welcome to oakhill ponds
Hello - we're Rob and Amanda, we’re so glad you’ve found your way here.
Oakhill Ponds is our home, our work and our passion: a spring-fed Somerset landscape shaped by water, story and imagination. Rich in wildlife, it is a place where nature, creativity and community come together.
We live here with our youngest daughter, Iona, our dogs Mabel and Freddie, and Rob’s dad, Denis. We are delighted to share this corner of the world with you.
Oakhill Ponds is a living landscape, often described as magical. We hope it offers space to rest, swim, read, write, make, gather, wonder and create.
our story
We moved to Somerset at a turning point in family life. Our older daughters were beginning to make their own way in the world, and Iona was still young enough for us to imagine a different rhythm — one shaped by water, trees, birdsong and space. We were ready for change, though we couldn’t have known quite how much this place would change us.
Both of us trained in theatre, and that background shapes the way we see Oakhill Ponds. We are interested in story, atmosphere, encounter and attention: how a place can invite people to shift perspective, listen more deeply and see the world with a little more imagination.
For over a decade before moving here, we helped create spaces for reflection and creativity through Breathing Space, a community arts and slow movement project. That rhythm — of stillness and activity, solitude and community, play and creativity — continues to shape what we are growing here.
Our family includes three wonderful daughters: Anya in Japan, Ellie in London, and Iona, who has grown up alongside Oakhill Ponds. Their creativity, courage and different ways of seeing the world continue to shape us and the place we are growing here.
Rob balances tending the land, off-grid experiments and writing a children’s novel with a day job in tech. Amanda swims in the ponds through the seasons and curates place-responsive experiences shaped by story, poetry, ritual and the beauty of this landscape.
oakhill ponds story
For millennia, water has been flowing here from the Mendip Hills, surfacing in a line of springs, gathering in the bowl that we now call Oakhill Ponds.
Over deep time, water has shaped caves, slockers and passageways in and around this land — underlands only partly discovered. Above ground, the springs have fed marshy meadows, trees, birds, insects and amphibians. In the eighteenth century, this water was gathered into ponds and reservoirs for Oakhill Brewery, then shaped into waterfalls, dams, grottoes and tunnels: a working landscape that also stirred the imagination.
Springs rising in our woodland were held in the ponds, aerated and sent downhill into Oakhill Brewery, founded in 1767 at The Beeches. The brewery grew around the house, where generations of owners lived, worked and hatched their plans. That water helped make Oakhill Porter and Stout famous — and helped build much of the village that grew around it.
Old maps, photographs and local memory show how closely the house, brewery buildings, springs, ponds, pipes and wider water landscape were connected.
Yet the water here played both a useful and aesthetically evocative role. Grottoes — cave-like follies of stone, water and shadow — were designed to awaken wonder and stir memories of myth, caves and hidden worlds: places where landscape became a kind of poetry.
the grotto in the dam
At Oakhill Ponds, even the dam has an inner life. Between the upper and lower waters, an eighteenth-century grotto is folded into the stone: tunnels, chambers, seats, niches, stairways, cascades and small windows of light. It is a place of engineering and enchantment, built to hold water and provoke wonder. Historic England calls it an “unusually complete survival”; we think of it as one of the thresholds of the land — a hidden passage between industry and imagination, depth and water, past and present.
Long after the brewery’s heyday, the ponds and grotto remained part of local memory and village story. Some people remember playing here as children, accepting the extraordinary as ordinary — as though every village had ponds with waterfalls, tunnels, chambers and a hermit's cell.
what we're growing here
Today, Oakhill Ponds is being reimagined as a living water landscape where creativity, ecology and reflection meet. Our work is to create a sustainable business that helps the land flourish — sharing it carefully, protecting its quiet, honouring its layered history.
We hope that our venture helps people to slow down, notice what matters, rediscover wonder, respond creatively and care more deeply for the world we are part of.
stay a while
Oakhill Ponds continues to evolve through stays, retreats, swimming, sauna, creative gatherings and quiet days. For whatever reason you come here — to rest, write, swim, celebrate, gather or simply breathe more deeply — we hope you feel the care, imagination and attention woven into the place.
We’re not experts or gurus — just two people with a love for the land, a spark of creativity and a desire to share this special place.
Come and explore Oakhill Ponds and this beautiful corner of Somerset. We’d love to share it with you.
The photograph below shows brewery workers gathered outside The Beeches — once the heart of the Oakhill Brewery complex and now our home.
