Somerset's Polden hills divide the county's central marshlands, Sedgemoor to the south and the Brue Valley to the north. Traces of human activity there include wooden trackways built across those marshes six thousand years ago. Most of the written sources tell the story of men from settlements on the nearby hills or isolated 'islands' who looked to those low-lying lands for food and fuel for themselves and food for their stock. Those sources, dating from the late Saxon period and particularly rich in the middle ages, derive largely from the archives of the former abbey of Glastonbury, main...
Somerset's Polden hills divide the county's central marshlands, Sedgemoor to the south and the Brue Valley to the north. Traces of human activity ther...
THE VOLUME relates the history of the south-east corner of Somerset. The area comprises the outliers of Salisbury Plain on the east and part of a clay vale to the west. It included a natural route followed by the two principal roads from London to Exeter and by the railway. Of the towns, Milborne Port and Wincanton each owed its prosperity to one of those roads. Bruton and Milborne Port were royal urban centres in the late 11th century, both centres of minster parishes. Milborne Port, a borough in 1086, returned members to parliament for some years from 1298; at Wincanton a borough had been...
THE VOLUME relates the history of the south-east corner of Somerset. The area comprises the outliers of Salisbury Plain on the east and part of a clay...
