Under an August Sky: Eclipse Magic on Cley Hill
There are some summer evenings you know you’ll remember long after the light has faded. Wednesday night was one of them.
Like thousands of people across the South West, I’d been watching the weather forecast almost as closely as the astronomical predictions. Because on August 12th, the moon was due to slip across the face of the sun, giving us the most spectacular partial solar eclipse seen from the UK for years.
And where better to watch it than from the top of Cley Hill?
I headed up there with a group of my closest Somerset friends, armed with eclipse glasses, drinks and that slightly giddy feeling you get when you know you are about to witness something special.
We weren’t alone. As the evening drew on, people gathered across the hill, finding their own patches of grass and turning their faces towards the sky. There was a wonderful sense of shared anticipation. For once, nobody was looking down at their phones. We were all looking up.
Then the moon began to take its bite from the sun - bit by bit.
Through our eclipse glasses, the familiar bright circle slowly became something altogether stranger. As more of the sun disappeared, the light around us began to change too. The landscape took on that peculiar, muted quality that photographs never quite capture.
From high on Cley Hill, with the Somerset countryside stretching away beneath us, it felt magical.
But perhaps what made it particularly special for me was who I was with.
There is something about witnessing a moment like that with people you love. We talked, we laughed, we watched the sky and occasionally fell silent as we took it all in. In a busy world, it felt like a little pocket of time when there was nowhere else any of us needed to be.
And the universe wasn’t finished with us quite yet.
After the eclipse, we headed back to our friends’ house and stayed outside as darkness properly fell. Instead of calling it a night, we lay out on the lawn and turned our eyes skywards again.
August is the season of the Perseids, one of the most beautiful meteor showers of the year, when the Earth passes through a trail of debris left behind by the Comet Swift-Tuttle.
So there we were, stretched out on the grass, waiting.
And then came the shooting stars.
There is something wonderfully childlike about spotting a meteor. No matter how old you are, the reaction is the same. A flash across the sky, a shout of “There!” and everyone desperately trying to work out whether they were looking in the right direction.
After the drama of the eclipse, the Perseids felt like the perfect encore.
I spend a lot of my time rushing from one thing to another, but lying on a Somerset lawn with some of my favourite people, staring into an August night sky, everything felt beautifully simple.
An eclipse. Shooting stars. Old friends. A warm summer night.
Sometimes the best evenings are the ones that remind you just how extraordinary the ordinary can be, especially when you stop for long enough to look up.
Written by Daisy Steel
Journalist, columnist and podcaster
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