Choose your skip size in Shepton Mallet
Not sure which size you need? Compare dimensions, capacity and typical uses — every size below is available in Shepton Mallet.
Local area guide
Skip hire in Shepton Mallet
Shepton Mallet is a market town in Somerset, sitting on the southern slopes of the Mendip Hills around 18 miles south of Bristol, with a population of around 10,500. Its name combines the Old English for sheep farm with the family name of the Norman Malet lords who held the manor, and the town grew wealthy on wool and cloth — by the seventeenth century it was one of the foremost cloth towns in the west of England, with the fast streams of the Sheppey powering fulling mills along the valley.
That prosperity left a fine legacy. The parish church of St Peter and St Paul has a celebrated fifteenth-century carved wagon roof, with some 350 panels and nearly 400 carved bosses, often described as the finest of its kind in England. The Market Cross of 1500, rebuilt in the Victorian period, stands in the Market Place beside the Shambles — a rare surviving medieval market stall of timber and stone, one of very few left in the country.
The town's most unusual building is Shepton Mallet Prison, which opened in 1625 and closed in 2013, making it the oldest operating prison in the United Kingdom at the time of its closure. During the Second World War it was used by the US Army as a military prison, and it held some of the most significant historical documents in the country for safekeeping — including the Domesday Book and a copy of Magna Carta — away from the London bombing. It is now open for tours.
Shepton Mallet has a long association with drink. Showerings developed Babycham here in the 1950s, a sparkling perry sold in distinctive coupe glasses that became a national phenomenon and was the first alcoholic product advertised on British television. The Royal Bath and West Showground, a short distance south, hosts the Royal Bath and West Show — one of the oldest agricultural shows in the country — and the town sits a few miles from Pilton, home of the Glastonbury Festival.
The town sits on the A37 and A361, with Castle Cary station around 20 minutes south giving services to London Paddington in under two hours; Shepton Mallet itself lost its railway in the 1960s. Wells, the smallest city in England, lies five miles west, with Cheddar Gorge and the Mendips close by. Housing ranges from weavers' cottages and Georgian and older stone property around the Market Place and Town Street — much of it listed and within a conservation area — to Victorian terraces, interwar and post-war housing, and considerable modern development on the town's edges.






