My Somerset Levels – a special landscape by Janette Ward

Janette Ward spent her working life in nature conservation and is now a Trustee of CPRE Somerset and a member of the national board of CPRE.  She lives in the heart of the Somerset Levels – here she shares with us why she is passionate about this unique landscape….

I walk around this lovely church, set high on a sandstone ridge, known as ‘the Cathedral of the Moors’ and every time my heart leaps, as from this high place, I gaze across the Levels.

The view is unique, the landscape enthralling and ever changing, sometimes green, sometimes shining with water, across fen meadows, reeds, withies, orchards, together with ancient places. Away upriver, I picture Burrow Mump, a single conical hill, a beacon in the landscape, where King Alfred once stood gazing out for raiding Vikings.

There is something both wild and magical about the openness and these watery horizons. I know that 10,000 years ago the sea covered this land, surrounding the famous Tor and what is now the town of Glastonbury in the distance. The land has changed and changed again, now a vast grassland and wetland, though still with watery links connecting it to the salt marshes, the mudflats and the tidal river Tone.

I can cross the Moor here along a road lined with ancient willow pollards along deep watery ditches with rustling reeds and dragonflies. Placid grazing cattle share the fields with herons, egrets and flocks of chattering starlings and in the distance, I see swans, silently cruising the ditches.

I think about a future with even more ‘wet and wild’.

In this flat land, with big skies and starry nights, the sense of nature, of space and beauty is palpable,

I feel so lucky to share this special landscape….