Country Diary: Somerset

A fortnight ago, champion representatives of 22 breeds of cattle and more than 30 breeds of sheep, as well as prizewinning pigs and goats, were paraded before packed crowds celebrating agriculture at the Royal Bath & West show. A week later, wagons carted away dismantled tents and pavilions, and the show site looked like a deserted battlefield. But before long the same roads will again be thronging with enthusiasts converging on the village of Pilton for another great tribal gathering of the Somerset summer - the Glastonbury festival.

Our own way led up beyond Shepton Mallet to a lonely spot in the Mendips. We turned off a wide track through a conifer plantation on to a winding footpath, which penetrated thick mature woodland, where the bright sun could barely filter through. In a clearing, there was a large pond and a tall, tapering chimney beautifully crafted in stone up to its highest stage, which was made of brick and bound with three red metal bands. The ground was lumpy and pockmarked, and the pond fringed with fern, sedge and spiky grasses. Large dragonflies hovered and skimmed over the murky, reddish water.

The sense of mystery was partly dispelled by a panel with a picture of what it might have looked like in 1870. The chimney - Smitham Chimney - was shown surrounded by sweating workers laboring in smoke and steam, and the humps and hollows around the pond could be seen to be relics of lead-smelting workings and installations. I recalled some neat, rounded mounds on a Taunton golf course, where men used to toil to extract calamine - marks in Somerset's green and rural surface that tell of a history of more than 3,000 years of mining. Smitham Chimney was rescued from demolition in 1973.