Ebbor Gorge

I love this place. It’s in Somerset, western England, just above the small city of Wells, with it’s spectacular 12th Century Cathedral. Up the hill past Wookey Hole, which is a deep set of caverns full of tourists, towards Cheddar, which is the bigger more popular natural attraction, you get to a tiny car park with a couple of footpaths unobtrusively leading down into a crack in the hilltop. You enter a deep ravine which brims with life, and following the winding path, after 30 or 40 minutes move up and emerge from the trees onto a high cliff which looks back across the gorge and towards Glastonbury and the endless Somerset levels.

It’s a beautiful place, which once housed Iron age people. It would have been safe here, defendable, sheltered from wind and weather, far from the invaders’ coast. I shot a video here. We dressed up like mannikins and cavorted like children on the cliff, the setting sun making us magical in red and gold.

This is the place I found contentment with H, who had precious little of that in her short life.

This fertile green split in the earth will spill out at a moment’s notice and rejuvenate the surrounding farmed grassland, once the people have gone.