The Somerset Levels are one of the great low-lying wetlands of southern England — a vast flat plain of water-meadows, rhynes (drainage ditches), pollarded willows, and reed beds, stretching east from Taunton toward Glastonbury and the Mendips. The land was reclaimed slowly over a thousand years and remains a working agricultural landscape on the very edge of being marsh.
The Levels are at their best for visitors at the RSPB reserves of Ham Wall and Shapwick Heath, where summer evenings bring up to a million starlings to the famous winter murmurations. Iron Age trackways — the world's oldest known timber roads — survive in the peat. Glastonbury Tor, the conical hill rising from the flatness, is the iconic landmark; the climb takes twenty minutes.