Qualla: Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum

Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1830 a brick chimney went up beside a rhyne in the village of Westonzoyland, and a beam engine began coughing smoke into the Somerset sky. For the first time in human history, somebody on the Levels was using mechanical power to push water uphill. The Romans had tried to drain this place; the monks of Glastonbury and Muchelney had built embankments here in the Middle Ages; the Dutch engineer Sir Cornelius Vermuyden had drawn up a scheme that the English Civil War destroyed. None of it had quite worked. The Westonzoyland engine worked. It worked so well that within decades pumping stations were going up across the Levels, and what had been salt marsh and floodland for a thousand years became the green agricultural plain that air travellers see today.

Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum: Drowned Country

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Somerset Moors and Levels are not really land. They are a reclaimed estuary: a coastal clay belt only slightly above mean sea level, with an inland peat belt at lower elevation behind it. For most of recorded history, large parts flooded with every winter rain and every high ...

Image: David Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum: Vermuyden's Plan, the King's War

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gillett's Crossing from Bristol, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0. In the early 17th century, during the reign of James I, an ambitious plan to drain and enclose much of Sedgemoor was proposed. The local Lords supported it. The Commoners opposed it - they would lose their traditional grazing rights, which had sustained generations of small farme...

Image: Gillett's Crossing from Bristol, United Kingdom | CC BY 2.0

Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum: Why Not Windmills?

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The strange absence in the record is the windmill. In the Fens of East Anglia, wind power had been pumping drainage water since the 17th century - hundreds of small windpumps that lifted water from low fields into high drains. On the Somerset Levels, only two windmills are record...

Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum: 1830, and What Came After

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. The first mechanical pumping station on the Levels was built at Westonzoyland in 1830 to drain Westonzoyland, Middlezoy and Othery. The original machine was a beam engine driving a scoop wheel - imagine a water wheel running backwards, scooping water from the rhyne up into the Ri...

Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum: Restoration on a Charity's Budget

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. After 1951 the building stood unused. In 1976 members of the Somerset Industrial Archaeology Society began restoration work. The Westonzoyland Engine Trust gained charitable status in 1980 and in 1990 purchased the site outright from Wessex Water. Volunteers stabilised the engine...

Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum: Engines from Everywhere

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Dace, CC BY-SA 2.0. The displayed collection is a small museum of British industrial engineering. There are 'quick revolution' engines by Belliss and Morcom, Robey and Co., Easton and Johnson, and Sissons. There are horizontal engines by W. and F. Wills (formerly powering a brickworks) and by J. Cul...

Image: Ashley Dace | CC BY-SA 2.0

Westonzoyland Pumping Station Museum: A Small Railway Beside a Bigger History

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Allen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Westonzoyland Light Railway is a short narrow-gauge line that runs alongside the pumping station, built after the closure to move heavy equipment around the site and now used to transport timber for the boiler. The locomotives are a 1968 Simplex diesel from the Minworth Sewag...

Image: Chris Allen | CC BY-SA 2.0