The first ever National Trust centre and shop for the outdoors has opened in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, providing visitors with information to help them explore the surrounding Somerset countryside.

With not a tea towel or wooden duck in sight, visitors will be able to buy from a new outdoors product range, including walking socks and Ordnance Survey maps, in what will be a major change to the usual National Trust shopping experience.

More than half-a-million people a year take a day out in Somerset and visit Cheddar Gorge, part of the reason why this location was chosen as the first centre of its type to highlight the work of the National Trust in the outdoors.

Andy Mayled, National Trust General Manager for the Somerset Countryside, said: “We won’t be selling the tea towels and lavender bags that you’d normally expect to find in a Trust shop.

“Our work in Cheddar Gorge is all about giving people access to the open countryside and this shop will sell the things needed to help people get out into the great outdoors. The new centre will help us to tell the story of the National Trust’s work in Cheddar Gorge, of which we own half, and the wider Somerset countryside sites that we manage from Exmoor to Glastonbury Tor.”

Via EPR Network
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