On the Levels Community aims to revive Somerset's eel population

When the Somerset Levels flood in winter, their reed-fringed waterways swell into a glinting inland sea, haunting and half forgotten.

- Amelia Hill

Generations ago, these wetlands pulsed with the seasonal arrival of eels: twisting through rhynes - human-made channels - and ditches in their thousands, caught in baskets, sung about in pubs and paid as rent to Glastonbury Abbey.

Today, those same waters flow more slowly, more sparsely: once-teeming channels now show only the barest traces of what was here.

Determined to reverse that collapse, the Somerset Eel Recovery Project (Serp) is weaving together science, folklore and community creativity to bring back not only the eel but a lost sense of local identity.