Longforth Farm

Longforth Farm lies on the edge of Wellington in Somerset, beside the building site where five hundred new homes now stand. Beneath the tarmac and topsoil the remains of a Bronze Age landscape stretch across less than half a hectare. Medieval builders levelled part of the earlier earthworks to lay out stone foundations, courtyards and tiled floors. Roof slates and glazed ceramic tiles still lie where they fell eight centuries ago. Excavators found floor tiles patterned like those at Glastonbury Abbey and pottery shards that date from the 12th to the 14th century. The manor itself began in the 12th century when King Richard I rewarded Sir William Mustoe with the estate after the Third Crusade. On Sir William’s death in 1230 the property passed to his son Lord Richard Mustoe. Three generations of the Mustoe family held the manor until Lord Edmund Mustoe sold it to Robert Burnell, Bishop of Bath and Wells, in 1281. After the sale the family moved north to Gloucestershire and the estate’s later owners remain unknown. Visitors today walk over the buried foundations laid out in neat rectangles around two small courtyards. Fragments of decorated tiles and broken roof tiles are visible in the soil where the diggers left them. The low walls of the medieval structure run just below the surface, showing how the great house once stood on its gentle rise above the Somerset Levels. A Bronze Age ditch curves across one corner of the site, reminding walkers that people have shaped this land for thousands of years.