Glastonbury, the Isle of Avalon between King Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea

On the Somerset Levels, which once flooded to form marshes and islands, rises a conical hill crowned by a solitary tower. This is Glastonbury Tor, the landmark of a landscape that medieval tradition identified with Avalon, the island to which King Arthur was said to have been carried after his last battle. Around this hill and the great abbey at its foot some of the most enduring myths of English culture have settled over the centuries.

The abbey and Arthur's grave

Glastonbury Abbey was one of the oldest and richest in England. In 1184 a fire destroyed most of its buildings. A few years later, in 1191, the monks announced that they had found in the cemetery the burial of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, marked by a lead cross bearing an inscription. The account has reached us mainly through Gerald of Wales, who wrote that he had seen the remains.

Many historians believe the discovery was also meant to attract pilgrims and donations for the rebuilding. In 1278 the bones were moved to a tomb before the high altar in the presence of King Edward I. The lead cross was lost in the eighteenth century, and only a drawing published by William Camden survives.

Joseph of Arimathea and the Grail

A second strand of legend attributes the foundation of Glastonbury's first church to Joseph of Arimathea, the disciple who according to the Gospels buried Jesus. This tradition developed during the thirteenth century, partly through additions to William of Malmesbury's historical work on the abbey, and became interwoven with the Grail romances that were spreading through France and England in those same decades.

Linked to the legend of Joseph is the Glastonbury thorn, which flowers twice a year, in spring and around Christmas. The story goes that it grew from the saint's staff planted in the ground. At the foot of the Tor lies the Chalice Well, a spring whose waters are reddish because of their iron content, and which modern tradition has connected with the cup of the Last Supper.

The Tor and the end of the abbey

On the summit of the Tor stood a church dedicated to Saint Michael, destroyed by an earthquake in 1275 and rebuilt; of the later church only the fourteenth-century tower remains. The dedication to the archangel, common on high places, suggests an ancient perception of the site as a point of contact between heaven and earth, although hypotheses of pre-Christian cults on the hill remain hard to prove.

The abbey's history ended tragically in 1539, during the dissolution of the monasteries ordered by Henry VIII. The last abbot, Richard Whiting, was executed on the Tor itself. The buildings were stripped, and today evocative ruins remain, where a plaque marks the site of Arthur's alleged tomb. Among the surviving structures are the Lady Chapel and the remarkable Abbot's Kitchen, square in plan with an octagonal roof.

In the twentieth century Glastonbury became a centre of alternative spirituality, with bookshops, pilgrimages and seasonal celebrations. Visiting it with historical awareness allows one to appreciate how legends from different ages, medieval and modern, have settled upon a single landscape. The writer Dion Fortune, who lived there between the wars, helped to spread its image as a spiritual place. The first theories about energy lines and zodiac figures drawn in the landscape date from the same period, evocative ideas with no archaeological foundation.