A very short uphill walk to the south of Bruton took me through time, as it were, from familiar marks of the town’s antiquity – the buttressed abbey wall, the packhorse bridge, schoolhouse and church – up to the displays of contemporary art that have attracted more than 100,000 visitors to the buildings and grounds of Hauser & Wirth Somerset since the centre opened last July. But I needed the expert guides I had, a local archivist and the chairman of the Bruton Trust, to appreciate signs of stages in Bruton’s past to be seen on the way.
We passed close to the site of the priory, founded in 1142, and later to become an abbey, and the Berkeley mansion that succeeded it after the dissolution of the monasteries, only itself to be demolished in 1786. But our particular destination was in an uneven and apparently unremarkable patch of pastureland, part of what is known as the Park, formerly an abbey possession but in the Berkeley days a picturesque pleasure ground.
Here I was shown a string of shallow and damp depressions, the largest almost 50 metres long. They are partly overgrown by scrub, and are linked by a stream that flows on towards the river Brue alongside Dropping Lane. These depressions are believed to be the remains of fishponds made to supply food to the abbey, and are scheduled as ancient monuments. The Bruton Trust is looking to research and possibly revive them.
Downhill, the stream disappears through a grille and into a culvert where the railway embankment (1856) blocks its path and the view to the old abbey site. But we looked across to the Dovecote on its own little hill above the town.
Surviving elms and marks of tracks suggest an avenue leading up to it, and just opposite Durslade Farm, itself a picturesque gothic creation of the 18th century, we saw more recent developments. Rows of saplings mark the beginnings of a community orchard, and allotments show varying samples of spring vegetable growth in raised beds with wooden frames available for rent from the town council at £5 per annum.
• This article was amended on 28 April 2015 to correct the number of visitors to Hauser & Wirth Somerset from 10,000 to 100,000. The picture caption was also amended to clarify that Subodh Gupta’s sculpture is no longer on display.
