Country diary: Somerset

The wintry scene at Christmas had been still and silent, the millpond solid ice, but now there was the sound of water rippling along the gullies and tumbling down the waterfall where the stream is diverted to make the mill leet. The little river Cam rises on a hillside at Bratton and dives down into Yarlington, where it flows through the garden of the Stag's Head Inn, and was once used to turn the wheel of Yarlington Mill. The Cam then passes through North Cadbury and Sparkford, fed by several unnamed rivulets that drain the sudden small hills and slopes that look down on villages like Compton Pauncefoot and Queen Camel. I went back to one of those small hills topped by woods and thickets to look down at Queen Camel. When I was last there the water had spread beyond the river banks to flood the fields and threaten the village school. But not so this time, though the river was swollen and flowing fast. From the edge of the wood, a green field slopes down to ploughed land and the gleaming curves of the river on its winding, tree-lined course to the bridge beside church and school. Beyond the village lies the Yeo valley, flat fields divided by trim hedgerows, and beyond the valley a rim of distant hills. On this cold January morning, the trees were bare, black against horizontal yellow streaks in the sky. A few yards along the track the ground falls away, and there ahead you could see the mass of Cadbury Castle. The light in the sky was different on that spring day in 1959 when John Steinbeck first climbed Cadbury-Camelot, as he called it, drawn here on a kind of pilgrimage by a lifelong devotion to Sir Thomas Malory's tales of Arthur. He wrote to a friend on 1 May: "It was a golden day, and the apple blossoms are out … it made the hairs prickle on the back of the neck … mystic, wonderful."