Somerset Overview

Somerset is a county in the south-west of England. The county town is Taunton, situated at 51° 00' 49? N 3° 06' 23? W. Somerset adjoins Gloucestershire to the north east, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south east and Devon to the southwest. The county is bounded to the north by the coast of the Bristol Channel.

The name is pronounced as though spelt Summerset. Some local people pronounce it Zummerzet as per the local West Country Accent. The name derives from Somersæte, meaning land of the summer people. The name continues in the motto of the county, Sumorsaete ealle, meaning "all the people of Somerset" in Anglo-Saxon.

Somerset is a largely rural county famous for its rolling hills and downland, the large flat Somerset Levels, and the Exmoor National Park which straddles the border with Devon. The town of Glastonbury is famous in mythology. The north of the county is administratively independent and includes the city of Bath, a World Heritage Site famous for its Roman history and Georgian architecture. The popular sea-side resort Weston-Super-Mare lies on the Bristol Channel coast.

The Somerset Levels, and specifically the dry points such as Glastonbury and Cadbury Castle, have a long history of settlement, and is known to have been settled by mesolithic hunters. The caves of the Mendip Hills were settled during the neolithic and contain extensive archaeology. Somerset, like Dorset to the south, held the Saxon invasion back for over a century, remaining a frontier between the Saxons and the Romano-British and Celts. The first known use of the name Somersæte was in 845 after the region fell to the Saxons. After the Norman Conquest the county was divided into 700 fiefs, and large areas were owned by the crown.

In the English Civil War Somerset was largely Royalist, unlike neighbouring Wiltshire. In 1685 the Monmouth Rebellion was played out in Somerset and neighbouring Dorset. The rebels landed at Lyme Regis and traveled north hoping to capture Bristol and Bath, but were defeated at the Battle of Sedgemoor.

The traditional northern boundary of the county was the River Avon, but this has crept southwards, with the creation and expansion of the City of Bristol. In 1974 a large part of northern Somerset was removed to form the southern half of the County of Avon. Avon has now been abolished, and North Somerset and Bath and North East Somerset have reverted to Somerset for ceremonial purposes, but are now independent counties in their own right for local government purposes.

Somerset contains England's oldest prison still in use, in the small town of Shepton Mallet, and the world's oldest known engineered roadway, the Sweet Track.