Somerset Leasing

Did You Know?

Somerset is a county in South West England which borders Gloucestershire and Bristol to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east and Devon to the south-west. It is bounded to the north and west by the Severn Estuary and the Bristol Channel, its coastline facing southeastern Wales.

With an area of 4,171 sq km and a population of about 508,000, Somerset is England’s seventh-biggest county by area but only the 22nd-biggest by population.

The West Somerset Railway is the longest preserved steam railway in the country. It has 20 miles of track running from Bishop’s Lydeard to its seaside station at Minehead. The line has been carrying heritage steam and diesel passenger trains for over four decades and now carries over 200,000 passengers a year.

Taunton in Somerset was the first town in the country to be lit permanently by electric street lighting in 1881. This was 12 months before the Electric Lighting Act of 1882 which enforced the switch from oil lamps to electric across the UK.

Somerset is the county of Cider and there are more than 400 different varieties of cider apple grown in the area, which is enough to keep the keenest scrumper busy.

Shepton Mallet in Somerset had the oldest prison in England when its jail closed in 2013. It first opened in 1610 and housed and saw the execution of countless inmates for over 400 years.

The Ancient Welsh, Celts and Saxons called Somerset ‘The Land Of The Summer’. They called it this because they could only ‘live off the land’ in this area during the Summer because the area flooded in the Winter.

The oldest complete human skeleton ever found in Britain was Cheddar Man, found at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. It was aged at around 9,000 years old.

Somerset has a lot of celebrity names under it’s belt. Mary Berry, John Cleese, Charlie McDonnell, Jenson Button, Maisie Williams, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Bill Bailey, James Purefoy, Sir Peter Blake, Don McCullin, Russell Howard, Richard J. Roberts and the entire band of Portishead were all born in Somerset.

There are two gorges in Somerset, the Ebbor Gorge and the more celebrated Cheddar Gorge. Ebbor has caves where bones of Ice Age mammals were found, while Cheddar is the largest in Britain, standing at around 500 feet.

Somerset is indirectly responsible for creating Frankenstein’s monster. Mary Shelley wrote the famous tale after hearing about Andrew Crosse’s electricity experiments at Fyne Court.