Qualla: Glastonbury Cemetery

Glastonbury Cemetery: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rodw, CC BY-SA 3.0. In October 1853, the vestry of Glastonbury sat down to a problem any thriving Victorian town would have recognised: where to put the dead. The churchyards at St John's and St Benedict's were nearly full. The population was growing. A burial board was formed, sites were considered - Fisher's Hill, Wearyall Hill, the fields north of St John's - and on 3 August 1854 the board settled on Edmund Hill, a slope on the edge of town named for the Saxon king who was crowned at Glastonbury Abbey in 1016. There was, the minutes recorded, 'some regret that a suitable site closer to the town could not have been found.' The cemetery on Edmund Hill opened the following spring, and the first grave was dug on 2 April 1855.

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Image: Rodw | CC BY-SA 3.0

Glastonbury Cemetery: Charles Edmund Giles, of Taunton

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Czampal, CC BY-SA 4.0. The architect was Charles Edmund Giles, a Taunton man who specialised in the kind of solid Gothic Revival ecclesiastical work that Victorian England produced by the thousand. He designed three buildings for the site: a lodge by the entrance gateway, and two mortuary chapels - one...

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Image: Czampal | CC BY-SA 4.0

Glastonbury Cemetery: Running Out of Room

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1899 the consecrated section was nearly full. A March 1900 report counted 26 consecrated and 203 unconsecrated spaces remaining - which says something about the burial preferences of late Victorian Glastonbury. A vestry meeting in September 1899 voted to buy three acres of adj...

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Image: Ashley Smith | CC BY-SA 4.0

Glastonbury Cemetery: Two Chapels, Twice Nearly Lost

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the mid-twentieth century the mortuary chapels had fallen out of use. The Church of England chapel saw occasional services; the nonconformist chapel was being used as a storeroom. Repair estimates were prohibitive. In February 1977 the town council voted to demolish both. Loca...

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Image: Ashley Smith | CC BY-SA 4.0

Glastonbury Cemetery: Dion Fortune Among the Yews

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ashley Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0. Among the burials at Glastonbury Cemetery is Dion Fortune - born Violet Mary Firth in Llandudno in 1890, died in London in 1946 - one of the most influential occultists of the twentieth century. She moved to Glastonbury in the 1920s and founded the Society of the Inner Light, wri...

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Image: Ashley Smith | CC BY-SA 4.0

Glastonbury Cemetery: A Town's Quiet Edge

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rbe2057, CC BY-SA 4.0. Glastonbury Cemetery is the kind of place that does not appear in guidebooks. It is not the abbey ruins or the Tor or the Chalice Well. It is the town's working necropolis, where people are still buried, where the names on the older stones are the names of the families who ran th...

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Image: Rbe2057 | CC BY-SA 4.0