A Ruin Shared by People Who Disagree About It

Glastonbury today carries at least two religious populations who visit the same ground for different reasons. The abbey ruins are held by a charitable trust and are used by the Church of England and other churches for pilgrimages, open air services and an annual gathering. The town has also become a centre for modern pagan, Goddess and New Age practice, drawn by the Tor, the Chalice Well and a body of claims about ancient sanctity at the site.

Ronald Hutton has traced how that second layer was assembled, largely across the twentieth century, from Victorian antiquarian speculation, from the writings of a small number of influential authors, and from the general modern search for a pre Christian Britain. He is careful about what this does and does not mean. That a tradition is recent does not make it insincere, and Glastonbury is a working religious centre for people whose practice began in living memory. It does mean the atlas cannot present the site's pagan significance as continuous from antiquity, because the evidence for that continuity is not there. The medieval abbey's own claim to be the oldest Christian foundation in Britain, said to have been established by Joseph of Arimathea, is likewise a claim the house made about itself and not one that can be independently checked.