If there is such a thing as a level playing field in the Mendip Hills, I have yet to find it. Not one street has “Rise” in its name, for nigh on every road has a rise (and fall). Folk here walk, run and cycle up the steepest of climbs. The former Guardian journalist Matthew Engel once interviewed an elderly yet sprightly man in a similarly vertically challenging town, who remarked” “The trouble is, people retire here to die … and then they don’t.”
A long exception to the up-down rule runs 6 miles out to the town of Radstock. Since railway engines are disinclined to tackle slopes, this line cut through. Fifty years after rolling stock rolled no more, Colliers Way is a much-used cycle and footpath. Funders were rewarded with a single inscribed brick in a grid set into a bank. Six across, two down gives me the giggles – “Yippee it’s flat!” wrote the Wheadon family on their personalised rectangle.
