches of rain in six hours. The River Chew became a wall of water. Bridges at Pensford and Keynsham were swept away. Eighty-eight homes in Chew Magna were under eight feet of water. Down at Cheddar, boulders rolled through the gorge and the caves flooded for three days. Eight people lost their lives. Those who lived through it never quite looked at a rainy evening the same way again.

And on a considerably cheerier note — Shepton Mallet gave the world Babycham, the first alcoholic drink ever advertised on British television. The fizzy perry in the tiny bottle, with the little deer, invented by the Showerings family just up the road. A small comfort, perhaps, after all of the above.

History around here: never dull.

Somerset Council is consulting on its first change to maximum taxi fares since May 2024, proposing a 10% rise in distance and waiting-time charges to reflect fuel costs and inflation. The first mile would rise from £4.60 to £5.06, with every extra tenth of a mile going from 30p to 33p. A new discretionary £10 booking fee is also proposed, aimed at encouraging drivers to take on rural pickups — including runs out to Mendip villages that can mean a long dead-mileage drive for not much fare. Objections can be lodged until 19 July.

→ Full story

Opposition Conservatives told Somerset Council's Executive, meeting in Taunton on 1 July, that the authority's commercial property losses would have been enough to repair around 65,000 potholes. Figures published ahead of the council's audit committee in late May showed a total loss to date of £91.85m on the sale of 28 of the 48 commercial investments inherited from the former district councils. It's the kind of number that lands hard in a corner of the county where plenty of residents can point to a pothole or two on their own road.

→ Full story

From a Learning and Development Specialist at Clarks in Street to HGV driving work out of Shepton Mallet and three separate care roles at Crandon Springs in Wells, this week's local jobs round-up runs to 28 vacancies. There's also a paralegal role in Wells, laboratory work near the city for a dairy-testing firm, and enough driving jobs — Class 1, Class 2, day and night — to make the A371 feel like rush hour.

→ See all 28 jobs

Somerset Council has confirmed its Council Tax Reduction scheme for 2026-27, keeping the existing structure in place but uprating income band thresholds by 3.8% in line with September's CPI rate — the same uplift applied to most state benefits. The change is designed to hold the value of the discount steady in real terms. Councillors also flagged support through the means-tested Exceptional Hardship Fund for anyone who loses an automatic 100% discount while transitioning onto Universal Credit. A wider review of the scheme is planned for later in 2026-27.

→ Full report

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 13 July 2026

A proper heatwave settles over the Mendips this week. Expect wall-to-wall sunshine and daytime highs climbing from 28°C on Monday to a peak of around 30°C on Tuesday and Thursday, easing back to a still-warm 27°C by Friday. Overnight lows stay mild, in the mid-to-high teens, and pollen counts are running high to very high for hay fever sufferers. Rain chances stay low through the week but creep up by Friday afternoon (around 40%) as things turn a touch more unsettled heading into the weekend — so make the most of the sunshine while it lasts, and keep the sun cream topped up.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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