Burrow Mump, Somerset: Alfred the Great's lookout point
The famed hill in Burrowbridge is today's Secret Britain spot.


An excellent lookout for marauding Danes, which was Alfred the Great’s purpose when he climbed it, Burrow Mump (literally ‘hill hill’) is only 79ft tall, but the views over the Somerset Levels are extensive.
In winter, when the rivers Parrett and Tone swirl at the foot of the Mump, the landscape must look similar to that seen by the ancient King of Wessex.
Civil War Royalist soldiers who hid in medieval St Michael’s Church, at the top, must have felt comparatively wary of approaching Roundheads and probably didn’t appreciate the vista, which includes fellow ‘islands’ Glastonbury Tor and Athelney, where Alfred hid before the Battle of Edington in 878.
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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.
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