SOMERSETSHIRE, a south-western county of England, bounded north and north-west by the Bristol Channel, north and north-east by Gloucestershire, north-east and east by Wiltshire, south-east by Dorsetshire, south-west and west by Devonshire. The area is 1,630.3 sq. miles. The county, orographically, consists of a basin surrounded on three sides by hills and limited on the fourth by the sea. The northern hills are the Mendips, composed of Carboniferous limestone, stretching from Nunney to the sea and appearing again in the islands of Steep Holm and Flat Holm, which link the structure of Somerset with that of South Wales. The summit of the Mendips is a long tableland between Soo and I,000 ft. in height, but rising in the west to just over that figure. To the north they die away gently, as a number of low hills, towards the Avon, which forms the county boundary first with Wiltshire and then with Gloucester. Here the limestone is cov ered in places by coal measures, but most of the rocks are Triassic. Southward the Mendip hills drop steeply in an abrupt line broken by many coombes, e.g., the gorge of Cheddar. The basin to the south is composed mainly of Triassic rocks, which, near the sea and along the valleys, are covered by recent alluvium. The basin is usually lower in its western than in its eastern part, which is known generally as Sedgemoor, but with different names in dif ferent parts. The large basin is subdivided into those of the Parrett and the Brue by the Polden hills, which run parallel to the Mendips from Lydford to Puriton. To the west of the Parrett rise the Quantock hills, which are outliers of the Devonian moorlands of Exmoor and the Brendon hills. These three hill groups consist almost entirely of Devonian rocks, and their highest points respectively are Will's Neck (1,261 ft.), Dunkery Beacon (1,707 ft.) and Lype hill (1,391 ft.). From Crewkerne along the southern and eastern borders of the county as far as the Avon runs a more or less continuous line of low Jurassic hills, while around Chard in the south there is a fair extent of Cretaceous rocks.
In early postglacial times the low lands were morasses and the clay lands forested, and so man, when he came to the district, settled on the open heights—the sterile old rocks of the west, the chalk of the south, the limestone of the Mendips and the oolites on the east—and the caves of Mendip and Cheddar have yielded valuable evidence of late Palaeolithic and Epipalaeolithic cultures. The evidence of finds of weapons, and of tumuli with beakers and other pottery, shows that the distribution of the pop ulation in the early ages of metal was very largely on the un f orested areas In the Chew valley, just south of Bristol, a few stone circles show connections with the Megalithic culture, and it is probable that some of the fortified camps date from the Bronze age. At a later time invaders, who knew of iron, penetrated into the county, and we have finds of their weapons, their pottery and of the remains of their animals along with traces of their crops. They had many earthworks here, e.g., Worlebury, north of Weston-super-Mare, at other points on the Mendips, and in the south, at Cadbury; and were the first to settle in the lake village at Glastonbury (q.v.).
History.—The Romans overran Somerset after the Claudian conquest of A.D. 43, and remains of the period of the Roman occupation are numerous, particularly east of 3° W. Bath, which was probably a settlement in earlier times, became, on account of the medicinal properties of its waters, an important Roman centre where the Fosse Way from Cirencester met another road from Silchester. From Bath another road ran north-westward, north of the Avon to the Severn and a Roman station guarded the crossing to Caerleon. The Fosse Way was continued from Bath to Exeter, and on it we have stations at Camerton and at Ilchester, where it crossed the Yeo. Besides these four settlements, remains of about so Roman villas have been discovered in the county.