Glastonbury Tor

Neolithic flint tools recovered from the top of the Tor show that the hill has been visited, perhaps with some lasting occupation, since prehistory. The nearby remains of Glastonbury Lake Village, identified in 1892, confirmed an Iron Age settlement of about 300–200 BC on what was then an easily defended island in the fens. There is no evidence of permanent occupation on the Tor itself, but the finds, Roman pottery among them, suggest it was visited on a regular basis. When the settlement was first recorded, in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, it was called Glestingaburg; the second element is Anglo-Saxon and more likely refers to a monastic enclosure than to a fortified place, while Glestinga is obscure and may derive from an Old English word, a Celtic personal name, or a person or kinship group named Glast. The Welsh name for the hill was Ynys Wydrin, sometimes Ynys Gutrin, meaning Isle of Glass.

A team led by Philip Rahtz excavated the summit between 1964 and 1966 and found evidence of occupation in the 5th to 7th centuries around what later became the medieval church of St Michael. The finds included postholes, two hearths, one of them a metalworker's forge, two burials oriented north to south and thus unlikely to be Christian, fragments of 6th-century Mediterranean amphorae that had carried wine or cooking oil, and a worn hollow bronze head which may have topped a Saxon staff.

The sides of the Tor carry seven deep, roughly symmetrical terraces, or lynchets, and how they were formed remains unexplained. They may be a natural differentiation of the layers of Lias stone and clay, or the work of medieval farmers terracing the hill to make ploughing easier; Nicholas Mann questions the farming explanation, since the effort would be expected to concentrate on the sunny southern side, yet the terraces are equally deep on the north and none of the other slopes of the island were terraced at all.

Defensive ramparts have also been proposed, though ramparts normally take the form of a bank and ditch and there is no evidence of that arrangement here: where South Cadbury had three concentric rings around a 44-acre enclosure, the Tor has seven rings and very little room on top to keep a community safe. A defensive function has been linked to Ponter's Ball Dyke, an embankment with a ditch on its east side about a mile east of the Tor, whose purpose and provenance are unclear. Ralegh Radford took the dyke for part of a great Celtic sanctuary, probably of the 3rd century BC; Philip Rahtz and others dated it to the post-Roman period and tied it to the Dark Age occupation on the Tor; an excavation in 1970 pointed to the 12th century or later. The historian Ronald Hutton mentions the further possibility that the terraces are the remains of a medieval spiral walkway made for pilgrims climbing to the church, like the one at Whitby Abbey. Geoffrey Russell proposed in 1968 that they are instead the remains of a three-dimensional labyrinth; in a more recent book Hutton writes that "the labyrinth does not seem to be an ancient sacred structure".

During the late Saxon and early medieval period there were at least four buildings on the summit. The base of a stone cross shows Christian use of the site in this period, and it may have been a hermitage; the broken head of a wheel cross dated to the 10th or 11th century was found partway down the hill and may have belonged to the cross that stood on top, and is now in the Museum of Somerset in Taunton. The earliest timber church, dedicated to St Michael, is believed to have been built in the 11th or 12th century, and its post holes and the associated monks' cells have since been identified. In 1243 Henry III granted a charter for a six-day fair at the site.

St Michael's Church was destroyed by an earthquake on 11 September 1275. It was felt in London, Canterbury and Wales and was reported to have brought down many houses and churches across England; the British Geological Survey puts the shaking at probably more than 7 on the Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik scale, with its epicentre in the area around Portsmouth or Chichester. A second church, again dedicated to St Michael, was built of local sandstone in the 14th century by Abbot Adam of Sodbury on the foundations of the first, with stained glass, decorated floor tiles and a portable altar of Purbeck Marble. The Monastery of St Michael on the Tor was probably a daughter house of Glastonbury Abbey.

The church stood until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, when it was demolished except for the tower. The Tor was the place of execution where Richard Whiting, the last Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, was hanged, drawn and quartered along with two of his monks, John Thorne and Roger James.

In 1786 Richard Colt Hoare of Stourhead bought the Tor and funded the repair of the tower in 1804, including the rebuilding of its north-east corner. It was then sold to the Very Rev. Hon. George Neville-Grenville and held within the Butleigh Manor estate until the 20th century. Its last private owner, Robert Neville-Grenville, wished to give the Tor to the National Trust along with the Glastonbury Tribunal; after his death in 1936 it was sold to the Trust, which raised money for its upkeep by public subscription.

The National Trust took control in 1937, though repairs were delayed until after the Second World War. Excavations in the 1960s identified cracks in the rock, suggesting that the ground had moved in the past, and this together with wind erosion had begun to expose the footings of the tower, which were repaired with concrete. Erosion by the feet of increasing numbers of visitors was a problem too, and paths were laid so that people could reach the summit without damaging the terraces. After 2000 the access was improved and the tower repaired again, the parapet rebuilt and some of the masonry damaged by earlier repairs replaced with new stone from the Hadspen Quarry. The tower is a Grade I listed building, and the site is a scheduled monument managed by the National Trust. A model loosely based on the Tor, carrying a tree instead of the tower, was built for the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, and the athletes' flags were displayed on its terraces as they entered the stadium.

The Britons seem to have called the Tor Ynys Afallon, the Isle of Avalon, and some, among them the 12th- and 13th-century writer Gerald of Wales, have believed it to be the Avalon of Arthurian legend. It has been associated with the name Avalon, and identified with King Arthur, since the alleged discovery in 1191 of his and Queen Guinevere's neatly labelled coffins, an episode recounted by Gerald. The hill has drawn Christian pilgrims since at least the 11th century and still does, both for its long-standing dedication to St Michael the Archangel, patron of many sacred mountains and hills, and more recently for the martyrdoms on its summit of the three beatified Benedictine monks, Abbot Whiting, John Thorne and Roger James.

With the 19th-century revival of interest in Celtic mythology the Tor became associated with Gwyn ap Nudd, first Lord of the Otherworld, Annwn, and later King of the Fairies, and came to be represented as an entrance to Annwn or to Avalon. A more recent myth is the Glastonbury Zodiac, an astrological figure of enormous size supposed to have been laid out along ancient hedgerows and trackways, in which the Tor forms part of Aquarius. It was proposed in 1927 by Katherine Maltwood, an artist with an interest in the occult, who thought it about 5,000 years old; most of the ground she assigned to it was under several feet of water at that date, and many of the field boundaries and roads she traced are recent. The Tor also matters to the modern Goddess movement, which reads the hill as a breast or as the whole figure of the Goddess and marks it with an annual procession up the slope behind an effigy.