Why the Quantock Hills Reward the Slow Traveller

Somerset keeps its finest walking country quietly to itself. While the crowds pour into the honeyed villages of the Cotswolds and the dramatic tors of Dartmoor, a modest range of hills in the county’s west goes largely unnoticed, which is exactly how those who know it prefer things. The Quantock Hills are small, soft and deeply English, a landscape of heathery ridges, wooded combes and ancient tracks, and they reward not the traveller in a hurry but the one willing to slow to their gentle pace.

These hills hold a quiet distinction: they were the first landscape in England to be formally protected for their beauty, recognised decades ago as something worth keeping. Yet that early acclaim never translated into fame, and today the Quantocks remain one of the least trodden of England’s protected uplands. You can walk a ridge here on a fine afternoon and meet almost no one, which in the crowded English countryside is a rare and precious thing.

A landscape at walking pace

The Quantocks are made for walking, and only really reveal themselves on foot. A road will show you nothing; a footpath will show you everything. The high ground is open heath, purple with heather in late summer, threaded with ancient tracks that run along the ridgelines with long views to the Bristol Channel on one side and the Somerset levels on the other. Below, deep wooded valleys — combes, in the local word — fall away into cool, ferny shade, with clear streams running through them and old oaks closing overhead. For English hills of a wilder, border-country character, our piece on why the Shropshire Hills reward the slow traveller makes a fine companion.

It is intimate country rather than grand. There are no great peaks, no vertiginous drops, nothing that demands technical skill or serious equipment. What there is instead is variety at close quarters: heath and wood, ridge and valley, open sky and enclosed shade, all within a short walk of one another. This is landscape to be savoured slowly, on foot, over long unhurried days — precisely the kind of travel set out in planning a genuinely slow itinerary. Those drawn to open upland will find kindred country among the heath and moor retreats that celebrate exactly this kind of terrain.

Wild ponies and older presences

The Quantocks are home to herds of hardy ponies that roam the hills freely, grazing the heath and gathering in the combes, and coming upon them on a misty morning is one of the quiet joys of the place. Red deer move through the woods too, and the hills are rich with birds — buzzards wheeling overhead, the small darting life of the heath and the streams. It is a landscape that feels genuinely wild for all its gentleness, unmanicured and left largely to itself.

There is deep human history here as well, worn soft by time. Ancient burial mounds crown the ridges, and old drovers’ tracks and hollow ways record centuries of foot and hoof. The hills feel layered with the past in the understated English way, nothing signposted or dramatised, just the quiet evidence of long habitation for the walker who notices. This sense of an old, gentle countryside links the Quantocks to the more famous but similarly layered landscapes of the Cotswold villages a county or two to the east.

The Quantocks give up nothing to the traveller who hurries. Walk slowly, and they open like a book you did not know you could read.

The Romantic inheritance

These hills carry a particular literary charge. Two of the great English Romantic poets lived and walked here at the close of the eighteenth century, and much of the poetry that helped invent our modern feeling for landscape was composed on these very ridges and in these very combes. To walk here is to walk in their footsteps quite literally, through the country that shaped their imaginations. You need not care a jot for poetry to enjoy the hills, but knowing this lends the walking a certain resonance — a sense that this quiet corner once helped teach a whole culture how to look at nature.

It is fitting that a landscape which inspired such slow, attentive looking should reward the same in its visitors today. The Quantocks are not a place to conquer or to photograph and leave; they are a place to sit in, to walk through slowly, to return to across the seasons and watch change. That patient, seasonal way of knowing a landscape is the same instinct that draws people to the quiet uplands and moorlands catalogued in the peatland and moorland country.

How to take them slowly

Part of the reward here is seasonal, and it pays to choose your moment. Late summer brings the heather into flower, turning the high ground purple and drawing the bees and the light; autumn sets the wooded combes alight with colour and thins the walkers to almost none; spring is all birdsong and fresh green and the ponies with their foals. Even winter has its stark appeal, the ridges bare and the views long and cold. Whichever season you choose, come for several days rather than one, and let the hills reveal themselves slowly, combe by combe, in the unhurried way they reward. Pack stout boots and a good waterproof, for the weather here turns quickly, and half the pleasure is being properly equipped to ignore it.

Base yourself in one of the small villages tucked into the hills’ skirts, in a pub with rooms or a farmhouse, and give yourself several days. Walk a different combe each morning, take long lunches, let the weather dictate the route. Do not try to cover the whole range in a day; the point is not distance but attention. Come in late summer for the heather, in autumn for the turning woods, or in the soft light of spring, and expect to have the ridges largely to yourself whenever you come. The Quantocks are a small, quiet reward for the traveller who has learned that the finest places are often the ones nobody is rushing to see. For more landscapes worth slowing down for, the Travel and Stays desk is the place to continue.