ARCHIVE: LEVELS 101 – GLASTONBURY, FAR AWAY TO THE EAST

Looking eastwards across Tealham Moor at sunrise.  A rough track is just visible up to the left of the water-filled ditch which, known locally as a rhyne (rhymes with seen), acts as a field’s fence.

The deep water and glutinous ooze in these ditches are notorious for trapping cattle that come down to the edge to drink and, as happened recently near here, for causing road traffic fatalities where these rhynes run beside poorly maintained, single track, tarmac roads that are often driven over at high speeds.

And in the distance, far off at upper right, the distinctive outline of Glastonbury Tor, with the tower of its ruined church on its summit.

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Technique: Z 6 with 70-300 Nikkor lens at 70mm; 1600 ISO; Lightroom, using the Camera Vivid V2 picture control; Tealham Moor; 12 Apr 2019.

SOMERSET LEVELS: SOME KEYWORDS

And finally – some keywords that will often be mentioned in this archive series:

Droves:  to avoid crossing other peoples’ land when accessing their own, the farmers constructed a series of tracks, known as droves, between the fields. Some of these droves are now metalled roads and many persist as open tracks – all of which allow wonderfully open access to this countryside.

Rhynes: the fields are bounded by water-filled ditches – which both drain the ground and act as stock barriers. Hence strange landscapes – where fields appear quite unbounded, except for a gate with a short length of fencing on either side of it, where a bridge crosses the water-filled boundary ditch to provide access the field.  These small wet ditches communicate with larger rhynes (“reen” as in Doreen), which in turn flow into larger drains, e.g. the North and South Drains in the Brue Valley. All of these waterways are manmade and, by intricate series of pumping stations and flood gates, all of them have their water levels controlled by local farmers, internal drainage boards or the Environment Agency.

Pollarded Willows: the banks of the rhynes were often planted with Willow trees, both to help strengthen the banks and also to show the courses of roads and tracks during floods. These Willows are often pollarded, i.e. their upper branches are cut off, which results in distinctively broad and dense heads to the trees. Pollarding keeps trees to a required height, while ensuring a steady supply of wood – more important in the past than now – for fires, thatching spars, fencing and so on.