Williton

Williton is what happens when a village spends a thousand years being the place you stop on the way to somewhere better and eventually decides that is the job. It was a royal hunting estate, then a workhouse town, then the administrative centre for a district that mostly consists of fields, and the through-traffic to Minehead has never once been asked to slow down. The Quantocks start just up the road and the sea is a fifteen-minute walk from the edge of it, which means the people who live here got the setting almost everyone else pays a premium for, on the condition they accept that the main road runs through the middle of their lives. Most of them made that trade knowingly, which is more than can be said for the ones who moved to the coast for the view and now queue behind caravans in August.