Wedstr two

Verified Slow Way

Verified by 100.00% of reviewers

I agree with everything the previous reviewers said - this is an absolutely fabulous walk, across beautiful and varied countryside and gives a really great feel for the Levels.

I too encountered the boisterous young cows - it took nerves of steel to walk through having had very bad experiences before with frisky teenagers. I’d say this is something to be aware of, especially if you have a dog.

I knocked a star off, however, for the number of broken, difficult or (in at least one case) slightly dangerous styles and gate, which required proper clambering and climbing over. I actually would have knocked 2 off normally, because it thought they were quite bad, especially around Hulk Moor on the approach to Street - though not just there. But the rest of the walk just doesn’t feel like it deserves to be 3 stars!

Overall a beautiful route , that would be even better if the styles and gates could be improved (and the cows segregated!).

Beautiful and interesting pretty much from the get-go, this route is a wonderful way to become immersed in the Somerset Levels. You are treated to a full portrait of this watery, semi-feral landscape and its sometimes clashing land-use agendas. It has fine extensive views and passes through two big, fabulous nature reserves, plus some highly contrasting areas of intensively farmed land and a zone where commercial peat extraction is still, astonishingly, taking place. This is a Slow Way for bird lovers. If you are the least bit interested, bring your binoculars!

The Slow Way heads uphill out of Wedmore to pick up a bridleway along a ridge with great views of the country around before descending towards Westhay Moor using quiet lanes and footpaths. Between Mudgley House Farm and the levels proper, there is a short stretch across the fields where the footpath is badly signed and the access across the hedgeline at adapt.poetry.stems is a scramble over a pair of gates pushed together which are partially covered in brambles. But stick with it because the Slow Way is soon heading along a drove through the watery Westhay Moor nature reserve. Here we stepped briefly off the route to sit in a bird hide and and watch Marsh Harriers and a Hobby hunting over the reeds while we ate our lunch.

The route then crosses a lane and steps as if through a portal into a zone of intensive farming between here and the village of Mere. Not so much nature here, just a tractor drilling a maize crop and (rather excitable and curious) young dairy cattle grazing the lush, uniformly green pastures.

The entry into Mere itself is round the mucky edge of the dairy farm buildings and then through the churchyard with a view of the historic Abbot’s Fish House, dating from the days when this was a wealthy agricultural area with a lively wool trade and a navigable river. The exit from Mere is out through some little fields near a primary school. The route shows the footpath right of way access but it is marginally quicker to walk down the lane past the school.

Once across the little fields south of Mere there is a kilometre of walking south along one of the typically lumpy levels roads before the Slow Way turns into another nature reserve at Ham Wall (popularly famous for its starling murmurations in winter and much loved by birders at all times) and follows a gravel cycle path through it. This has the best of the views into this wet, reedy landscape and is also busier. You could also take the quieter grassy footpath immediately to the north on the other side of the rhyne but you won’t see as much.

At the end of the reserve, the route heads south again for a bit along a very quiet minor road set about by an area of active peat cutting, which still provides a living for some, despite years of campaigning to stop it. It then takes a path around some flooded recent peat cuttings and follows the path through fields alongside one of the area’s many big drainage ditches until it meets the A39 and heads into Street using a cycle path.

I found access and navigation to be reasonably straightforward apart from the scrubbed-up gate already mentioned near Mudgely. Otherwise it is the usual selection of farm gates, kissing gates and stiles. And while it was fine underfoot on the late spring day that we walked it, some of the going is very likely to be muddy and very wet in the winter.

There is one pub along the way - the Railway Inn at Ashcott Corner by Ham Wall - but it has often been closed when I have passed by in the daytime.

What a walk. The mechanical extraction of peat over many decades from the Somerset levels is an ecological crime which is perhaps being slowly paid for in the shape of the the national nature reserves that have been established there. This slow way takes you from Wedmore, a town well endowed with top notch snacks, descending off a ridge deep into the stunning wetland of Westhay moor, where we saw Marsh harriers hunting, great crested grebe chicks and heard the first cuckoo. The bird hides are great, the sound and smells are wonderful. And then... after all that nature, the landscape turns into flat industrial farming until the village of Meare, full of buildings and stonework which leads back to the wealthy ecclesiastical past of this area. Out of the village, the roads buckle and roll on the unstable peat and the vegetation gets wild again. At the RSPB reserve of Ham Wall, the path alongside the canalised River Brue is again through the flooded pits, and the bird life is amazing. We sat and heard the booming of bitterns, saw egrets, more marsh harriers and lots of duck business. The Tor, and more piles of peat come into view as you approach Street. A longish walk, but a total Somerset levels experience.

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