Issue #28 | Thursday 23 July 2026

Good morning, Mendips! The Plandits' Big Bad Wolf prowls into Bishop's Palace this Friday, while Burcott SkaFest and the Glastonbury Symposium both kick off for the weekend.

Shepton Mallet's community is already gearing up to help families with school uniforms in August, and there's a fond farewell to a much-loved Glastonbury councillor too.

📸 The Big Bad Wolf at Bishop's Palace - Today's featured event

📅 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

Village homes plan stalled over A371 safety fears

Glastonbury remembers Alderman John Coles

Shepton Mallet's school uniform giveaway opens

This Ain't Texas rides back into the showground

Wells police step up shoplifting crackdown

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

This Friday (24 July), The Bishop's Palace and Gardens in Wells opens its grounds for an outdoor performance of The Big Bad Wolf, brought to life by local theatre company The Plandits. The show starts at 5.30pm and reimagines the classic fairy tale for the whole family, promenading through the Palace's historic grounds as the story unfolds.

The Bishop's Palace has become something of a summer home for outdoor theatre in the Mendips, its 800-year-old walls and moat providing a dramatic backdrop for touring companies each year. The Plandits are known locally for playful, family-friendly retellings that mix classic storytelling with plenty of audience participation — expect younger visitors to get pulled into the action.

Tickets are £16 for adults, £12 for children and £50 for a family of four. It's a good excuse to make an evening of it — the Palace gardens and Dragon's Lair play area stay open beforehand, and the Mythical Creatures trail through Wells Cathedral is just a short walk away if you fancy combining the two.

→ Full details and tickets at bishopspalace.org.uk

Next time you're strolling across the Mendip plateau admiring a cow, spare a thought for what's going on directly beneath your walking boots. You are, in the most literal sense, on top of Britain's biggest underground river system — and a good deal more besides.

The recipe is simple. Take one slab of 340-million-year-old Carboniferous limestone. Sit it on a bed of even older red sandstone. Pour Somerset rain over the top for a few million years. The rain, ever so slightly acidic, dribbles off the sandstone summits, hits the limestone, and disappears down a "swallet" — or, if you're a local of a certain vintage, a "slocker."

From there it gets to work quietly gnawing out passages, chambers and sumps until it re-emerges, blinking, at Cheddar or Wookey Hole. Some water takes a fortnight to travel ten miles. The Cheddar Yeo, which rises inside Gough's Cave, drains a full 54 square kilometres of hill.

The numbers are dizzying. Swildon's Hole at Priddy is over nine kilometres long. St Cuthbert's Swallet is a spaghetti-tangle of six-and-a-half. Charterhouse Cave plunges to 205 metres, making it the fourth-deepest in England. Wookey Hole's terminal sump is the deepest in Britain at 90 metres. And Reservoir Hole, above Cheddar Gorge, recently coughed up "the Frozen Deep" — believed to be the largest chamber under the whole massif. Cavers are still finding new bits every year; on a busy weekend, more than 500 of them are down there rummaging.

Humans have been fond of these holes for a very long time. Neanderthals were knapping flints in Wookey's Hyaena Den 45,000 years ago. Gough's Cave gave us Cheddar Man — Britain's oldest complete skeleton at 9,000 years old — plus a rather charming 13,000-year-old mammoth engraving and the somewhat less charming discovery that our Palaeolithic ancestors were enthusiastic cannibals who fashioned drinking cups from their neighbours' skulls. Nice!

An Iron Age woman's skeleton found at Wookey with a polished alabaster ball is generally fingered as the original Witch of Wookey Hole, and 16th-century locals were sufficiently spooked to scratch protective "witch marks" onto the cave walls.

Then came the Romans, who swooped in barely six years after landing in Britain and started mining Mendip lead at Charterhouse on an industrial scale. When Pompeii was excavated, some of the pipework turned out to have come from a Somerset hillside. Not bad for a day's work.

What of the ground above? The plateau is classic karst — meaning "gruffy ground" from old lead workings, occasional new sinkholes appearing in fields, and a lot of protected SSSIs. It also means astonishingly pure spring water for our taps.

And the modern exploitation? Half a million tourists a year visit Cheddar Gorge, cave-diving as a sport was invented here in 1934, and — the bit that matters — Gough's Cave, at a constant 11°C and 98% humidity, is once again ageing proper cloth-bound Cheddar cheese, exactly as it did in the twelfth century.

So yes: mammoths, murder, monks, molten lead and mature cheddar. All under one hill.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

Somerset councillors have deferred a decision on plans for up to 60 homes at Westbury-sub-Mendip for the second time, calling for an independent assessment of pedestrian safety across the busy A371. The scheme has drawn 57 letters of objection over road safety, ecology and drainage. A decision is now expected once the safety review is complete, within six months.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

Glastonbury Town Council paused for a minute's silence and lit the unity candle in memory of former mayor and firefighter John Coles, who served the town for around 40 years. Councillors recalled his love of trains, his allotment and his devotion to the community; the flag at the Town Hall has flown at half-mast. His funeral takes place at St John's Church on Friday 31 July, with mourners asked to wear something yellow.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Nub News)

Shepton Waste Action Group is running a free school uniform and supplies giveaway on Saturday 8 August, with donation points now open at the Town Council office and Art Bank on the High Street. Families of children at St Paul's, Shepton Infants, Whitstone and several other local schools will be able to collect items from two High Street venues. The final day for donations is Friday 7 August.

Read full story → (Shepton Mallet Nub News)

The Bath & West Showground has confirmed its country-and-western festival This Ain't Texas returns on Saturday 26 September, with live tribute acts, line dancing, American BBQ and street food, whiskey stalls and axe throwing. It's a family-friendly day out with fancy dress encouraged — think Stetsons rather than swimwear for late summer in Shepton Mallet.

Read full story → (Bath & West Showground)

Wells' Neighbourhood Policing Team has named the High Street a priority hotspot for repeat shoplifting, stepping up high-visibility patrols by officers and Special Constables and deploying extra staff under the Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee. CCTV is playing a growing role too, with recent enquiries already leading to several positive identifications of offenders. Police say the crackdown is about protecting traders and staff who deal with the problem day after day, and are encouraging anyone with concerns or information to come forward.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 23 July 2026

It's a glorious dry spell across the Mendips this week. Thursday brings sunny intervals up to 27°C, with Friday turning properly sunny and warm at 26°C — ideal for The Plandits' outdoor stage at Bishop's Palace. The weekend cools slightly with some light cloud around 22°C, before sunshine returns for a warm 24°C on Monday.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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