The New Normal: Weekend 5

We travelled from Monmouthshire to Somerset on Friday, stopping at a list of villages along the way that looked promising, hubby had done the research - and also the driving - as I am not good outside of our local area.  We encountered many very narrow country rodes with room for only one vehicle where 2 wanted to pass!   We looked at villages within a short drive of Taunton.... sorry the pictures are in no particular order as I am a bit rushed.....

The criteria was must have a church, pub, if possible a community hall, a shop and a post office. 

We found houses on canals with resident swans, thatched roof cottages, pretty pubs and friendly people, passed so many places we forgot their names - we even whizzed passed Glastonbury and drifted into the county of Wiltshire, passing Stonehenge at some point!

Everywhere we went there were little goodwill tables set up outside houses where they placed their surplus tomatos, runner beans, marrows, carrots etc., and you put an offering in a dish in return.  Also a lot of houses with hens sell their excess eggs in pretty little boxes along the road.

We filled up our cider flagon (which we had kept from the last trip) with sweet Somerset local cider... they are not selling the flagons any more and are going over to vacuum pack boxes, but will still fill ours if we return.

We stayed at The Duke of Wellington in Minehead, which we have been to many times before.  There is much more to Minehead than the Butlins holiday camp, at the other end of town, behind the main street there are very pretty old houses and going up the hill, along the coastline there is beautiful woodland.

We stopped at Dunster as it is special to me - probably too remote to live though, my grandparents are buried at the church there (below) so I visited the grave and left a little  posy of flowers I had picked from the hedge on the walk up there.

The next day we spent touring all the villages on hubby's Somerset list - we were exhausted but saw plenty and liked several, all of which fulfilled our criteria - all within a train ride of Bristol (for work) and Taunton (for work/shopping).  Taunton itself was fairly vibrant and in fact much bigger than the nearest town to our current abode.

We spent Saturday evening in Minehead at a quiet pub, where we were invited to sit with a lovely couple who had recently bought a house just a short walk away and were full of information about the area and very encouraging.  Below is the centre of Dunster village.

Sunday morning we went back to take in a few more villages and onwards to home, arriving late afternoon exhausted to a fairly tidy house, a younger son who had been sick all morning and was still sleeping off a very bad rum hangover, a conservatory full of dying plants with no windows open and no water, a garden looking limp and thirsty and an older son busy doing his laundry and tidying the kitchen - a few things got broken (new glass salt cellar, melted chopping board) but nothing life threatening and all forgivable …. and so here we are …. home :)