The Somerset Monument stands on the Cotswold Edge escarpment half a mile from Hawkesbury Upton, a hundred-foot tower of dressed ashlar visible for miles across the Severn Vale. Designed by Lewis Vulliamy and completed in 1846, it commemorates General Lord Robert Edward Henry Somerset, third son of the 5th Duke of Beaufort, whose family seat at Badminton lies just a few miles to the east.
Somerset's military career spanned the Peninsular War and the climactic Battle of Waterloo in 1815, where he commanded the Household Cavalry Brigade. During the first cavalry charge against Milhaud's cuirassiers, Somerset lost his hat. In the subsequent search for it, a cannonball tore off the flap of his coat and killed his horse beneath him. He survived, and his brigade's conduct that day — both the ferocity of its charges and its patient endurance of French artillery fire — became legendary.
Somerset was also the elder brother of Lord Raglan, who would later command British forces in the Crimean War. He died on 1st September 1842, and the monument was erected four years later by public subscription.
“Somerset was also the elder brother of Lord Raglan, who would later command British forces in the Crimean War.”
The tower's first keeper was Shadrack Byfield, a one-armed veteran of the Anglo-American War of 1812. A native of Bradford on Avon, Byfield lived in Hawkesbury Upton from 1843 to 1856, guarding the monument and no doubt recounting his own war stories to visitors. The tower is Grade II* listed and currently on the Heritage at Risk register. It can be seen from the Tyndale Monument at North Nibley, ten miles to the north-west.
