Visiting the town today you could be forgiven for finding it unremarkable at first glance. To the north, the mouth of the river Severn and the southern coast of Wales beyond. To the east, the great sweep of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire with its barrows and circles of stone – Avebury and Stonehenge. To the south, the hills of Dorset and the rampant figure of the Cerne Abbas giant waving his club. To the west of the town lie the moors of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall – Exmoor, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. Glastonbury, a small town in south-west England, is considered by many to be one of the most sacred spots on earth. The secret of Glastonbury is that we are invited to enter an earthly paradise.John Michell, New Light on the Ancient Mystery of Glastonbury It is a place of meeting of the inner and outer worlds too, of the essence of Paganism and Christianity, which merge in the story of the grail, and of the God and the Goddess embodied in Glastonbury Tor and Chalice Hill. Echoes of the Druids, Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus, King Arthur with his Queen Guinevere can all be found here.Avalon is a place of meeting – every year the Glastonbury festival attracts thousands of music lovers, and hundreds are drawn to the Goddess Conference and gatherings of the Order of Bards Ovates & Druids. During Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century, the abbey was sacked and its bishop hung on the Tor.Ĭhristian pilgrims still come to the town but they are outnumbered now by Pagan and New Age pilgrims and by spiritual seekers who are drawn here by the numerous legends that coalesce around key features of the town and surrounding countryside. In medieval times the town and its Abbey rivalled Canterbury as a destination for pilgrims. Standing on Glastonbury Tor when the mists have rolled in and only hilltops are visible, it is easy to imagine the area as it once was – islands and lake villages on stilts surrounded by water. Glastonbury, in south-west England’s cider-making region of Somerset, is known to spiritual seekers as Avalon, the ‘isle of apples’. ~ St Augustine of Canterbury, 6th cent AD ~ There is on the confines of western Britain a certain royal island, called in the ancient speech Glastonia, marked out by broad boundaries, girt round with waters rich in fish and with still-flowing rivers, fitted for many uses of human indigence, and dedicated to the most sacred of deities.
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