Glastonbury is a fascinating place, and it always has been. It is an ancient semi-island, surrounded at different times by sea, wetland marshes or drained 'moors'. Glastonbury's harbour lay in the bay on the south of the island, below Wearyall Hill, just west of where the Butleigh road descends to the once-flooded moor.
Boats sailed in to Glastonbury from the Severn Sea (Bristol Channel) via Brean Down, Cheddar and Bleadney Gap (Panborough), along the winding river Brue. First landfall on Avalon would be at Bride's Mound, Beckery. Then the boats would round the end of Wearyall Hill, following a substantial loop of the river, before it meandered along the bay between Wearyall Hill and the Tor.
The boats brought with them a regular stream of visitors from Wales, Ireland and even the Mediterranean. They also connected Glastonbury with the many holy isles along the coast of western Britain – from Gower and Caldey to Skomer, Bardsey and Mona (Anglesey), then up to the Isle of Man, Arran and eventually Iona and the Hebrides, with Ireland too. From Megalithic to Celtic times the Irish Sea was the overall centre of attention in the British and Irish Isles, while much of what is now England was deeply forested.
Glastonbury has attracted attention and pilgrimage for thousands of years. When approached from any direction, at any time in history, that strangely anomalous hill, Glastonbury Tor, has never failed to evoke a frisson of excitement, of remembering, mystery, enticement, even foreboding.
There are only some archaeologically-discovered remains of ancient activity here. They were found mainly atop the Tor and in the ancient lake villages near Godney and Meare. The banks or labyrinth on the Tor are likely to have been built in Megalithic times, though academic historians and archaeologists are at times almost desperate to reassert that they are medieval strip-lynchets or agricultural terraces. They offer no explanation why these 'lynchets' are located on the sunless north side as well as the sunny south side of the Tor, or why the ample land under the Tor was not used instead.
The banks were built to serve either as a set of stages up the hill, embodying perhaps a rendering of concepts of levels of reality, or they described a ceremonial labyrinth. The latter idea has been popular in recent decades, though I believe the former idea needs another look.
One newly-recognised ancient site is the mound on top of Windmill Hill, Glastonbury, formerly called St Edmund's Hill. It has frequently been assumed that it is solely a mound, built with bulldozers while the housing estate was being built around it in the 1950s. However, there are legends of burials beneath it and paranormal events in the vicinity. It has been suspected to be a Megalithic mound, but no digs have been performed to find out. Recently, Nicholas Mann, a local prehistory researcher, has investigated astronomical alignments from the mound, finding surprising alignments emanating from it to the rising and setting points of the sun and moon at the solstices and lunar maxima. These alignments point to Brean Down in the NW, Maesbury Castle in the NE, Aller Hill in the SW (High Ham) and Cadbury Castle in the SE - all of them significant ancient sites, thus strongly suggesting that the mound indeed is Megalithic in origin.
