Glastonbury: The Field That Remembers

Glastonbury has been a site of religious significance since at least the Neolithic period. The Tor itself shows evidence of terracing that may date back 4,000 years — possibly used for ritual processions. Celtic tradition identified it as the entrance to Annwn, the Celtic Otherworld. Early Christian tradition claimed it as the site of the first church in Britain, established — according to legend — by Joseph of Arimathea in the first century AD.

Whether or not Joseph of Arimathea actually came to Somerset, the legend tells us something important: this place felt, to the people who lived near it, like the kind of place where the sacred and the earthly met. The kind of place where heaven touched ground.

By the medieval period, Glastonbury Abbey — built in the valley below the Tor — had become one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Europe. Pilgrims came from across the continent to pray at the abbey, to climb the Tor, to drink from the Chalice Well — a natural spring whose red-tinged water was said to carry healing properties. At its peak, the abbey was the wealthiest monastery in England after Westminster.

The ruins of Glastonbury Abbey — once the wealthiest monastery in England after Westminster.

In 1539, Henry VIII dissolved Glastonbury Abbey as part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The last abbot, Richard Whiting, was executed on the Tor itself — hanged, drawn, and quartered on the hill that had been considered sacred for millennia. The abbey was stripped, its stones carted off for building material. Within a generation, one of the great pilgrimage centres of Europe was a ruin.

The pilgrims stopped coming. But the hill remained. And something about the place — its strange prominence, its layered history, its air of significance — kept drawing people. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, Glastonbury had become a centre of the emerging New Age movement, attracting those interested in Arthurian legend, Celtic spirituality, ley lines, and earth mysteries.

The sacred ground had been vacated by one tradition. Others moved in to fill the space.

In September 1970, a dairy farmer named Michael Eavis hosted a music festival on his farm at Worthy Farm, Pilton — about three miles from Glastonbury Tor. Admission was £1, which included free milk from the farm. Approximately 1,500 people attended.

Eavis has spoken openly about the spiritual dimension of the site. He was aware of the ley line tradition that connected Worthy Farm to the Tor and to Stonehenge. He was aware that he was farming land that sat within the ancient sacred geography of Somerset. The festival was not designed as a religious event. But it was designed with an awareness that the land itself carried a kind of weight.

The Pyramid Stage — Glastonbury's iconic main stage — was originally built as a small pyramid structure in 1971, positioned on what Eavis believed to be a ley line. The current steel pyramid, erected in 1994, maintains that orientation.

The Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury — positioned on a ley line connecting the Tor and Stonehenge.

Today, Glastonbury Festival draws 210,000 people across five days. It is the largest greenfield music festival in the world. Its 2023 headliners — Arctic Monkeys, Guns N' Roses, and Elton John — drew a combined global audience of tens of millions. But the festival also hosts a dedicated Healing Fields area, a Sacred Spaces area with multiple faith traditions represented, and a long tradition of hosting speakers, thinkers, and activists alongside the music.

Here is the striking thing about Glastonbury Festival attendees: they describe their experience in language that is almost indistinguishable from pilgrimage accounts.

Researchers who have studied the festival find that attendees describe a sense of temporal suspension — the feeling that ordinary time has been replaced by a different kind of time. They describe a sense of communitas — the dissolution of social hierarchies and the emergence of a temporary community of equals. They describe a sense of liminality — being between worlds, between their ordinary self and something larger.

These are not festival-specific terms. They are the vocabulary of religious anthropology, developed by scholars like Victor Turner to describe what happens to people during pilgrimage and ritual. The festival is doing, for many of its attendees, what the medieval pilgrimage did for theirs.

The mud is part of it. The discomfort is part of it. The physical journey — the travel, the camping, the shared hardship — is not incidental to the experience. It is constitutive of it. Pilgrims have always known that the difficulty of the journey is part of what makes the arrival meaningful.

Here is the question that Glastonbury raises for the Christian tradition: what do we do with a place that was sacred, that was abandoned by the church, and that has been re-occupied by a culture seeking the same things the church once offered?

One response is to mourn the loss — to see the festival as a symptom of secularisation, a pale substitute for the real thing. That response is not entirely wrong. But it is incomplete.

Another response is to recognise that the hunger driving 210,000 people to a muddy field in Somerset every June is the same hunger that drove medieval pilgrims to the same ground. The destination has changed. The ritual has changed. The theology has changed — or disappeared entirely. But the hunger is the same.

And the Christian tradition has always believed that hunger is not accidental. That the longing for transcendence, for community, for something that feels sacred — is not a cultural artifact. It is a theological datum. It is what Augustine meant when he wrote: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

The field remembers. The question is whether the church will show up to meet the people in it.