Who crawled along Snail’s Bottom? Who found beauty on Bonnyleigh Hill? Who measured Little Acre Farm? This small patch of Somerset – like everywhere else in Britain – is a storied landscape, every feature named and memorialised by mostly forgotten individuals. Our job over the next two hours is to take one such name, one such story, and overwrite it with something better.
Over a level crossing, through a kissing gate and on to a public footpath running down sloping ground. I had only been told the local epithet for this banana-shaped paddock after we moved here, though my arm already understood its origin. A priapic stallion, its coat studded with burdock burrs like a peppered mackerel, had clamped its jaws around my humerus. “That’s bitey horse field,” people told me. Bitey no more, for the poor fly-grazing beast has left, and our ever-proactive town council has secured the land on a 99-year lease.
