Glastonbury

Glastonbury begins with its landscape. The town stands in the Somerset Levels, a flat country of moors and rhymes that flooded every winter into shallow seas, and above those floods rises the Tor, a whale-backed hill with a conical top so regular it seems shaped by hands. In the early Middle Ages the high ground of Glastonbury was truly an island, and the Welsh called it Ynys Witrin, the Isle of Glass, for the way its slopes shone above the water or for the blue glass traded there long before. Iron Age farmers built whole villages on wooden platforms in the surrounding marshes, and when Christianity came to Somerset, the isle drew hermits the way high ground always does. A monastery was standing there by the seventh century, and under the Saxon kings it grew into Glastonbury Abbey, one of the richest and holiest houses in England, the burial church of kings.

The abbey's fame rests on a grave. In 1184 a fire gutted the monastery, and seven years later, while rebuilding, the monks dug in their cemetery between two stone pyramids and announced they had found King Arthur. At seven feet down lay a leaden cross inscribed with the words "Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon," and beneath it, at nine feet, a hollowed oak trunk holding the bones of a very tall man with a wounded skull and, beside him, the bones of a woman whose golden hair crumbled when a monk snatched at it. King Henry II, it was said, had told the monks where to look, having heard it from a Welsh bard. In 1278 King Edward I came with his queen and had the bones reburied in a black marble tomb before the high altar, where they drew pilgrims for two and a half centuries, until 1539, when Henry VIII dissolved the abbey, hanged its last abbot, Richard Whiting, on the summit of the Tor, and let the grave, the cross, and the greatest church in the west of England go to ruin.

The second legend is older than Arthur in the telling, though younger in the writing. From the later Middle Ages, Glastonbury claimed that Joseph of Arimathea, the rich disciple who buried Jesus and kept the cup of the Last Supper, had sailed to Britain after the Crucifixion and built at Glastonbury the first church in the land, a humble wattle chapel the monks called the Old Church. Weary from the journey, Joseph had thrust his staff into the ground of Wearyall Hill, and the staff budded, and grew into the Glastonbury Thorn, a hawthorn that blossoms twice a year, once in spring and once in the dead of winter at Christmas. Pilgrims came from across Europe to see the thorn and the church, and the monks called their ground the holyest erthe in England, the holiest earth, a second Jerusalem where heaven had touched down twice: once with the Grail and once with the grave of the once and future king.

The Tor keeps the oldest layer of all. Long before the monks, the Celtic tradition placed the otherworld in such hills, and Glastonbury's Tor was named as the dwelling of Gwyn ap Nudd, the Welsh king of the fairies and lord of Annwn, the land of the dead. The tale of St Collen tells how the saint, living as a hermit on the hill, was invited into Gwyn's palace inside the Tor, refused the fairy feast, and threw his holy water over the glittering hall, which vanished at once and left him standing alone on the bare hillside. A church of St Michael, the archangel who weighs souls, was later built on the summit, and its tower still stands, the landmark of the whole plain. At the Tor's foot the Chalice Well rises, a spring whose waters run red with iron, and tradition says Joseph hid the Grail there, and the water has blushed ever since.

Modern Glastonbury has simply added new layers to the pile. In the twentieth century the town became a pilgrimage site again, this time for mystics, artists, and seekers who trace ley lines through the Tor, honour the Goddess in its slopes, and fill its high street with crystal shops and healing rooms. Since 1970 the farmland at nearby Pilton has hosted the Glastonbury Festival, the largest greenfield music festival in the world, where for one weekend a year a temporary city of two hundred thousand people gathers under the same sky as the monks, the kings, and the saints. The abbey ruins still draw their visitors, the thorn still blooms, and a sprig of its winter blossom is cut each Christmas and sent to the reigning monarch, a small green message from the Isle of Avalon.