Things to do
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Somerset Bridge
Reckoned the smallest working drawbridge in the world, its opening span no wider than a sailboat mast, raised by hand with a plank. It carries the main road over the cut between Somerset Island and the rest of Bermuda.
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Somerset Village
A single street of shops and a small harbour, and one of the few places on the island that is neither a cruise stop nor a resort. The ferry calls here and the Railway Trail runs straight through it.
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Cambridge Beaches
A cottage colony on its own peninsula at the western tip, built up around a seventeenth century farmhouse and holding several private beaches inside its grounds. It was among the first Bermudian resorts of its kind.
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Fort Scaur
A fort dug into the narrowest point of the island in the 1870s, its ramparts sunk below the skyline so that a ship at sea would see nothing. The dry moat is walked as a path and the lawns above look down the length of the Great Sound.
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HMS Vixen
An ironclad gunboat scuttled across the western channel in 1896 to block it against attack, sitting in shallow enough water that her bow still stands above the surface. She is close enough to the shore at Daniel's Head to reach on a snorkel rather than a dive.
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Hog Bay Park
The largest open parkland in the west, running down through old farm terraces and woodland to a shore that empties into a wide sand flat at low tide. There is no road to the water, so it stays quiet.
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Somerset Long Bay
A long shallow curve on the north shore, protected enough that the water stays flat and warm, which makes it the family beach of the west end. A nature reserve and pond sit behind the dune line.
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Springfield & Gilbert Nature Reserve
A National Trust reserve of woodland and old farm fields behind an eighteenth century plantation house, with slave quarters, a buttery and a kitchen block still standing in the yard. Paths run from the house down through the reserve.