Glastonbury Abbey

In 1184 the abbey burned down. In 1191, with the rebuilding stalled for want of money, the monks announced that while digging in the cemetery they had found a coffin sixteen feet down, and with it a lead cross reading Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon. Pilgrims came. The money came. Historians have been polite about it ever since, and modern opinion is close to unanimous: it was a fundraising exercise by an institution in serious trouble. That does not make the place less interesting. It makes it one of the best-documented pieces of medieval marketing in England, and you can stand on the spot.

The richest abbey in England, and then a field

A monastery existed here by the seventh century, and probably earlier: a British Christian community on what was then an island in the marshes. Ine of Wessex endowed a stone church about 712. Dunstan, abbot here from about 940 and later Archbishop of Canterbury, reformed English monasticism from this house and made it the wealthiest in the country. Three Anglo-Saxon kings were buried here — Edmund I, Edgar and Edmund Ironside.

The fire of 1184 destroyed almost everything, including the ancient wattle church that was the community’s most treasured possession. Rebuilding began at once and the Lady Chapel was consecrated in 1186, on the site of the lost church, which is why the most complete building here is also the oldest part of the new one.

By the fifteenth century Glastonbury was the second richest religious house in England, after Westminster. Then, in 1539, the king’s commissioners arrived. The abbey was seized, the abbot was executed, the lead came off the roofs, and for three hundred years the site was a quarry. The buildings did not fall down. They were carried away, piece by piece, into the walls and roads of Somerset. That is why so little stands: not decay, but re-use.

The visitor’s cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The museum, and the model

Start inside, at the entrance, with the scale model of the abbey as it stood before 1539. Five minutes there makes the rest of the site legible: without it, the ruins read as a handful of walls in a park, and with it you can see that you are standing in the fourth-longest church in medieval England. The museum also holds finds from the excavations, which have been going on here for more than a century.

The Lady Chapel

The most complete building on the site and the first thing to walk to. It was consecrated in 1186, only two years after the fire, on the exact footprint of the old wattle church — a deliberate act of continuity by a community that had just lost its holiest object. The late Romanesque carving round the north doorway is worn but still legible, and the interior is roofless but intact to the wall-heads.

The crypt below it

Around 1500 Abbot Bere dug a crypt underneath the Lady Chapel and dedicated it to St Joseph, which meant lowering the ground and building steps down. It is one of the few places here where you are indoors, and it is the clearest physical evidence of how seriously the abbey took the Joseph of Arimathea story by the end — seriously enough to rebuild for it.

The great church

Beyond the Lady Chapel the nave begins, and what survives is mostly at ankle height: pier bases, wall stubs, the outline of the aisles in the mown grass. Two fragments of the crossing still stand to their full height, and they are the only way to feel the scale. The church was about 220 feet long before the east end was extended; the Edgar Chapel at the far end took it beyond 400. Walk the length of it on the grass. It takes a surprisingly long time.

The site of Arthur’s grave

In front of where the high altar stood, a low sign in the grass marks the place where the bones found in 1191 were reburied in 1278, in a black marble tomb, in the presence of Edward I and Queen Eleanor. The king had his own reasons for attending: a Welsh and Breton tradition held that Arthur had never died and would return, which was inconvenient for an English king conquering Wales. A funeral settles that.

Be careful how you tell the rest. The lead cross was seen and described by the antiquary John Leland in the sixteenth century and by Camden after him, and then it was lost — it has never been examined by anyone able to test it. So it was not exposed as a forgery; it simply disappeared. And the monks never admitted anything. What can be said is that the discovery came at exactly the moment the abbey needed money, that the pattern fits a dozen similar medieval relic discoveries, and that no serious historian now takes it at face value.

What the archaeology actually shows

Glastonbury has been dug more thoroughly than almost any monastic site in Britain — thirty-six seasons of excavation between 1904 and 1979 — and for most of that time the results were reported by excavators who already knew what they hoped to find. C. A. Ralegh Radford, who dug here from the 1950s, announced an early Celtic monastic community, and identified the spot where the monks had supposedly exhumed Arthur.

A project led by Professor Roberta Gilchrist at the University of Reading went back through the entire excavation archive with modern methods and published its findings in 2015. The results cut both ways, which is what makes them worth reading. Radford’s two headline claims did not survive: neither the pre-Conquest cloister he believed was the earliest in England, nor the reputed site of the exhumation of Arthur’s grave, is supported by the evidence.

