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.
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‘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).
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.