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Issue #29 | Friday 24 July 2026

Good morning, Mendips! Big Bad Wolf, Burcott SkaFest, the Glastonbury Symposium and Glastonbury Pride have all had their moment in the Mendiplodocus spotlight this week — so today we're putting Rock Farm's Mendip Storytellers gathering front and centre instead, tea, cake and all. Elsewhere, police have cracked down on rural crime across the Mendips and Street Fire Station has announced a September open day for the whole community.

🎉 What Shall We Do For The Weekend? - this week's quieter pick, plus the big stuff too

Close encounters of the Mendip kind.

📅 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

Rural crime crackdown nets arrest across the Mendips

Street Fire Station opens its doors for a September open day

Wells Beer Fest taps up a third year

History Alive brings the Blitz to Bishop's Palace

Henton Village Hall hosts young singers
🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

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Big Bad Wolf, Burcott SkaFest, the Glastonbury Symposium and Glastonbury Pride have all already had their turn in the Mendiplodocus spotlight this week. So if you've had your fill of loud and busy, here's a different kind of Saturday.

📖 Mendip Storytellers Summer Event — Saturday, 2pm-5pm, Rock Farm, Windsor Hill Lane, Shepton Mallet. No stages, no ticket queues, no crowds — just tea, cake and the county's oldest tradition: telling a good tale. It's easy to overlook next to the big festivals, but it might be exactly the unhurried afternoon you fancy after a busy week. Turn up, settle in, and let someone else do the entertaining for a change.
→ More at mendipstorytcircle.com

Still fancy something bigger? All four of this week's headline acts are still on:

🐺 The Big Bad Wolf – The Plandits — Friday, Bishop's Palace, Wells. Gates 4.45pm, curtain up 5.30pm for the rock 'n' roll fairytale mash-up on the South Lawn.
→ Tickets at bishopspalace.org.uk

🎷 Burcott SkaFest 2026 — Friday to Sunday, The Burcott Inn, Wookey. Three days of ska and reggae in the beer garden.
→ Full line-up at burcottinn.co.uk

🔮 The Glastonbury Symposium — Friday to Sunday, Glastonbury Town Hall. Talks on ancient mysteries and consciousness, now in its 36th year.
→ Tickets at glastonburysymposium.co.uk

🏳️‍🌈 Glastonbury Pride 2026 — Sunday, Tor Leisure. Music, performances and a parade in Pride's bigger new home.
→ More at glastonburypride.co.uk

👻 Ghost Walk of Wells — Sunday evening, meeting point in the town centre. A guided wander through Wells' darker history, running again on 30 July too.
→ Details at wellssomerset.com

Big or quiet, loud or low-key — there's a Mendips weekend for everyone. Enjoy it.

If you glance up at the skies over Glastonbury this weekend, as the Glastonbury Symposium gathers to debate the strange and the unexplained, you are far from the first to wonder whether something might be watching back.

Glastonbury has long traded in mystery – Arthurian graves, holy relics, crop circles and ley lines – so it is no surprise that unidentified flying objects now join the list. Avon and Somerset Police figures from the 2000s showed dozens of calls in just a few years reporting “alien events” in the Glastonbury area, from bright orange balls of light to stranger personal claims.

More recent round‑ups by UFO research groups and local media add discs and moving light formations over Glastonbury and nearby Shepton Mallet to the catalogue.

Some of the most colourful stories centre on the Glastonbury Festival at Pilton. When declassified Ministry of Defence UFO files were released, one case that hit the headlines was from two festival‑goers at the 1994 event who claimed to see a silent, circular craft hovering over the jazz tent. The witness described a “twirling set of moving lights” attached to a circular object that seemed to communicate through its flashing patterns and glided away with uncanny smoothness.

Later reports spoke of mysterious lights over the Pyramid Stage in 2003 during headline sets, though sceptics pointed to Chinese lanterns and stage effects as likely culprits.

Recent reports paint a varied picture of aerial phenomena around Glastonbury: dull red discs apparently pacing an airliner without sound, star‑like points that suddenly shift direction, and slow‑moving “tic‑tac” shapes in the Somerset skies.

Nationally, almost half of reported sightings now come with photos or video, and many use the same language – orbs, spheres, cylinders – that has become familiar from US Navy “UAP” accounts. None of this proves extraterrestrials, but it does make the easy shrug harder for some observers.

So what is actually going on? Sceptics note that many sightings happen in visually noisy environments: festival light shows, drones, aircraft, lanterns, atmospheric effects – sometimes viewed by tired or intoxicated people. The Ministry of Defence itself eventually shut down its UFO investigations, saying that despite thousands of reports it had no solid evidence of alien craft and more pressing priorities.

Yet the tone of the debate has shifted. A growing number of pilots, military personnel, scientists and technically literate witnesses do not insist that “aliens are here”, but argue that a small fraction of cases behave as if under intelligent control and defy simple explanations.

In that sense, Glastonbury is a laboratory for our attitudes to the unknown. It is exactly the sort of place – with lasers, lanterns, ley lines and a love of myth – where you would expect mundane lights to be misread as something cosmic. But the same openness that makes the town a magnet for mystics and free thinkers also means people actually watch the sky, document what they see and are willing to talk about it.

As delegates at the Glastonbury Symposium trade slides and stories this weekend, the most honest position may be neither blanket belief nor smug dismissal. The UFOs of Glastonbury – from festival “saucers” to quiet discs over the Levels – remind us that our skies still hold puzzles, and that how we respond to those puzzles reveals as much about us as it does about whatever is, or is not, up there.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

Police recovered a stolen horse trailer, seized three vehicles and made an arrest during a rural crime operation across Priddy, the Mineries, Blackdown and Wavering Down. Avon and Somerset Police worked with Mendip Hills National Landscape rangers, checking 87 vehicles after community tip-offs flagged an untaxed vehicle towing the stolen trailer. Officers are urging residents to keep reporting anything that looks out of place.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

Street Fire Station will throw open its doors on Cranhill Road on Saturday, 19 September, from noon to 4pm, giving residents the chance to meet the crew and look around the appliance. The local Neighbourhood Policing Team is also set to attend, making it a joint chance to talk fire safety, crime prevention and community concerns. It's the kind of open day that's worth popping in the diary early, even though it's still a couple of months off.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Nub News)

Wells Beer Fest returns to The Sheep & Penguin on Friday 31 July and Saturday 1 August, with more than 40 craft beers from local and regional breweries, street food and live music across two days. General admission is £20 including a festival cup, with Brewer's and Bundle tickets also on sale.

Read full story → (wellsbeerfest.co.uk)

The Palace grounds go back to the 1940s on Saturday 1 and Sunday 2 August, as History Alive: Britain at War brings WW2 re-enactors, vehicles and displays to Wells. It's included with standard admission, so it's an easy add-on to a normal day out at the Palace.

Read full story → (bishopspalace.org.uk)

Henton Village Hall, just outside Wells, throws open its doors on Saturday for singing workshops aimed at four to 18-year-olds. It's a small, homegrown addition to the summer holiday diary — the kind of thing that keeps a village hall earning its keep.

Read full story → (Facebook event)

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 24 July 2026

High pressure looks to hold across the south for the start of the weekend, with warm, mostly dry spells for Friday and Saturday. It turns more changeable into next week, with an increasing chance of showers and temperatures staying above average for the time of year — so a hat for the sun and a brolly in the bag isn't a bad shout.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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