Issue #26 | Tuesday 21 July 2026

Good morning, Mendips! The Burcott Inn in Wookey turns into a ska and reggae paradise this weekend as SkaFest returns for its third year, with the Glastonbury Symposium and some open-air fairy-tale theatre at Bishop's Palace also landing in the diary. Elsewhere, Wells Tennis Club has lodged plans for a new pavilion and Shepton Mallet's Amulet Theatre stays on the nation's at-risk list.

🎪 Burcott SkaFest - Today's featured event

📅 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

Wells Tennis Club serves up new pavilion plan

Godney Gathering to leave its Somerset home

Shepton's Amulet stays on theatre risk list

Wells Beer Fest returns for a third year

Storytellers gather for tea, cake and tales at Rock Farm

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

The Burcott Inn in Wookey turns its paddock into a three-day ska and reggae weekend from Friday, with six live acts across Friday and Saturday and a relaxed family fun day to close things out on Sunday. Every ticket comes with a limited-edition "Ska in the Paddock" beer mug, and campervan pitches are available in the paddock for those who want to make a proper weekend of it.

Now in its third year, SkaFest has grown from a single evening into a full weekend fixture for the pub, which sits in the countryside just outside Wells. Friday night opens with live music and "Skabba", Saturday brings The Decatonics and "Skacasam", and Sunday winds down with open mic and entertainment for the children.

It's a busy weekend across the hills more generally — the Glastonbury Symposium also gets underway on Friday at Glastonbury Town Hall, and The Big Bad Wolf brings open-air theatre to the Bishop's Palace the same evening (see In Other News below). Camping space at the Burcott Inn is limited and first come, first served, so it's worth booking ahead.

→ Full details and tickets at burcottinn.co.uk

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Ever driven the back roads between Glastonbury and Street and wondered why that hedge takes such a peculiar wiggle? According to one determined Edwardian sculptress, you weren't just looking at a hedge — you were looking at the eyebrow of a giant lion, part of a 30-mile-wide star map that our Somerset ancestors supposedly carved into the very earth we potter about on every day.

The tale begins in 1925 with Katherine Maltwood, a sculptor and self-described mystic who'd been hired to draw a map tracing the adventures of King Arthur's knights through the Vale of Avalon.

Poring over the newfangled aerial photographs of the area (courtesy of the RAF, no less), she spotted something odd near Somerton: the River Cary seemed to trace the unmistakable curve of a lion's back. "I shall never forget my utter amazement," she later wrote, convinced she'd stumbled on the actual Leo of the zodiac, hiding in plain sight in the Somerset Levels.

One giant beast led to another. Soon Maltwood was finding a dragon, a griffin, a phoenix and eventually all twelve signs of the zodiac, each one sprawling for two or three miles across the landscape, formed from riverbanks, old droveways, field boundaries and earthworks. She published her findings as "A Guide to Glastonbury's Temple of the Stars" in 1929, and doubled down with a fuller book in 1935.

Maltwood didn't stop at "interesting coincidence." She decided the whole 30-mile temple had been laid out around 2700 BC, possibly by Sumerian or Chaldean star-worshippers, as a giant astrological calendar mapped onto the ground.

Then she connected it to home-grown legend: the knights of the Round Table, she argued, weren't just chasing the Holy Grail across Somerset, they were symbolically re-enacting a battle with the star-gods themselves — Lancelot as Leo the Lion, Arthur as Hercules the sun-god, Gawain as the Ram.

It's the kind of theory that makes you look twice at every roundabout on the way to Sainsbury's.

Sadly for star-gazers, when actual landscape historians got their boots muddy, the zodiac didn't hold up terribly well. Studies by Ian Burrow in 1975 and by Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy in 1983 went looking for Maltwood's ancient earthworks and mostly found much younger, much more mundane explanations.

Capricorn's "eye" turned out to be a haystack. The wing of the Aquarius phoenix was a perfectly ordinary road built in 1782, with old maps showing nothing in that spot before it. The famous Cancer "boat" (a boat, not a crab — already a bit suspicious for a zodiac) is just a tangle of 18th-century drainage ditches.

Archaeologist Philip Rahtz summed it up neatly, calling the whole thing a Rorschach test: you see a lion or a phoenix roughly in proportion to how much you already want to.

Not entirely worthless nonsense, mind you — it's wonderfully entertaining nonsense, and it's given Glastonbury one more layer of magic to sit alongside the Tor and the Grail legends. Even skeptics admit there's something rather lovely about squinting at a map of the Levels and letting your imagination do the rest. So next time you're stuck behind a tractor on a lane near Butleigh, feel free to imagine you're crossing the flank of a two-mile-long stone-age lion. Just don't tell the county archaeologist

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

Wells Tennis Club has applied to replace its pavilion at the Athletic Ground on Rowdens Road with a new single-storey building, including a clubroom, refreshment facilities and improved changing rooms. The club has already raised more than £100,000 towards a £150,000 target, with the new building designed to improve accessibility and shelter for junior coaching and visiting teams.

Read full story → (Somerset Leveller)

The Sheep & Penguin's Wells Beer Fest is back for a third year on Friday 31 July and Saturday 1 August, with more than 40 craft beers from local and regional breweries alongside street food and live music. General admission is £20, with Brewer's tickets and a festival bundle also on sale via Eventbrite.

Read full story → (Wells Beer Fest)

Shepton Mallet's Amulet Theatre has again been named on the national Theatres at Risk Register, one of 39 venues highlighted by the Theatres Trust in 2026. The Brutalist building has been closed as a performance venue since 2011, but the Let's Buy the Amulet campaign has already hit its share-offer fundraising target and secured 400 donated seats for a hoped-for reopening.

Read full story → (Shepton Mallet Nub News)

The Plandits bring their open-air production of The Big Bad Wolf to the grounds of Bishop's Palace this Friday evening, with the moated medieval setting doubling as a fairy-tale forest for the night. It's a family-friendly start (5.30pm) to what's shaping up to be a packed weekend across the Mendips.

Read full story → (Bishop's Palace)

The Mendip Storytellers hold their summer gathering at Rock Farm near Shepton Mallet on Saturday afternoon, continuing a local storytelling tradition with tea and cake laid on alongside the tales. It's a relaxed, family-friendly afternoon and a good excuse to get out to the farm.

Read full story → (Mendip Storytellers)

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 21 July 2026

It's another warm, largely dry week across the Mendips, with temperatures widely in the low-to-mid 20s°C by day and dropping into the mid-teens overnight. Expect a good deal of sunshine through midweek, with a slightly fresher, cloudier spell possible by the weekend — still comfortable for anything al fresco.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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