Last visit: August 2026

You can't really miss The Plume of Feathers.

Driving above Rickford on the A368, it appears to be the obvious heart of this tiny cluster of houses below you, and there always seem to be people sitting outside enjoying a pint. After years of passing through and wishing I could join them and discover what this intriguing little village was like, I finally stopped.

It was worth it.

The Plume has been part of Rickford for generations. The earliest surviving document relating to the property dates from 1801. It was once a working rural pub in every sense: farming and beer retailing took place here, cider was made from the surrounding orchards, and in the early twentieth century the pub could be open from six in the morning for men wanting a pint before work.

You can still feel something of that history inside.

The pub is arranged around three rooms, with the main bar occupying a large space around a huge log burner on a slate floor. A second, cosier room opens off the bar, while a lower room provides additional seating and a pool table.

Historical photographs of the village, its people and the pub are displayed throughout, making it easy to start imagining the Rickford of earlier generations. A pub copy of Mary Coward's book, “Rickford-A history of a North Somerset Village” is available behind the bar if you'd like to read the history of the village.

But this isn't a museum.

It's a living village pub.

Kate and Dan have been at the Plume for 20 years this year, and during my visit I met Amberley, who was working front of house. She had one of those natural abilities to make people feel welcome that can't really be taught, a real gem. Meanwhile, the people I met during the walk were already talking about the pub as somewhere they regularly visit.

At Yeo Valley I was told about the Friday “gin trail” from Blagdon, with the Plume as its destination on the way home. Later, a mountain biker I met on Black Down told me the Plume was his local and was looking forward to returning for the food. I tried the Ploughman's myself — enough to move the Plume into second place in my highly unofficial search for the best pub lunch — but the pizza menu has already given me a reason to return. Roquefort pizza? Absolutely.

And then there are the ducks.

The annual duck race takes advantage of the ford running through Rickford, with the Plume acting as its headquarters for a wonderfully eccentric Mendip summer event that raises money for local charities. I missed this year's race by only a few weeks, but the painted rubber ducks around the pub made sure I knew I'd missed something significant.

This is what makes The Plume special.

Its setting is extraordinary, its history is fascinating and its food is worth stopping for. But underneath all of that, it is still what you hope to find when you turn off a main road into a tiny village: a pub where local people come, where visitors are welcomed, where things happen, and where the community has a place of its own.

Rickford may wear many historical layers.

The Plume of Feathers is the beating heart beneath them all.

Rickford Rising, the Ford & the Water That Shaped a Village

It is difficult to understand Rickford without first understanding its water.

At the foot of Blagdon Combe, the Mendip limestone has a remarkable way of hiding water underground before releasing it again as springs. At Rickford, the result is the Rising: a clear, constant spring emerging from the hillside before flowing beneath the road and into the Mill Pond.

The flow is extraordinary. Rickford's history records an average of around 13.7 million litres of water a day, fed by the underground drainage of the Mendips. The Rising has reportedly never been known to run dry.

It is easy to imagine the significance that must have had for a small settlement.

The water provided power for mills, shaped the village's boundaries and created the ford that may lie behind Rickford's name. An early Anglo-Saxon reference to the area describes a large spring as Schirebourne, or “clear stream”, while two mills on the stream were recorded in the Domesday Book.

The relationship between village and water remains remarkably visible today.

The brook runs through Rickford and, historically, formed the boundary between the parishes of Burrington and Blagdon. That created some curious consequences: people living on opposite sides of the stream could belong to different parishes, even though they were neighbours.

Further down the village, the water becomes even more difficult to ignore.

The road itself enters a substantial ford. There is no conventional two-lane carriageway here; instead, the route narrows to a single lane alongside a footpath before part of it disappears into the stream bed. The ford is deep and uneven enough that it is effectively a four-wheel-drive crossing rather than a normal road for ordinary cars.

It is an extraordinary sight in a modern English village.

But perhaps it shouldn't be surprising. The name Rickford is thought to incorporate the idea of a ford, and the stream has been part of the settlement's physical geography for centuries. Here, the water hasn't simply been accommodated by the village. The village has been built around it.

That becomes even clearer at the Mill Pond.

The pond has existed for centuries, with a leat carrying water towards the mill. The readily available supply supported a variety of local industries, most notably flour milling and later paper making. The paper mill continued to produce paper by hand into the nineteenth century, making use of the same resource that had first helped establish milling here.

In the late nineteenth century the landscape around the pond was transformed again, with W. H. Wills landscaping the area and enlarging the pond.

Today it is one of Rickford's prettiest features: water lilies, the little chapel reflected on the surface, the cascade below and the Rising continually replenishing it.

It is easy to see only the beauty.

But look at the water closely and you are looking at the reason Rickford is here at all.

Source: Mary Coward, Rickford – A History of a North Somerset Village, Rickford History Group.

Bristol Water – From Mendip Spring to City Supply

By the late nineteenth century, Rickford's water was no longer simply a local resource.

