Burrow Mump

Burrow Mump rises where the River Tone and the old course of the River Cary meet the River Parrett, a natural lookout over the low-lying Somerset Levels. Roman pottery and coins found nearby hint that the site may have served the river-junction trade, though the evidence is slight. The hill's name folds two words for the same thing together — both 'burrow' and 'mump' mean hill — and one reading of 'burrow' as 'burh helow', a refuge fort, would make it 'the refuge fort on the hill'; it stands close to Lyng, the site of one of the fortified burhs King Alfred recorded in the Burghal Hidage.

The hill is popularly called King Alfred's Fort, but nothing proves it was ever fortified in his reign or used by him directly; its only documented Alfred connection is that it belonged to the nearby Athelney Abbey, which he founded and linked to the hill by a causeway, and it may have served as a natural outwork to the defended royal island of Athelney at the end of the 9th century. The first fortification actually built on the hill came later: excavations have found square pits, one possibly a well, post holes and a 12th-century masonry building consistent with an 'adulterine' castle, and the terraced motte on the summit may date from the Anarchy of 1135–1153.

A medieval church dedicated to St Michael, belonging to Athelney Abbey, stood on the hill from at least the mid-15th century; William Worcester gave the earliest surviving name for the site around 1480, recording it as Myghell-borough. During the English Civil War the church sheltered royalist troops in 1642 and 1645, and in 1685 a detachment of the king's army occupied it during the Monmouth Rebellion.

In 1793 the medieval church was pulled down and rebuilding began on a new one, with a west tower, a three-bay nave and a south porch in squared lias dressed with red brick and Hamstone. Despite donations from William Pitt the Younger and Admiral Hood, the appeal never raised enough to finish the work, and a parish church was built instead at the foot of the hill, in Burrowbridge, in 1838. The unfinished ruin on the summit was repaired at its north-west corner in the mid-20th century.

In 1946 Major Alexander Gould Barrett gave the hill and its ruin, 3.573 hectares in all, to the National Trust as a memorial to the 11,281 Somerset men killed in the First and Second World Wars. The ruin was listed Grade II in 1963 and has been a scheduled monument since 1949.