Legends will always swirl around Glastonbury, but conservation projects like the Avalon Marshes point to a future that transcends the mythical and has real benefits for our planet. The county of Somerset is England's mythical and historical heartland. Alfred the Great's military campaigns from the fortress of Athelney in the 9th Century were instrumental in the birth of the English nation ; while the nearby ruins of Glastonbury Abbey contain a grassy grave claiming to be the resting place of the mythical King Arthur.
Sites like Glastonbury Tor retain a mythical pull to this day, said by some to be places of great spiritual power. The small, modern town of Glastonbury is full of bohemian shops that trade on the area's rich corpus of folklore. In one of them, The Hollow Hills Bookshop, I picked up a work by British occultist Dion Fortune – 1934's Avalon of the Heart .
The title alludes to the identification of Glastonbury with the Isle of Avalon from Arthurian mythology (a money-making hoax by the abbey's monks, according to archaeologists ), and the pages are rich in local lore – such as the legend, immortalised in the hymn Jerusalem, that Jesus himself once visited here. Amid all the conjecture, though, the book is verifiably correct about one thing: "It is not so long since Avalon was an island." Glastonbury sits in an area known as the Somerset Levels, which nowadays is a long, flat plain of green farmers' fields between the Mendip and Blackdown Hills.
Once, though, thi.
