Glastonbury is a place of beginnings, many of them so shrouded in myth and mystery as to have become impenetrable, yet ever intriguing. As one distinguished historian wrote the Glastonbury legends may not be fact but their existence is a very great fact.
My post about Glastonbury as a centre of Marian, and related, devotion, from last year, together with links to previous posts from other years, about the abbey as a focus of prayer and history can be read at Marian Pilgrimage - Our Lady of Glastonbury
Glastonbury, its legends and history have fascinated me since I was a boy, and as a younger man I had the opportunity to stay at the adjoining Diocesan Retreat House in preparation for the Anglo-Catholic Pilgrimage each year from 1987 until 1993. I also stayed there for retreats or as a holiday base in those years, and have been on other occasions to the actual Pilgrimage. My annual week, or weeks, at Glastonbury enabled me to soak up the historic atmosphere and Christian - but hopefully not the non-Christian - spirituality of the town and abbey ruins nestling beneath the distinctive profile of the Tot with its legends and story of martyrdom in 1539. I came to sense and see just how extraordinary and exceptional this charming little market town really is as a source of so much art and literature, of myth and legend. It is a holy place, a graced place, where the time-space continuum wears this, where time becomes space.
At its heart.are the remains of the abbey. One can be awed, as at Cluny, by the horrific scale of destruction, but then realise, and marvel, that from the fragments of stonework that survive most of the monastic church could be accurately recreated.
The one portion that survives more or less completely save for vault and roof is the Lady Chapel at the western extremity
This, with its distinctive angle turrets, was built after the devastating fire of 1184 and stands on the site of the Old Church of Glastonbury. This was the venerable timber church built, it was claimed, by Joseph of Arimathea in honour of Our Lady. A later version of the legend had the structure actually created by Our Lord on a visit with Joseph of Arimathea whilst engaged in the tin trade before His public ministry. That version is, as far as I can tell, a post-reformation reworking to enhance the case for English exceptionalism. Just to the south of the chapel is the cemetery site where the monks found at this time of rebuilding what they believed, or claimed, to be the remains of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere.
The chapel as rebuilt after 1184 is, unlike the main monastic church with its early Gothic style, consciously more old-fashioned in a confident earlier twelfth century Romanesque and rich with carved decoration. In places, even today, remains of the painted decoration can be found on the sculpture of the doorways.
The Lady Chapel at Glastonbury Abbey
Image: Britain Express
May Our Lady of Glastonbury pray for us and our intentions,
Jesu mercy, Mary pray
