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First published in: City GENT Issue 127. December 2005
YEOVIL
Set in the fertile river valley of the Yeo, it has always been surrounded by prosperous farms, so there is a Farmer Palmer Red Alert. Yeovil was made more prosperous by the making of gloves, and other things, from sheep’s skin from the Dorset Downs.
Yeovil is a small town, and the locals seem to have two ways of looking at it:
1st. Prosperous with a lot of pretty buildings built of honey coloured limestone.
2nd. A desperately inward looking and insular place where young people leave, or stay and produce twelve toed children.
One thing most of the Glovers seem to agree on is that there are plenty of pubs, of all kinds. We doubt any City fans will want to settle here after the match, or even be allowed to, so we can all enjoy some beer on one of the prettiest trip of the season, pretty apart from the football of course.
The Beach
This is what the locals call the lawn below the church of St John, which is 20 miles from the sea. Which is a less daft than Bradford’s proposed canal, and costs nothing. We doubt anyone will be sunbathing when we play here though. The church is well worth a look if you like churches.
Yeovil’s museum (now called the Museum of South Somerset) seems to have been tarted up in a sympathetic way. The building used to be the Coach House of Hendford Manor.
Fleet Air Arm Museum
A must see if you like war planes. The Fleet Air Arm was the Navy’s air force, and it is worth learning something of how it had to fight the Battle of the Atlantic, to stop Britain starving, with battered old biplanes because the RAF got given thousands of super expensive modern bombers. Bombers which dropped their bombs an average of 20 miles from the target in the first three years of the war, and which caused fewer German casualties than the number of bomber crew killed doing it!
The museum is to the north of Yeovil and there is an entrance fee.
Yeovil Town’s Huish Park ground is at least two miles to the north-west of the town centre, and there seem to no pubs near the ground. In the town the Mermaid Hotel on the High St is an historic boozer selling real ale; The Butchers Arms on Hendford Way, the same street as the Museum, is small and friendly; and the Armoury Inn to the north of it seems worth a look.
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