Colliery Wheel

The Colliery Wheel sits outside Mells as a tangible reminder of Somerset's industrial past - a proper Victorian-era mining installation that stopped operating decades ago but still commands respect. It's the kind of thing you might drive past without noticing, which would be a shame, because this restored wheel tells the story of what happened underground when Somerset was taken seriously as a coal-producing region.

What you're looking at is engineering from an era when moving coal wasn't automated nonsense but required mechanical ingenuity and brute force. The wheel itself is substantial, weathered, authentic. You can walk around it, photograph it, and feel the weight of manual labour that went into extracting minerals from beneath the countryside. There's no gift shop, no interpretive panels hammering home the narrative - it's just there, asking you to fill in the blanks.

This works best for industrial history enthusiasts and walkers who are already exploring the Mells area rather than those planning a dedicated trip. Allow twenty minutes, maybe half an hour if you're chatty with other visitors or want to sketch it. It's free to visit, though getting close sometimes depends on whether local farmers have fenced sections off.

Stay at Glamping on the Hill nearby - three miles away - and you can work this into a broader Somerset circuit. It pairs well with a morning walk around Mells village itself, which has genuine medieval bones. The Colliery Wheel won't take long, but it'll lodge in your head as a genuine artifact of how Somerset worked.