Cheddar Wood
protected area in Somerset, England
Cheddar Wood (grid reference ST445552) is an 86.9-hectare (215-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest at Cheddar in the Mendip Hills, Somerset, England, notified in 1967.
Cheddar Wood and the smaller Macall's Wood near Cheddar Gorge are what remains of the wood of the Bishops of Bath and Wells in the thirteenth century and of King Edmund the Magnificent's wood in the tenth. It lies on carboniferous limestone with rock showing through the thin topsoils. In 1801 the wood was larger than it is today. During the nineteenth century its lower fringes were grubbed out to make strawberry fields, most of which have reverted to woodland. It was coppiced until 1917.
This site comprises a range of habitats which includes ancient and secondary semi-natural broadleaved woodland, unimproved neutral grassland and a mosaic of calcareous grassland and acidic dry dwarf-shrub heath. Two nationally rare plant species are present. Additional interest lies in the invertebrate fauna. Cheddar Wood is one of only a few English stations for starved wood-sedge (Carex depauperata), which grows in the lane along the east side of the wood.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5089195. Authority coordinates are 51.293, -2.797. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1801 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cheddar Wood” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.