Bristol was expanding and its demand for water was growing. The reliable supply emerging from the Mendips attracted the attention of the Bristol Waterworks Company, which obtained powers in 1888 to take water from Rickford.

The Gauge House, built in 1895, is the most visible reminder of what happened next.

But it is easy to miss what makes this particular corner of Rickford so captivating. The Gauge House is not an isolated piece of water infrastructure: it is part of a remarkable sequence of water and buildings that unfolds as you move through the village. The Mill Pond, its small waterfall, the elegant Mill House and the chapel lead the eye onwards towards the Gauge House, and then further along the road towards The Plume of Feathers. Water, stone and buildings combine to produce an almost Swiss-like quality in this tiny Mendip settlement.

Only then does the practical purpose of the Gauge House become apparent.

Beneath it are the regulating arrangements that controlled the flow of water through Rickford. Water needed to remain in the brook, while surplus could be diverted into a pipe carrying it towards Blagdon Lake.

So the water that had once turned Rickford's mill machinery was being incorporated into a much larger infrastructure — helping supply Bristol.

The Gauge House also provides another glimpse of the influence of the Wills family. The land on which it was built was acquired from the estate, and the Wills family retained rights relating to the supply of water to parts of their Rickford property.

There is something rather satisfying about following the water's journey.

It begins as rain falling on the Mendip Hills, disappears underground, emerges at Rickford Rising, fills the Mill Pond, passes through the village and eventually becomes part of the infrastructure serving a growing city.

For centuries, Rickford lived from its water.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Bristol was living from it too.

Source: Mary Coward, Rickford – A History of a North Somerset Village, Rickford History Group.

Rickford Chapel – Methodists, Baptists & Dissenters

The little chapel beside the Mill Pond looks almost as though it has arrived from somewhere else.

The building was commissioned by W. H. Wills as a Baptist Chapel and hall and completed in 1888. An earlier Baptist chapel, together with a barn, yard and cottage, had stood nearby before being acquired and demolished to make way for the new building.

But the religious story in Rickford goes back further.

Dissenters were living in the village in the early nineteenth century, and “Deeds of Dissent” were registered in 1828 and 1843, allowing dwellings in Rickford to be used as places of Protestant worship.

A chapel was operated by Methodists until 1854, when the Baptists took over. An “open church” was subsequently formed in 1859, allowing former Methodist attendants to join. But disagreement arose because the Methodists had not been baptised, and they eventually resigned.

The present chapel therefore represents much more than a pretty building beside the pond. It is part of the story of the religious divisions and adaptations that shaped communities across England during the nineteenth century.

There is an especially nice connection here with the wider story of England's religious strands explored elsewhere on Pubs Worth the Walk.

The Wills Family & the Western Mendips

The Wills family left a remarkable mark on this part of the Mendips.

Sir W. H. Wills acquired Coombe Lodge, Blagdon and around 400 acres in 1879. Over the following years he bought additional land and property around Blagdon and Rickford, built farmhouses and cottages, and became an important local landowner.

His influence can still be seen in Rickford.

The family acquired buildings and land as they became available, including Rickford Mill House, and built cottages for estate workers. They also commissioned the present chapel. Their wider estate encompassed land around Rickford, Burrington, Blagdon and Langford.

The family wealth came from Bristol's great W. D. & H. O. Wills tobacco business, which grew into one of Britain's major tobacco companies and later formed part of Imperial Tobacco.

The story therefore isn't simply one of a wealthy family buying a country estate.

It is a story of Bristol industrial wealth reaching out into the Mendips and becoming physically embedded in the landscape: houses, cottages, farms, chapels, roads, water infrastructure and eventually the great country estate at Coombe Lodge.

The walk provides glimpses of that influence rather than a grand tour. The land through which the route first climbs towards Burrington Ham forms part of the estate land made available to the public, while later, leaving Rickford, the route passes the high stone walls of Coombe Lodge.

The Wills family effectively wrote themselves into the landscape.

Rock of Ages – the Cleft, the Hymn & the Legend

The final layer belongs not to Rickford itself, but to the Burrington Combe section of the walk.

The cleft in the rock face is traditionally associated with Augustus Toplady, who was curate of Blagdon in the eighteenth century. According to local tradition, he sheltered here from a violent storm and the experience inspired him to write Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me.

It is a wonderful story.

Whether it is literally true is less certain.

The tradition has become inseparable from the place, and the cleft is now marked with a commemoration of the hymn. Local churches continue to gather here for an annual Rock of Ages service, maintaining a connection between the landscape, the hymn and the communities around it.

Toplady himself provides another link with the walk's starting point. He served at Blagdon, and the church there features in our New Inn, Blagdon walk and pub entry.

And if Rock of Ages sounds like an unlikely cultural reference point for a modern walker, there is another route into it.

You may know the phrase from Queen.

The words appear in Brighton Rock, providing a rather different musical echo of a hymn written more than two centuries earlier.

From Mendip geology to eighteenth-century Anglicanism and twentieth-century rock music, it is another example of how much cultural history can hide behind a name on a rock face.