About Easton
Misty morning over Easton
Photograph by Rose Atkinson
A small village with a big heart
Easton is a small, friendly village of around 250 houses located at the foot of the Mendip Hills, overlooking the Somerset Levels. We are just three miles from the historic cathedral city of Wells and seven miles from Cheddar's breathtaking limestone gorge and caves.
Easton ... a Old English place name meaning 'east farmstead or village'
Our origins
People have been living in this part of the UK since prehistoric times but quite when Easton was established as a village is lost in the mists of time. It doesn't appear on the map of 'Somersetshire' shown below, from Henry Boswell's The Antiquities of England and Wales", in 1786.
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Nearly a century later, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Easton as:
'A chapelry in St. Cuthbert parish, Wells borough, Somerset; 2 miles W of Wells town and r. station. It was constituted in 1844; and its post town is Wells. Real property, £1, 630. Pop., 259. Houses, 52. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Bath and Wells. Value, £209. Patron, the Vicar of Wells.'
Ancient roots
From flint points to long barrows and even skeletal remains, there are plenty of signs that humans have lived in this part of the world for thousands of years.
The oldest dated human road work in Great Britain – the Sweet Track, constructed across the Somerset Levels with wooden planks in the 39th century BCE – is just a few miles away.
Also close by is Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge where the skeleton of Cheddar Man was found in in 1903. Cheddar Man lived around 10,000 years ago and is the oldest almost complete skeleton of our species, Homo sapiens, ever found in Britain.
'Somersetshire'
The first reference to Somerset is the Anglo Saxon Chronicle for 848 which refers to the men of Somerset and Dorset.
The county itself is an Anglo-Saxon creation, with boundaries that remained largely unchanged from Domesday until frequent changes in both the 19th and the 20th century, according to JW Hart, author of The Changing Boundaries of Somerset.
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Easton is not listed in the Domesday Book, the survey of England and Wales ordered by King William (the Conquerer in 1085, although neighbouring villages Westbury-sub-Mendip and Rodney Stoke are recorded.
Easton today
Our Village Hall – located in what used to be the old school in Victorian times – sits at the heart of community life.
At the centre of the village is the church of St Paul's, built in 1844 using stone quarried in the village. The neighbouring Easton Church Room hosts monthly coffee mornings, as does Easton Women's Guild, which celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2020.
We have a popular children's playing field which was recently planted with native trees and hedging by our active Wildlife Group which is working to increase biodiversity in the village.