“My home is close to the Mendip hills which snake their way through rural Somerset, from the Bristol channel in the west to the Salisbury planes in the east. My family is rooted in this landscape, they have grown from the gifts that lay beneath the surface. For centuries the limestone of the Mendips has been quarried to forge the cities of Bath and Bristol leaving cavernous scars on the landscape. The quarrying of limestone has been a traditional industry for centuries. This Geology has been a gift for the population. Alongside agriculture, quarrying limestone and coal mining has sustained rural communities for centuries. In the post-industrial age, the area has struggled to sustain its population and economy, in part to the closure of the Somerset coal fields with the last coal pit closing in 1974, the surviving quarries have been a lifeline. The quarries that scar the landscape are located within a triangle of towns, to the west Shepton Mallet, the north Norton Radstock and to the east the market town of Frome. Employing over two thousand people and producing over five million tons of stone a year they hold together generations of rural working-class communities that have existed in the area for centuries.”

“In Somerset they guide the plough
From early dawn till twilight now.
The good red earth smells sweeter yet,
Behind the plough, in Somerset.
The celandines round last year's mow
Blaze out . . . and with his old-time vow
The South Wind woos the Violet,
In Somerset.

“In Somerset, Fay Inchwarn”