But the same reassessment pushed the site’s history in the other direction. It found new evidence of occupation here in the fifth or sixth centuries, earlier than Radford had been able to demonstrate, and it re-dated a remarkable glass furnace complex to the late seventh century, three hundred years earlier than anyone had thought. The legends lost; the place itself turned out to be older and more important than the digging had proved.

The Abbot’s Kitchen

Across the grass stands a square stone building with an octagonal roof, and it is the one complete room left on the site: the Abbot’s Kitchen, built in the fourteenth century, with a great fireplace in each of its four corners and a lantern at the apex to draw the smoke. It is one of the best-preserved medieval kitchens in Europe, and it survived because it was useful — the site’s later owners kept it for storage while the church was being carted away.

The Holy Thorn

Somewhere on most visits someone will ask about the thorn. The legend is that Joseph of Arimathea came here after the crucifixion, pushed his staff into the ground on Wearyall Hill, and it took root. The tree involved is a real variety of hawthorn that flowers twice a year, in spring and again around midwinter, which is what gave the story its evidence. It is first recorded in an early sixteenth-century text — late, in other words, not ancient. Cuttings have been sent to the monarch at Christmas since the reign of James I, and descendants of the tree grow in the abbey grounds.

The grounds, the fishponds and the landscape

The ticket buys 36 acres, and most of it is parkland rather than ruin. The abbey ran a working landscape out here — fishponds, a mill leat, drainage across the Levels — and a medieval house this size was an agricultural corporation as much as a religious one. It is also simply a good place to sit, and the abbey encourages picnics everywhere except the Great Church and the Lady Chapel.

1539, and the Tor

Richard Whiting had been abbot for nearly twenty years when the commissioners came. He refused to surrender the abbey. He was tried at Wells, convicted of treason, dragged up Glastonbury Tor on a hurdle and hanged, drawn and quartered there on 15 November 1539, at about eighty years old. His head was set over the abbey gate and the quarters sent to four Somerset towns.

You can see the Tor from parts of the grounds, and after that it is not really possible to look at it as scenery. It is a mile away, free to climb, and belongs to the National Trust rather than to the abbey.

Tickets and tours

Don’t miss

• The model in the museum Five minutes with it before you walk out makes the whole site readable.
• The sign in the grass Marking where Arthur and Guinevere were reburied in 1278, in front of a king who wanted the matter closed.
• The Abbot’s Kitchen Four corner fireplaces and a smoke lantern. The only complete room left.
• The Lady Chapel crypt Dug about 1500 for St Joseph, and the one place here you are properly indoors.
• The north doorway carving Late Romanesque, weathered, and better than it first looks.
• The length of the nave Pace it out on the grass. It is the fourth-longest medieval church in England under your feet.
• The Tor from the grounds Where the last abbot was executed in 1539.

Insider tips

Book the night before. Online is £14 against £15 at the gate, and online sales stop at 6pm the day before your visit, so the saving is only available to people who plan a day ahead.

Last entry is 45 minutes before closing, whatever the closing time happens to be that month. Arriving at half past five in high summer is fine; arriving at half past three in midwinter may not be.

Do not plan on the Tor being part of this. It is a mile away, uphill, National Trust, and free, and it wants an hour of its own and proper shoes.

Take a picnic. The abbey allows it everywhere except the Great Church and the Lady Chapel, there are tables and benches, and 36 acres is a lot of walking to do hungry. The Yard Café at the entrance is open to anyone without a ticket.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Glastonbury town is immediately outside the gates and is unlike anywhere else in England; the high street is worth an hour by itself. The town has plenty of places to eat and a reasonable choice of small hotels and B&Bs. Wells is six miles north and makes the obvious pairing, and Bath is under an hour by car. There is no useful train, so this is a place you reach by road.

More English cathedrals and abbeys

• Wells Cathedral — six miles north, and what Glastonbury might have looked like if it had survived.
• Bath Abbey — a monastery that became a parish church instead of a quarry.
• Rock of Cashel — another great ruined religious site read from its foundations up.
• Kylemore Abbey — a Benedictine house that is still a Benedictine house.

See all the English cathedrals in this guide →