Puriton, United Kingdom

A cement and lime works was at the western end of the Polden Hills, at Dunball. It used Blue Lias stone quarried at several locations in the village, transported to the works on narrow-gauge railways. This area of the Polden Hills was used for quarrying stone and lime burning from 1888 until 1973. Quarrying may have taken place on the hillside as early as the 15th century.

In 1910 exploration for coal discovered a 36 metres (118 ft) thick seam of Rock salt 183 metres (600 ft) beneath the mudstones. Between 1911 and 1922 this was commercially extracted by dissolving the salt with water pumped down bore holes, which was brought to the surface and evaporated in boiling pans.

In 1941, ROF Bridgwater, an explosives factory, was opened midway between Puriton and the adjacent village of Woolavington. The factory lies mostly in Puriton parish, with a small portion in Woolavington. Several million gallons of water per day were extracted from the nearby artificial Huntspill River to supply process water to the factory. After peak production in the second World War, the factory's water extraction rate became lower and the process water was returned to the Huntspill River after use, with clean-up through a reedbed sewage treatment plant. However, since the factory's closure (see paragraph below), this reedbed has been allowed to silt up. The site's former owners, BAE Systems Land and Armaments, closed the whole site in spring 2008. In 2017, it was announced by the site's current owners, a private company, the Salamanca Group, that they planned to turn it into a smart campus, called: Gravity.

The village's stone quarries began to go out of use during World War II. The cement and lime works, next to both the King's Sedgemoor Drain and the Bristol and Exeter Railway line, became run down by the early 1960s and was demolished when the M5 motorway was built through part of the site. The church, and the boundary walls, in the old part of the village, are built of blue lias blocks. Puriton Park was built over part of the site of an in-filled blue lias quarry, at the eastern end of the village.

The British Institute for the Achievement of Human Potential, which was the forerunner of British Institute for Brain Injured Children (BIBIC), moved in 1976 to a former 19th century house: Knowle Hall. The headquarters of BIBIC was to remain at Knowle Hall until 2014, when they relocated, across Somerset, to Langport. It is believed that they were unwilling to carry of burden of ongoing repair costs of what was mostly an old building.

On 19 July 2023, it was confirmed that approximately half of the Gravity site would be a developed as new factory dedicated to producing Electric vehicle batteries for Tata Group's Tata Motors, the owner of Jaguar Land Rover. Construction work is ongoing.