Qualla: Glastonbury Lake Village

Glastonbury Lake Village: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Read more: Glastonbury Lake Village on Qualla

Glastonbury Lake Village: Building on Water

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, hau...

Read more: Glastonbury Lake Village on Qualla

Glastonbury Lake Village: Daily Life in the Mud

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 sha...

Read more: Glastonbury Lake Village on Qualla

Glastonbury Lake Village: The Glastonbury Bowl

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 lifetim...

Read more: Glastonbury Lake Village on Qualla

Glastonbury Lake Village: Why It Was Abandoned

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 currenc...

Read more: Glastonbury Lake Village on Qualla

Glastonbury Lake Village: Reburial

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 i...

Read more: Glastonbury Lake Village on Qualla