Issue #27 | Wednesday 22 July 2026

Good morning, Mendips! Glastonbury gears up for its biggest Pride yet this Sunday, with a march, dog show and afterparty all planned.

Elsewhere this week: ska hits Wookey, the Symposium returns to Glastonbury Town Hall, and Wells United Church is dishing up free summer lunches for anyone who needs one.

📸 Glastonbury Pride 2026 - Today's featured event

Shepton Mallet Prison - from hell to tourist attraction

📅 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

New bus link ties Glastonbury and Street to the trains

MP calls for fire ponds to fight wildfire risk

Wells church to serve free summer lunches

Somerset Chamber Choir lights up Wells Cathedral

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

Glastonbury Pride returns this Sunday, 26 July, with a full day of music, performances, family activities and a march through the town. The main programme runs at Tor Sports and Leisure from 10am to 4pm, alongside events at venues right across Glastonbury — from a drag brunch at The Queen of Cups to karaoke on the terrace at The Riflemans.

This year's Pride builds on 2025's success with more games, more accessibility and more community links. The main stage opens with the mayor and town crier at 10am, breaks for the march from 1pm to 2.30pm, and rounds off with a dog show hosted by Penny Drops — prizes going to best costume and waggiest tail. Sarah Dyke MP is due on stage at 1pm before the procession sets off from the Town Hall.

The march runs from Market Cross up the High Street and down to the White Spring, with Samba Di Bispo providing the beats. Expect road closures on Chilkwell Street between 1pm and 2pm, with the best viewing along the High Street near St John's Church. The day wraps up with the ticketed Rainbow Vespers afterparty at the King Arthur from 8pm — over-16s only.

→ Full details at glastonburypride.co.uk

If buildings could gossip, the honey-coloured walls on Cornhill would never shut up. Shepton Mallet Prison, Britain's oldest, spent nearly four hundred years listening to the country's problems before finally clocking off in 2013 — and it has quite a tale to tell.

It all began politely enough. Following the Bridewell Act of 1610, Somerset's magistrates bought Cornhill House and an acre of land from a local reverend for £160, opening the doors in 1625 under a governor with the marvellous name of George Sheephaye. The plan was a modest house of correction for the county's more disorderly citizens. The reality, sadly, was rather grimmer: men, women and children were bundled in together, sanitation was ambitious at best, and gaol fever did the rest.

By 1773, the pioneering reformer John Howard toured the place and was appalled, writing that inmates went in healthy and came out "emaciated, dejected objects," according to The Telegraph's history of the prison. Reforms trickled in. So, less helpfully, did a treadwheel in 1823, powered by up to forty men at a time and reportedly rough enough to cause internal ruptures. Somerset, it seems, took its bread-making seriously.

The Victorian era brought judicial hangings from 1889, ending with the execution of John Lincoln in 1926, per Capital Punishment UK. Then came the prison's oddest chapter. In 1939, roughly 300 tons of the nation's most treasured documents — the Domesday Book, HMS Victory's logbooks, the Olive Branch Petition, Waterloo dispatches — were quietly evacuated from London and tucked into the women's wing for safekeeping, according to The National Archives. For a few remarkable years, Shepton Mallet was arguably the most historically valuable building in Britain.

In 1942 the Americans arrived, renaming it the 2912th Disciplinary Training Center. Between 1943 and 1945 eighteen U.S. servicemen were executed here, including the only two American military firing-squad executions carried out in Europe during the war, as documented by Somerset Live. The purpose-built brick execution block still stands, a sobering brick full-stop to a sobering paragraph.

After the war the prison settled into a quieter life as a military detention centre, then a Category C men's prison, before finally closing its gates in March 2013. And here is where the story turns.

Today, those same walls that once held the frightened, the forgotten and the Domesday Book welcome visitors, ghost-hunters, school groups and history nerds through the heritage attraction that now occupies the site. The cells are open, the stories are told honestly, and the wagon-roofed church of St Peter and St Paul next door carries on ringing its bells as it has since long before the first prisoner arrived.

Four hundred years of hard lessons — and, at last, a building that has swapped keys for guided tours. Not a bad ending.

Fallible
Something that is likely to fall over.

Fanatic
To waft air over a very small insect.

Fantasy
A bit like an orange fizzy drink.

Farthing
Something a long way off.

Farthingale
A strong wind that's a long way off.

Fauna
A whirlpool bath for young deer.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

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A new 567 bus service linking Glastonbury and Street to trains at Castle Cary launches on 3 August, running seven days a week. It ties in with the existing 667 service and connects to London, Exeter, Plymouth, Salisbury and beyond, with a Somerton Slinky link planned for Somerton and Langport too.

Read full story → (Somerset Leveller)

Glastonbury and Somerton MP Sarah Dyke is urging the Government to fund fire ponds for farmers and rural communities after a spate of Somerset wildfires, including one near Ilminster this month. She wants the ponds recognised in the national Farming Roadmap 2050 as a low-cost way to give fire crews vital water access when it counts.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Nub News)

Wells United Church is offering free lunches at Seager Hall on Thursdays throughout the school summer holidays, with children's activities and family support also on hand. Sessions run from noon to 2pm on 24 and 31 July, then 7, 14, 21 and 28 August — open to anyone who fancies a healthy meal and good company.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

Somerset Chamber Choir brings its Sacred Shadows programme to Wells Cathedral on Saturday 1 August at 7pm, an evening of choral music beneath the candlelit nave. It's worth booking early for one of the cathedral's most atmospheric summer concerts.

Read full story → (TicketSource)

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 22 July 2026

A gorgeous run of sunshine settles over the Mendips this week, with highs of 26°C on Wednesday and Friday and light breezes throughout. It turns breezier for the weekend, with a spell of drizzle likely on Sunday as Glastonbury Pride gets underway — worth packing a light layer just in case.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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