Blagdon railway station

The Anglican Church Of St Andrew in Blagdon, within the English county of Somerset, was built in the 15th century. It is a Grade II* listed building.The church has a 116 feet (35 m) high tower with pinnacles and a cusped lozenge pattern parapet, with a stair turret spirelet in the north-east corner. The tower dates from the 15th century and is one of the tallest in Somerset. The tower contains a bell dating from 1716 and made by Edward Bilbie of the Bilbie family. The remainder of the church was rebuilt in 1907–09 by Lord Winterstoke (of the Wills tobacco family)The interior includes a romanesque piscina set into the south wall of the chancel.The lychgate to the east of the church is a Grade II listed building in its own right. Above the door are four primitive Norman carvings which survived three rebuildings.Augustus Toplady was serving as curate of St Andrew's in the 1760s when he wrote the hymn Rock of Ages. It is believed that he was inspired to write the lyrics while sheltering under a rock in nearby Burrington Combe.In 2013 fundraising was undertaken to provide toilets and a new kitchen in the church. Improvements were also made to the damp proofing and insulation.The parish is part of the benefice of Blagdon with Charterhouse, Compton Martin and Ubley within the Diocese of Bath and Wells.

Blagdon is a village and civil parish in the ceremonial county of Somerset, within the unitary authority of North Somerset, in England. It is located in the Mendip Hills, a recognised Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. According to the 2011 census it has a population of 1,116. The village is about 12 miles (19 km) east of Weston-super-Mare on the A368 between Churchill and Compton Martin.

Blagdon Lake lies in a valley at the northern edge of the Mendip Hills, close to the village of Blagdon and approximately 10 miles (16 km) south of Bristol, England. The lake was created by Bristol Water (Bristol Waterworks Company as it was known then), when it dammed the River Yeo, starting construction in 1898, to designs by Charles Hawksley, and completing this in 1905. The Wrington Vale Light Railway was constructed primarily to bring building materials for the lake. The reservoir was formed by the construction of a dam and provided water to the pumping station which originally contained four Woolf compound rotative beam pumping engines, built by Glenfield & Kennedy of Kilmarnock, which have now been replaced by electric pumps. Two of the steam engines have been preserved, with one in working order as part of the visitor centre which also includes educational facilities for children. The pumping station is now a Grade II* listed building. The 8,456,000,000-litre (1.860×109 imp gal; 2.234×109 US gal) lake still provides 9,547,000,000 litres (2.100×109 imp gal; 2.522×109 US gal) of drinking water each year, but also acts as a fishing lake. It provides a habitat for a range of flora and fauna and is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The original suction tanks, which formed the water supply for the steam boilers powering the pumping engines, are now used for trout rearing.

Butcombe is a village and civil parish in Somerset, England. The village is situated just north of Blagdon Lake, in North Somerset. The parish has a population of 218 and mainly consists of family-owned farmland. It no longer has any amenities apart from a telephone kiosk and a letter box.

The Anglican Church of St Michael and All Angels at Butcombe in the English county of Somerset was built in the 15th century and restored in 1868. It is a Grade II* listed building.

Bourne SSSI, Avon (grid reference ST484600) is an 8.47 hectare geological Site of Special Scientific Interest near the village of Burrington, North Somerset, notified in 1992. This site is of considerable importance because it has provided detailed information upon the composition of a north Mendip Pleistocene alluvial fan. An alluvial fan is a fan-shaped deposit formed where a fast flowing stream flattens, slows, and spreads typically at the exit of a canyon onto a flatter plain. At Bourne sections have shown highly weathered gravels overlain by sandy silts and clay loams, the highest levels in the sequence showing evidence of cryoturbation. Two phases of fan sediment deposition were separated by a long period of subaerial weathering, which may represent an interglacial period.

