Issue #31 | Monday 27 July 2026

Good morning, Mendips! We're gearing up for the Wells Beer Festival this Friday and Saturday at The Sheep & Penguin — full details below. Elsewhere this week:

Strode Theatre's summer school opens its doors to young performers in Street, a touring magic show lands at The Mill in Wells on Wednesday, Wells & Mendip Museum has thrown open its doors for the school holidays, and over in Glastonbury the 31st annual Goddess Conference gets underway on Tuesday for a six-day celebration across the town. Let's get into it.

📸 Wells Beer Festival 2026 - Today's featured event

The Lost Village of Moreton

📅 What's On This Week — across the Mendips

Housing maps show where land is being eyed for new homes

Library of Avalon flood clean-up gathers pace

Summer Sundays open at Wells & Mendip Museum for the school holidays

Strode Theatre's summer school brings young performers to Street

🌸 Glastonbury Goddess Conference — 31st annual gathering begins Tuesday

🌡️ Weather — Wells BA5 forecast

Wells Beer Festival returns for its third year this Friday and Saturday at The Sheep & Penguin, with over 40 craft beers from local and regional breweries lined up alongside street food and live music across the two days.

The festival has quickly become one of the Mendips' favourite summer fixtures, growing bigger each year since it launched. Expect a proper mix of styles on the bar — from Somerset session ales to punchier regional craft brews — and a lively, festival-tent atmosphere in the pub garden.

Doors open Friday from 3pm to 10pm and Saturday from midday to 10pm. General admission is £20 (including a festival cup), with brewer's tickets and weekend bundles also available if you want to make a proper weekend of it.

→ Tickets and full details at wellsbeerfest.co.uk

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Drive past Chew Valley Lake on a sunny afternoon and you're looking at 20 billion litres of Bristol's morning cuppa — and, if you know where to squint, the ghost of a Somerset hamlet that once lived down there.

Moreton (spelled "More" in the Domesday Book of 1086) sat quietly in the Chew Valley for the best part of a thousand years. By the early 1900s it was fifteen houses, a manor, a mill, orchards of apples, pears and plums, a medieval chapel, and rather a lot of pigs. Then Bristol got thirsty. Parliament said yes in 1939, the diggers arrived in 1950, and by 1956 the whole valley was under the drink — 5,000 trees and 70 miles of hedgerow cleared before the tap was turned on.

Moreton's most exciting export was, briefly, the ability to blow things up. An 18th-century gunpowder mill operated there, one of a small cluster of Somerset powder works alongside Woolley near Bath and the much larger Littleton mill up the road at Winford (Bath History

A note for anyone who's heard the tale of poor Joseph Gaskell being killed in an explosion here: I've combed parish memorials, industrial archaeology journals and Bath's gunpowder histories, and I can't find him. The best-documented Chew Valley bang was in March 1786, when a workman at the neighbouring Littleton mill drove an iron wedge, struck a spark, and blew the place sky-high. He died of his burns; his wife survived hers. The gunpowder-and-tragedy story is real — the name may have wandered a mile down the lane over the years. If any reader has the source, do write in.

Every dry summer, someone swears they've seen the spire of Moreton's church poking through the water like a sunken submarine. It's a lovely image. It's also, sadly, nonsense.

Moreton had a medieval chapel, not a great spired church, and the buildings were demolished before flooding. The tower-in-the-water legend appears to have drifted west from Derwent village in the Peak District, where a real church tower did stick out of Ladybower Reservoir until 1947. Bristol Water's own manager Cade told the BBC plainly: "I have never encountered the church spire that is said to be submerged." Verdict: charming legend, but a legend.

Genuinely, though — during the droughts of 2022 and 2025, when levels dropped below 40%, walkers spotted the old humpback bridge at Ben Bridge, stretches of ancient road, hedge lines and tree stumps re-emerging from the mud like the valley clearing its throat.

Before the flood, archaeologists rescued Roman writing tablets (now at Bristol Museum), Bronze Age flints, a mace-head, and evidence of the medieval Nunnery of Santa Cruz. Stratford Mill was dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt at Blaise Castle — probably the only building in Somerset to have moved house on its own. And the Moreton Cross stands today in Chew Stoke churchyard, a small stone survivor with a very wet backstory.

So next time the lake looks low, take a wander. Moreton is still down there — just not, alas, ringing its bells.

→ Full listings and booking at Wells Film Centre

New land availability assessments published as part of the district's local plan work map out sites across the Wells and Mendip area being considered for future housing development. The maps don't commit to any scheme going ahead, but give residents an early look at where planners are weighing up options.

Read full story → (Wells Nub News)

Volunteers at Glastonbury's Library of Avalon have been working through the week to dry out shelves and restock books after recent flooding affected the building. The community has rallied with donations and cleaning help as the library aims to get back to normal opening hours soon.

Read full story → (Glastonbury Nub News)

Wells & Mendip Museum on Cathedral Green is opening every Sunday through the school holidays, giving families the chance to meet a Jurassic sea monster, step into a WWI trench and explore the walled garden. Doors are open 10am–4pm, with adult tickets at £6 and a family ticket at just £12.

Read full story → (Wells & Mendip Museum)

Strode Theatre's four-day summer school opens today, giving 7 to 14-year-olds a taste of different types of performance across the week. It runs through to Thursday, wrapping up with the young performers putting what they've learned into practice.

Read full story → (Strode Theatre)

🌡️ Wells BA5 Weather — Week of 27 July 2026

It's a typically mixed late-July week for the Mendips — expect a fair bit of sunshine mixed with cloud, highs in the high teens to low twenties, and a slim chance of a shower midweek. Things look set to brighten up nicely for the weekend, which is good news for anyone heading to the Beer Festival on Friday and Saturday.

→ Full 7-day forecast on BBC Weather

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