Two miles outside Glastonbury, archaeologists in 1970 lifted a wooden walkway out of the peat that was old enough to make Stonehenge look modern. The Sweet Track, named for the man who dug a drainage ditch through it, was built in the 39th century BC - dendrochronology pins it to 3807 or 3806 BC - and it ran across the marsh from Westhay to Shapwick when the area we now call Somerset was a half-drowned wetland of reeds and islands. Glastonbury was one of those islands. Eight thousand years of more or less continuous human habitation later, it is the only town in England where Druids, Benedictine nuns, Sufi mystics, Pagan goddess priestesses, and 200,000 music festival pilgrims all consider themselves locals.
Before the Somerset Levels were drained, Glastonbury sat on a dry knoll surrounded by reedbeds, lakes, and seasonal flooding that turned the surrounding country into water for half the year. Glastonbury Tor, the strange conical hill that dominates the skyline, made it visible for miles. Iron Age communities lived nearby - Glastonbury Lake Village, built around 250 BC on an artificial timber platform, housed up to 200 people in roundhouses made of hazel and willow. The Romans came and went. The Saxons named the place Glestingaburg, possibly after a person called Glast, and in the seventh century King Centwine of Wessex endowed a monastery here that would grow into one of medieval England's most powerful institutions. Glastonbury Abbey rose, fell, and rose again. Edmund Ironside was crowned King of England here in 1016.
In 1184, the abbey burned. Pilgrim donations dried up, and the monks needed a financial miracle. In 1191 they got one: they announced the discovery of the graves of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere on the abbey grounds. The bones were duly produced, contemporary chroniclers visited and verified, and Glastonbury became the centre of the Arthurian world. Modern archaeologists led by Professor Roberta Gilchrist of the University of Reading have examined the site and concluded what historians have long suspected: the timing was, let us say, suspiciously convenient. Gilchrist will not call it a forgery outright - 'we are not in the business of destroying people's beliefs,' she said - but the layers of pilgrim coins and the Arthur story together saved the abbey. They also helped establish the deeper legend: that Joseph of Arimathea had arrived here with the Holy Grail in the first century, that the original Christian church of England stood here, and that Glastonbury was, in the words of a 1520 pamphlet, 'the holyest erth of Englande.'
Henry VIII's commissioners dissolved Glastonbury Abbey in 1539 and hanged the last abbot, Richard Whiting, from the top of the Tor. The abbey buildings were progressively dismantled - stones carried off for houses, walls, and roads - until the great church was an empty ruin. The town's wool and cloth trade carried on for a while, then declined. The canal silted up, the railway arrived in the 19th century and left in 1966, and by 1900 Glastonbury was a quiet market town living off agriculture and dim memories. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, something strange happened: the artists and mystics arrived. Frederick Bligh Bond conducted archaeological digs guided, he claimed, by automatic writing from the long-dead monks. Dion Fortune set up an occult retreat. Composer Rutland Boughton founded a summer music festival in 1914 with Arthurian themes. By the 1960s the town had become the unofficial capital of British alternative spirituality, and it has only intensified since.
In April 2012 the local Pilgrim Reception Centre counted around seventy distinct faith groups operating in a town of fewer than nine thousand people. There is a Catholic Benedictine monastery founded in 2019, a Goddess Temple that registered as a place of worship in 2003, a Sufi zikr that meets monthly in St Margaret's Chapel, an Order of Druids established in 1988, a British Orthodox Church headquartered here, and adherents of the Baha'i Faith following Wellesley Tudor Pole, who founded the Chalice Well Trust at the foot of the Tor. The Chalice Well itself produces 25,000 imperial gallons of iron-tinted water a day from a spring that has never failed in recorded memory. A short walk away, the White Spring runs with calcite-white water from a Victorian collection chamber that has been reborn as a candlelit temple. Visitors leave ribbons in trees and coins in pools.
The Glastonbury Festival is held six miles east of town, at Worthy Farm between the villages of Pilton and Pylle. Michael Eavis ran the first one in 1970, charging one pound for entry and including a free pint of milk from his herd. By 2007 the festival covered 900 acres, had 80 stages, and drew 177,000 people. It is not held in Glastonbury, but Glastonbury bears its name and lives through its week-long invasion of mud, music, and devotional eccentricity. The Eavis family still own the farm. Michael's daughter Emily runs the festival now. The 2025 Formula 1 World Champion Lando Norris grew up in town. Glastonbury keeps producing improbable juxtapositions, and somehow they all hold.
Glastonbury sits at 51.15 degrees north, 2.72 degrees west, on a dry rise in the Somerset Levels 23 miles south of Bristol. Glastonbury Tor (158 m above sea level) is the unmistakable landmark from any direction - a conical hill topped by the roofless tower of St Michael's Church. In winter the flooded Levels around it recreate the medieval island appearance. Nearest airports: Bristol (EGGD), 22 nm north; Cardiff (EGFF), 35 nm northwest across the Severn Estuary; Exeter (EGTE), 50 nm southwest. Best viewed from 4,000-6,000 feet AGL on a clear day.