This project supported the local Stowey Walking group and the Quantock Hills Walking Festival. The aim was to help them to achieve the “critical mass” needed to establish the Walking Festival as a financially sustainable annual event with at least a regional profile, to support the small Quantock tourism industry, and to spread the recreational load away from the honeypot sites. 

The QLPS has certainly helped to sustain the festival, but a combination of key people retiring and the move of many former B&Bs and other tourism providers towards proving accommodation for workers at the Hinkley nuclear power plant site meant that we didn’t reay fullfil our wider objectives.

In 2025 leadership of the festival passed to the National Trust at Coleridge Cottage, and we wish them every success into the future.

To help with future festivals, and with the general National Landscape events programme, with Scheme funded seven volunteers to train to Lowland Walk Leader standard.

As well as participating in and supporting the Festival, the project has a small pot of capital money for path improvements and repairs. Our first repair was on the Coleridge Way in Over Stowey at the aptly named Watery Lane (well worth a visit; Grid Ref ST182394). Here, the historic bridleway runs alongside, then actually along, the streambed. A footpath has been created around the underwater section so walkers can use it dry shod, but just before then, on the Stowey side, the path had slumped into the stream making an unsightly mess, not helped by past repairs with urban curb stones. So we fixed it!

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