In summer, the Glastonbury festival may grab the headlines, but in winter, it is the extraordinary sight of 2m starlings that draws the eye on the Somerset Levels, coming together in fluid clouds that swirl back and forth in the last of the light before diving to roost in the reeds below.

It is the greatest wildlife show in the west, and is now so popular that the RSPB even has a starling hotline, telling visitors how best to see it.

When I was there, the birds were roosting in the wetlands at Ham Wall, which is reached by a footpath that runs from Ashcott along a disused railway track. Twenty years ago, there was nothing here but disused peat workings.

Today, it is one of Britain’s finest national nature reserves, a refuge not only for wintering starlings, but also a haven for all kinds of wildlife, from otters to barn owls.

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In spring, rare bitterns boom in the reed beds, and soon, it is hoped, another lost marshland voice will be heard, with the RSPB’s plans to reintroduce the crane, a bird that has not bred in the West Country for 400 years.

Winter, however, is when these Somerset wetlands are at their most atmospheric, when the floods arrive and the fields go under, awakening echoes of the ancient Saxon fen, whose secret islands and dense reed jungles hid King Alfred from the marauding Danes.

Peel off the M5 midway between Bristol and Taunton and in no time you have swapped the fast lane for a bygone cheese-and-scrumpy world in which eel-catchers and basket-weavers still make a living. Uneven roads that ripple with subsidence lead you ever deeper into its waterlogged heart, on raised causeways lined with pollard willows. Into this land of the seven rivers — Axe, Brue, Cary, Isle, Tone, Parrett and Yeo — pours all the runoff from the green hills of Somerset.

The result is more East Anglia than west of England: a chequerboard of spongy pasture crisscrossed by willow-bordered dykes and ditches. Every­where in this timeless landscape the sense of the past is palpable.

At Shapwick Heath National Nature Reserve you can see where the oldest routeway in Britain was unearthed. Here ran the Sweet Track, a Neolithic boardwalk, traversing Somerset’s peat-bog jungles 6,000 years ago.

In places, the peat is 30ft deep. Some spots are nearly 20ft below the high-tide mark in Bridgwater Bay and much of the land is so low-lying that vast areas are thought to have been overwhelmed by a tsunami in 1607. Across the flatness of the Levels, distant landmarks draw the eye, and none more so than the enigmatic hilltop called Glastonbury Tor.

Approach it from any direction and you can see why in Somerset all ley lines lead to Glastonbury. Capped by the beckoning finger of St Michael’s Tower, it dominates the view for miles. The climb to the summit will make you puff, but the rewards are huge — a 360-degree panorama taking in the Mendips, Wells Cathedral, Flat Holm in the Bristol Channel, Exmoor, the Quantocks and the Dorset hills.

While you are there, spare a thought for Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, who was dragged to the top of the Tor and hanged in 1539 on the orders of Henry VIII. The ruins of his abbey, once the largest in England, lie below on holy ground overlaid with legends of Arthur and Guinevere. Here, some believe, Joseph of Arimathea buried the grail and built a church of wattle and daub, making this the oldest Christian site in the land.

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