Somerset family photography: Exmoor, the quantocks & the levels

Exmoor: England's Wild South-West Moor

Exmoor National Park covers 267 square miles of upland Somerset and Devon — a high moorland plateau cut by steep, wooded river valleys (locally called combes), with a dramatic north-facing coast dropping to the Bristol Channel. The moorland itself — heather-covered in summer and purple in late August — provides open, expansive family portrait settings with big skies and long views to the Welsh coast on clear days. The valley woodland is intimate and ancient: ancient oak coppice, moss-covered boulders, clear streams running over red sandstone. The combination of open moorland vista and enclosed woodland valley within short distances of each other makes Exmoor one of the most photographically versatile landscapes in England. Porlock Weir, Watersmeet, Doone Valley, Simonsbath and Dunster all offer distinct settings within the park.

The Quantock Hills

The Quantocks were England's first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty — a ridge of sandstone hills running north-west to south-east between Taunton and the Bristol Channel coast. The hill tops are open, bracken-and-heather moorland with red deer grazing in the early morning. The combes — the valleys cut into the ridge — are ancient sessile oak woodland of a quality found in very few places outside Wales and the Lake District. Holford Combe, Rams Combe and the valley below Dead Woman's Ditch are all extraordinary for family photography in spring (bluebells) and autumn (golden oak foliage). Dead Woman's Ditch itself — a Bronze Age earthwork on the ridge — gives wide views across the Somerset Levels to Glastonbury Tor and the distant Mendips. The village of Nether Stowey (associated with Coleridge) provides an attractive market village setting at the foot of the hills.

The Somerset Levels

The Somerset Levels are a flat, reclaimed peat wetland occupying the low ground between the Mendip Hills and the Quantocks — a landscape of rhynes (drainage ditches), pollarded willows, reedbeds and, in winter, extensive flooding that creates vast shallow lakes reflecting the sky. Glastonbury Tor — a conical hill rising abruptly from the flat plain and capped by the ruined tower of St Michael's church — is the defining landmark of the Levels and one of the most photographically dramatic landforms in England. The combination of the flat, reflective plain and the vertical drama of the Tor creates compositions impossible elsewhere. The Ham Wall and Shapwick Heath nature reserves provide exceptional wetland winter photography.

Cheddar Gorge & the Mendip Hills

Cheddar Gorge is the largest gorge in the UK — a limestone canyon two miles long and 400 feet deep, carved by meltwater at the end of the last Ice Age. The gorge walls give extraordinary geological texture and scale as portrait backdrops; the viewpoints from the top of the gorge provide wide views across the Somerset Levels. The surrounding Mendip Hills AONB — a plateau of limestone grassland, ancient hill forts, and wooded dry valleys — has a quieter, more intimate quality than Exmoor. Black Down, the highest point of the Mendips, gives views across Somerset in every direction. Ebor Gorge, a wooded limestone gorge near Wookey Hole, is one of the most atmospheric ancient woodland settings in Somerset.