Arthur Bulleid was a medical student in 1892 when he started digging in a field near Godney, two miles northwest of Glastonbury. He had read about Swiss lake dwellings - Iron Age villages built on stilts over alpine waters - and convinced himself that something similar must exist in the marshy ground of his native Somerset. The locals thought he was wasting his summer. Then his spade turned up a piece of pottery, then a wooden post, then another, and another, until what emerged from the peat was the most completely preserved prehistoric village ever found in the United Kingdom.
The village was constructed around 250 BC on a morass - not a lake exactly, more a permanent swamp that flooded in winter and softened to mud in summer. To make solid ground the builders dumped at least 1,000 tonnes of clay onto a foundation of timber, brushwood, and bracken, hauled from drier ground about a kilometre away. On the new platform they built five to seven groups of houses, each cluster a family compound with sheds and barns of hazel and willow covered in reed thatch. At its peak the village held up to 200 people in perhaps 15 houses, ringed by an alder palisade with deliberate gaps in it. Archaeologists Stephen Minnitt and John Coles concluded the palisade was not defensive - it was structural, holding the clay platform together at its edges. Causeways up to 130 feet long connected the village to firmer ground. The villagers used log canoes for the rest.
The peat preserved what dry sites destroy. Bulleid and his later collaborator Harold St George Gray pulled wheel spokes and an unfinished wheel hub out of the ground, woven baskets up to 700 millimetres wide and 480 deep, a wooden frame for stretching animal hides, dice and a shaker made from antler. They found pottery, charcoal, whetstones for sharpening blades, spinning whorls and weaving combs that suggest textile production - whether for sale or for the household, no one can say. There was evidence of bronze casting and iron smelting in the village. The diet, surprisingly given the surrounding water, was largely vegetable and small mammal: beavers and otters made up more of the meat than fish, alongside wheat, barley, and beans. Among the most poignant finds were the burials of ten newborn babies - the only human remains discovered on site. The adults were buried somewhere else.
The most famous object is a small bronze bowl, riveted together from two separately made halves. The lower half is Iron Age. The upper half was added in the first century AD, cut from a sheet of metal that had been something else first - perhaps part of a shield. Over its lifetime the bowl was repaired several times. It is the kind of object that suggests a community with skilled metalworkers, trade networks, and a sense of material value. The Glastonbury Bowl now sits in the museum at the Tribunal on Glastonbury High Street, where most of the lake village's portable artefacts ended up. The British Museum holds some pieces too. The Museum of Somerset in Taunton holds others. In 1909, the future King George V visited the excavation while he was still Prince of Wales, and the diggers presented him with a silver replica of the bowl.
The village was occupied for about two hundred years, then abandoned around 50 BC - possibly because the water level rose, possibly for reasons that left no archaeological trace. The peat closed over the buildings and the wooden floors and the dropped pottery and the iron currency bars. For nearly two thousand years no one knew it was there. Bulleid worked the site for six months a year from 1892 to 1899, then left to finish his medical degree. He came back in 1904 with Harold St George Gray, who had been trained in modern excavation technique by General Pitt-Rivers, the founder of British archaeological method. They documented every find: large timber, fragments of pottery, layers of hearth ash, all drawn and described before lifting. They published their findings in two thick volumes that are still in print.
When the excavation finished in 1907, Bulleid and Gray made a decision that was unusual then and looks visionary now: they reburied most of the timber. They had concluded - correctly - that the best preservation for waterlogged wood was the waterlogged ground that had preserved it for two thousand years. The site went back under the peat. A 2005 survey confirmed that the timbers were still mostly intact, although the peat coverage is thinning and the area is drying out, which is why English Heritage has listed Glastonbury Lake Village on its Heritage at Risk Register. The field looks like a field. Drive past it on the road to Godney and you would see nothing but reeds and willows. But under the soil, mostly preserved, is the most complete picture we have of Iron Age life in this part of Britain - the houses, the boats, the wheel hubs, the babies' graves, the hearths where 200 people warmed themselves through Somerset winters two thousand and three hundred years ago.
Glastonbury Lake Village lies in a field near Godney at 51.164 degrees north, 2.727 degrees west, three miles northwest of Glastonbury in the low-lying Somerset Levels. From the air there is nothing to see at the site itself - the village remains reburied under peat - but the surrounding landscape of straight drainage ditches, willow-lined droves, and seasonal flooding gives a sense of what the original marsh looked like. Glastonbury Tor is the most prominent landmark, 3 nm southeast. Nearest airports: Bristol (EGGD), 22 nm north; Exeter (EGTE), 50 nm southwest. Best viewed from 4,000 feet AGL on a clear day for context.