The Myths and Legends at Glastonbury

Glastonbury is a small town in Somerset, but it carries more legends per square mile than almost anywhere else in Britain. Some of these stories are old, some are very old, and a few have been quietly stitched together over the centuries until it is hard to tell where one ends and another begins. Taken on their own, each tale sounds like the defining myth of the place. Looked at together, they share roots, characters and locations in ways that feel less like coincidence and more like the branches of a single old tree.

What follows is a short tour of the main legends attached to the town, and the threads that link them.

King Arthur and the Isle of Avalon

The Arthurian stories range across Britain and into France, but Glastonbury sits near the centre of the map. Many people have argued, over the years, that this is where Camelot once stood, with its Round Table, its knights, Merlin, and Arthur himself.

The strongest physical clue is at South Cadbury, a few miles away, where there is a large hill fort. Excavations have shown the site was reoccupied and refortified in the early 6th century, which fits the rough period when a historical figure behind the Arthur legends, if there was one, is thought to have lived. That has been enough for generations of writers to point at Cadbury and call it Camelot.

Closer to the town itself is Glastonbury Tor, the steep conical hill that rises out of the Somerset Levels. Some identify it with the Isle of Avalon, the place where Arthur was taken to be healed after his final battle. Given how much wetter the Levels once were, the name makes more sense than it first appears. In the early medieval period the surrounding land flooded for much of the year, and the Tor would have stood out as high ground above the water. One old name attached to Avalon is the "Island of Glass", and some have suggested Glastonbury itself takes its name from the same idea, though the etymology is debated.

The Arthur connection got a further push in 1191, when the monks of Glastonbury Abbey announced they had discovered the graves of Arthur and Guinevere on the abbey grounds. Conveniently, this came when the abbey had recently burned down and badly needed funds for rebuilding, and a royal tomb was good for pilgrim numbers. Whether the monks found anything genuine, planted the find, or simply rebranded an older grave, is something historians still argue about.

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Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Thorn

The second great Glastonbury legend is older in feel and more directly tied to the Bible. Joseph of Arimathea is the man named in the Gospels as the one who provided the tomb for Jesus after the crucifixion. According to the Glastonbury tradition, Joseph later travelled to Britain, possibly as a tin trader, and brought the young Jesus with him on an earlier visit. This is the story behind William Blake's lines, "And did those feet in ancient time", which became the hymn Jerusalem.

The story continues that Joseph returned after the crucifixion and settled at Glastonbury, founding the first Christian church in Britain on the site that later became the abbey. When he arrived, so the tale goes, he thrust his wooden staff into the ground at Wearyall Hill. The staff took root and grew into a thorn tree that flowered twice a year, once in spring and once around Christmas.

A thorn tree did grow at Wearyall Hill for centuries, and cuttings from it have been planted around the town and at the abbey. The original tree was cut down during the English Civil War by Puritans who disliked the superstition attached to it, but replacements were grown from cuttings. The most recent Wearyall Hill thorn was vandalised in 2010, which caused real distress locally. A sprig of the Holy Thorn is still sent to the monarch each Christmas.

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The Holy Grail and the Chalice Well

Joseph's story is the bridge to the third legend, because in some versions he did not arrive empty handed. He is said to have brought with him the cup used at the Last Supper, or two cruets containing the blood and sweat of Christ. This is the Holy Grail, and it ties the biblical strand of the Glastonbury story directly back into the Arthurian one, since the quest for the Grail is the great spiritual mission of Arthur's knights.

At the foot of the Tor sits the Chalice Well, a natural spring whose water runs a deep red because of the iron content in the rock. The colour has long been read as a symbol of Christ's blood, and the well is associated with the place where Joseph is said to have buried or hidden the Grail. The site is now run as a quiet garden by a charitable trust and remains a place of pilgrimage for people of various faiths and none.

Next to it is another spring, the White Spring, whose water is clear and rich in calcium. The pairing of red and white waters has its own folklore attached, and some link it back to older, pre-Christian beliefs about the Tor as a sacred hill.

How the stories fit together

What is striking about Glastonbury is how willingly the legends share space. Joseph brings the Grail, and centuries later Arthur's knights set out to find it. The Tor is both a Celtic otherworld and the resting place of a Christian king. The abbey claims Joseph as its founder and Arthur as its most famous burial. The same handful of locations, the Tor, the abbey grounds, Wearyall Hill, the Chalice Well, the hill fort at Cadbury, keep turning up in different tales.

None of this proves anything historically. The written sources are late, often centuries later than the events they describe, and several of them have clear motives, whether religious, political or financial. What the layering does show is how a particular patch of Somerset became a magnet for stories about origins: the origin of British Christianity, the origin of British kingship, the origin of a sacred object. People still come to Glastonbury with those questions in mind, and the town still seems happy to hold them.

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