The Fairy Toot is an extensive oval barrow in the civil parish of Nempnett Thrubwell, Somerset, England (grid reference ST520618). It is an example of the Severn-Cotswold tomb type which consist of precisely-built, long trapezoid earth mounds covering a burial chamber. Because of this they are a type of chambered long barrow. Fairy Toot was formerly a chambered cairn which is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Located south-southwest of Howgrove Farm, it is a mound 60 m long, 25 m wide and now 2.5 m high, retained by a stone wall. Its summit is covered with ash trees and shrubs. Formerly it was considerably higher. On being opened and essentially destroyed between 1787 and 1835 by the Reverend Thomas Bere of Butcombe and the Reverend John Skinner of Camerton, it was found to contain two rows of cells, running from south to north, formed by immense stones set edgeways, and covered by others of larger dimensions. A human skull from the barrow is now in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.At the time it was conjectured to be a work of the Druids, but its origins are far older and probably date from the Neolithic period.Wade and Wade in their 1929 book "Somerset" described it as "a remarkably fine tumulus of masonry, said to have been one of the finest in Britain, in the chambers of which skeletons have been discovered. A few vestiges of it now only remain, the rest has been used as a lime-kiln."The site was visited in the past as it was known as a place for curing warts.

Charterhouse was a town in the Roman province of Britannia. Its site is located just to the west of the village of Charterhouse-on-Mendip in the English county of Somerset. Its Latin name may have been Iscalis, but this is far from certain. Based on inscriptions on a pig of Roman lead BRIT. EX. ARG. VEB, meaning "British (lead) from the VEB... lead-silver works", the Roman name has been reconstructed as Vebriacum (with Iscalis more plausibly placed at Cheddar).It is associated with the Iron Age hill fort, Charterhouse Camp. The Roman landscape has been designated as a Scheduled Ancient Monument.

Burrington railway station served the village of Burrington, North Somerset, England, from 1901 to 1950 on the Wrington Vale Light Railway.

Charterhouse Camp is a univallate Iron Age hillfort in the Mendip district of Somerset, England. The hillfort is situated approximately 0.6 miles (0.97 km) east from the village of Charterhouse. There is some evidence, in the form of burials in local caves, of human occupation since the late Neolithic times and the early Bronze Age. The site is associated with Charterhouse Roman Town and may have been the site of Iscalis. The site is a scheduled monument.Hillforts developed in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age, roughly the start of the first millennium BC. The reason for their emergence in Britain, and their purpose, has been a subject of debate. It has been argued that they could have been military sites constructed in response to invasion from continental Europe, sites built by invaders, or a military reaction to social tensions caused by an increasing population and consequent pressure on agriculture. The dominant view since the 1960s has been that the increasing use of iron led to social changes in Britain. Deposits of iron ore were located in different places to the tin and copper ores necessary to make bronze, and as a result trading patterns shifted and the old elites lost their economic and social status. Power passed into the hands of a new group of people.Archaeologist Barry Cunliffe believes that population increase still played a role and has stated "[the forts] provided defensive possibilities for the community at those times when the stress [of an increasing population] burst out into open warfare. But I wouldn't see them as having been built because there was a state of war. They would be functional as defensive strongholds when there were tensions and undoubtedly some of them were attacked and destroyed, but this was not the only, or even the most significant, factor in their construction".

Lulsgate Plateau is the name given to the Carboniferous Limestone hills which form a northern outlier of the Mendip Hills, southwest of Bristol, England, approximately 600 feet (180 m) above sea level, which has been occupied since prehistoric times. The major feature on the plateau is Bristol International Airport. Cutting into the western edge of the plateau are two combes, Brockley Combe and Goblin Combe a 52 hectares (128 acres) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). There are two major roads in the area — the A38 cuts across the top of the plateau, while the A370 runs along its western edge. Both run in a southwesterly direction, and join Bristol to towns and villages in Somerset. To the west of the plateau are the North Somerset Levels, and to the south is the Yeo valley.

Nempnett Thrubwell is a small village and civil parish in dairying country on the western edge of Bath and North East Somerset, in the county of Somerset, England. It is about 15 km south-west of Bristol. The parish, which has a population of 177, is sheltered by the Mendip Hills, near the River Yeo in the Chew Valley. It is the site of the Fairy Toot oval barrow. Lying just to the north of Blagdon Lake, isolated Nempnett Thrubwell falls within the network of minor roads bounded by the A38, A368, B3114 and B3130; whilst signposted from each of these major routes, a lack of any further signposting makes it difficult to locate the village when arriving by road. The landscape is characterized by isolated farmsteads, the vernacular older buildings generally of the local Lias limestone or of render with clay-tiled roofs. Though being largely rural and consisting of one road and a few houses, Nempnett Thrubwell's curiously comedic name makes the village something of a famous local attraction. It is the subject of the song Down In Nempnett Thrubwell by The Wurzels and is mentioned in the earlier Adge Cutler song Up The Clump.