Glastonbury Tor

The Isle of Avalon, and seven terraces nobody can explain

A cone of clay and Blue Lias rising 158 metres out of the flat Somerset Levels, crowned by the roofless tower of St Michael’s Church and seen from miles around; in a thermal inversion it can seem to float above the mist, a mirage named after Morgan le Fay. The Britons seem to have called it Ynys Afallon, the Isle of Avalon, and since the reported discovery of the coffins of Arthur and Guinevere in 1191 the Tor and Avalon have been the same place in the imagination. Its sides are cut by seven deep terraces nobody has explained. Medieval ploughing makes little sense when the cold north side is terraced as deeply as the sunny south, and in 1968 Geoffrey Russell proposed a three-dimensional labyrinth walked to the summit, which the historian Ronald Hutton doubts. An earthquake threw down the first church in 1275, and in 1539 the last Abbot of Glastonbury, Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered on the top with two of his monks. The National Trust cares for it, and the iron-rich spring of Chalice Well rises at its foot.