Clive Gunnell visits Nettlecombe Court located near the Brendon Hills in Exmoor National Park which has just become a natural history centre for field sciences. The existing mansion house, church and parkland are sixteenth-century Elizabethan, Tudor and Georgian but archaeologists have discovered Viking remains dating to 900. The Great Hall is immortalised in the British film adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel Tom Jones (1963) starring Albert Finney.