Sweet Track in Nature
When so much of today is fast-track, the Sweet Track is a special magical place for us. A quiet path, trodden by countless individuals, symbolising time-honoured, ancient wisdoms.
‘The Somerset Levels are one of Britain’s best-known areas of wetland, where the extraordinary preservative qualities of the peat have embalmed ancient trackways and lost villages for thousands of years. Excavating the Levels … Bryony and John Coles have unearthed the world’s ‘oldest road’, the Neolithic Sweet Track.’ (Sweet Track to Glastonbury – The Somerset Levels in Prehistory, Bryony and John Coles, 1986, Butler & Tanner, Frome and London).
This is a very beautiful and special landscape where Collette comes to make a deep connection with the land and nature. It is the oldest known road still in existence, 6,000 years old. A Neolithic footpath that runs for over a mile across the Somerset Levels. An elevated causeway through the low-lying marshes and meadows, across rhynes, overhung by willow trees, circled by wildlife abundance and views across the inland sea towards Glastonbury (the Glassy Isle, the Isle of Avalon).
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Photography by Palden Jenkins and Collette Barnard
In prehistoric times this causeway, the Sweet Track, linked communities. Today it is a nature reserve with a tranquil and timeless atmosphere.