History of Weston-super-Mare

Weston-super-Mare is an unusal name for a town and no, it has nothing to do with horses!  It is a mixture of Anglo Saxon and Latin and is often misspelt as Western Super Mare.  Oh and there are those hyphens too, along with the "s" of "super" being in lower case.  But we won't hold it against you if you get it wrong, so long as you get here and enjoy yourselves!

For those who really want to know, West Tun was Anglo Saxon for a settlement in the west.  This is obviously such a general term that there became far too many such settlements for anyone to be able to distinguish one from the other.  It is thought that in the 13th Century when the overlords wanted to collect their taxes, they ordered the monks who scribed in Latin to distinguish between the approximately 60 settlements all known as Weston. So after various latin appendages from various writers of Latin over a period of years, we eventually became Weston-super-Mare, or Weston Above The Sea,  we think somewhere in the middle of the 14th Century.  

It remained a small town until the Victorians discovered the fresh air, the benefits of sea water and then invented the steam train, when Weston-super-Mare grew quickly.  There's much Victorian heritage here and many of the buildings were designed by a very skillful and imaginative architect, Hans Price.  

For those of you interested in ancient history, we can even offer you an Iron Age hillfort to explore, here or you can enjoy a visit to Weston Museum that takes you through a tour of pre-history to the present age.