Pilton

To reach our final village, Pilton, we must leave our straight route at East Pennard and travel almost due north for a couple of miles or so. Pilton is a large but quite dispersed village beside the Glastonbury to Shepton Mallet road, and we are now some six miles from the former. The parish church, dedicated to St John the Baptist, developed from the Norman period onward through the Middle Ages, and is down in a dip at the junction of several streets. The church has an attractive Norman south door, with corbels with heads of a bish- op and two angels inside the porch. Inside there is an Easter sepulchre, and the nave and north aisle have Somerset-style timber tie-beam roofs with carvings of angels. Next to the church there is the manor house. It was established in the 13th century as a residence of the Abbots of Glastonbury and added to by them for the next couple of hundred years. After the Dissolution, it passed into private hands and what we see today from the outside is the result of various alterations made during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, including some by one of the Earls of Hereford who owned the place in the 17th century. In the yard at the back there is a rare survival, a dovecote dating from the 13th or 14th century.
An extract from from"Glastonbury Photographic Memories".

Pilton is famed for its pop festivals, which started in 1970. Its crossroads was known as Conduit Square because of an underground drainage system. The store was originally the White Hart Hotel, with a brewery behind, and the Crown Inn to its right was the tap room for the coachmen. The post office was opposite.
An extract from from"Somerset Living Memories".

This is the oldest part of the cathedral - the stiff-leaf carvings on the capitals of the north-west side are simpler in design than those east of this point. The bishop’s seat or ‘cathedra’ is on the left.
An extract from from"Wells Photographic Memories".

WE BEGIN the tour of the city by the Dean’s Eye gate-house, the dropping-off point both for mod- ern tour coaches and ancient stagecoaches. Until about 1970, one-way traffic passed under this gate-house into Sadler Street, the main road from London and Bath to Exeter. The Dean’s Eye is also known as Browne’s gate, after a cobbler who lived alongside it in 1553. The east side of the street was developed after 1340, but some deeds for the west side date back as far as 1301. On the west side is the white Georgian façade of one of the earliest coaching inns: the Hart’s Head, known as the White Hart from 1700. It was built on dean and chapter land, and has been an inn since 1497. The site of the Hart’s Head first appears in the 1343 Commoner’s Accounts; it was bequeathed five years earlier in return for prayers for ‘the repose of the soul of Ralph de Lullington’.
An extract from from"Wells Photographic Memories".

The frontage of the Swan Hotel hides its 15th- and 16th-century origins. The window to the left of the swan on its plinth was once a doorway permitting passengers to walk into the hotel from the top of a stagecoach. The little garden was created in 1869. The Swan Hotel, first recorded in 1422 and rebuilt in the 16th century, hosted a feast in honour of Queen Anne of Denmark in 1613. The hotel has some theatrical costumes permanently on show on the ground floor; these were worn by the 19th-century actor Sir Henry (Brodribb) Irving. He was the first actor to receive a knighthood (1895).
An extract from from"Wells Photographic Memories".