Visiting Glastonbury Tor

Somerset Levels - the Tor as an island

In ancient times, the Somerset levels were a shallow, marshy sea. Then, Glastonbury Tor was an island. Neolithic people in the region built platform villages linked by wooden causeways, arguably the first man-made roads.

At some point, no one knows exactly when, the Tor became a sacred site. Viewed close up, its slopes are subtly terraced, and some scholars speculate that it forms a remnant of a Neolithic labyrinth.

The Isle of Glass

The Celts called it Ynys Witrin, or the Isle of Glass, and believed it was a gateway to the underworld. Later legend has it that the Tor is the Island of Avalon, burial site of King Arthur.

Saint Michael's chapel

The tower on the Tor is all that remains of a fourteenth-century chapel dedicated to Saint Michael, a replacement for an earlier church destroyed by an earthquake in 1275.

The chapel is in itself evidence of the site's pre-Christian roots. It was a common practice to build churches on pagan worship sites both to cement the ascendancy of the new faith and to give the people a Christian gathering place at a familiar spot.

Such churches were often dedicated to Michael in his role as spiritual guardian.

Arthurian legends

In the 1960s excavations suggested that a sixth-century fortress or at least a stronghold stood on the site of the Tor, which for some supports another legend connected with the Tor, that it was the location of the stronghold belonging to 'Melwas', who is credited in one of the many Arthurian legends as the man who abducted 'Guinevere'.

There have over the centuries been offered many theories that the hill itself is/was hollow and that this in turn has led to the legends that it was the entrance to the underworld or the place of the 'Sleeping Lord'.