Exploring Axbridge : Page 2

You will now come to the Square where the buildings have had many uses over the centuries. If you'd come in a waggon three hundred years ago your way might well have been blocked by a shambles. This was a market building for the sale of livestock. A painting in the downstairs room of the Museum shows its extent, filled with horses on the day of a fair. Also giving the ancient traffic grief was the market cross, similar to the one still in Cheddar. The one in the Square was deemed such a hazard to smooth circulation that it was pulled down in 1756. A pattern of bricks near the Oak House shows the place it once stood.

In the twentieth century many of the now private residences were shops.

The Post Office on the left used to be a garage with its pumps in the yard where the post vans now park, and the house beside it, Mendip View, was a hostel for cyclists.

A bicycle shop itself was located where the Old Forge now is, and the Old Market Shoppe has a medieval bread oven at the back where the townspeople would come to bake their bread in past centuries.