Day 11 in England: To Avalon with King Arthur

 

With the whole of Le Morte d'Arthur under our belts, the teenager and I were especially excited for our day at Glastonbury, also known as Avalon, burial site of Arthurus, Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus. 

But first a Full English, then a bit of time exploring THE most epic creation in all of England:

Mini Stonehenge!

Here's our full day:

• Glastonbury Abbey
• Glastonbury Tor
• window shopping in Glastonbury
• drive the long drive to Devon

We needed emergency crisps and biscuits and Cadbury bars for our long afternoon drive later, so we stopped by a Tesco Express on our way out of Salisbury and the college student found that our favorite biscuit, Jaffa Cakes (or are they a cake? I feel like England has a Whole Thing about biscuits vs. cakes), also sells something called a Jonut. And it. Is. Delicious!

I am currently very sad that my mouth is not full of Jonuts, Cadbury with Popping Jellies, and scones with clotted cream.

With Matt's three full days of driving experience by this time, we didn't actually do too badly in the narrow streets of Glastonbury, especially considering that window shopping along High St. later, we would see SO many near-accidents and drivers screaming at each other. 

Fortunately, we were able to avoid driving on High St.! Apparently the hippies wake up kind of late, because there was plenty of parking available in the one public lot near the center of town, and from there it was just a short walk to Glastonbury Abbey.

The history of archaeological excavations at Glastonbury Abbey is very checkered--the first archaeologist was also a spiritualist who believed that the dead spoke to the living, and he included some architectural features in his site maps that he hadn't actually found... but it was fine, because a spirit had used automatic writing to tell him it was there!

Ahem.

So there's a lot still not understood about Glastonbury Abbey and its history of occupation, but the museum did have some cool artifacts:

These cool artifacts include some contemporary ones, as the museum also displayed stuff they found during a recent dredging of the pond on their site:

And, of course, it had the obligatory several shelves of used books for sale!

I wish now that I'd purchased that Misty Copeland memoir and the A to Z Atlas of London and Suburbs.

Then, out the door to explore!

You know we love our architectural ruins! This is the Lady Chapel, supposedly sited on top of an even earlier "Old Church." There are glass walkways that allow you to cross the ruins at height, and stairs that give you access to the lower levels. Grass and flowers grow on the tops of the stones and in the cracks in the walls.

I love how they arranged site access so you can see and explore these formerly underground areas.

This site was fun to research with the kids, because it is VERY steeped in the spiritual/mystical woo of Glastonbury. I didn't buy the map of ley lines that I saw in one of the High St. shops (a fact that I actually super regret now...), but apparently we're just walking right over all kinds of crossing ley lines here!

Just east of the Lady Chapel is the Great Church, dating from around 1230:

Once upon a time, it was the second largest church in England, but during its construction it fell on hard times and upkeep and renovations got too expensive. Fortunately, monks discovered that King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, long associated with the area by legend, were actually buried on the property! Yay! The monks got tons of money after that, they were able to finish building the church, and they reburied Arthurus Rex in the middle of the Great Church:

We walked around the grounds of the old abbey, exploring the space and admiring the views--

Here's where King Arthur's grave was discovered!

The site also has a surviving plant from two thorn trees that used to grow on a nearby hill. They were seen as holy thorns, possibly originating from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, who local legend has it possibly visited here with a little lad Jesus back in the day. The Puritans, being religious extremists, cut down those original thorn trees, but lots of local gardeners had their own cuttings, and this tree is said to be from one of them:

There was a shuttle from the nearby visitor center to the base of Glastonbury Tor, but it only took cash, alas, so after exploring the abbey grounds, we walked the 1.3 miles from the abbey to the tor, uphill all the way:

The path is that way!

The pedestrian footpath was actually really nice, ranging along wooded paths and through gates that led us across fields and under arches of overhanging ancient trees:

Getting closer!

This was a HARD fucking hike, and my asshole family left me completely in the dust:

There's no place to sit and rest other than in the nettles next to the path, no place to really make it easy to pass someone who's slowly huffing their way upwards, and behind me as I slowly huffed were at least a dozen various UK vacationers taking their kids up the tor for a Saturday afternoon picnic. Not only was I about to die of a myocardial infarction, but I had to keep up my pace so as not to inconvenience the people following me. Also, my face gets REALLY red when I'm hot. Like, REALLY really red, so a couple of times total strangers asked me if I was well. 

I finally made it, quietly weeping and absolutely beside myself with embarrassment and exhaustion. 

But look at that view!

Check out these rats who left me to die, hanging out as happy as clams without me:

To get back to the abbey, you just do the trek in reverse:

But fortunately the ice cream truck at the base of the tor DOES take credit!

It's also much easier to enjoy how pretty the walk is when I'm walking downhill:

We spent most of the rest of the afternoon window shopping along High Street, where they have SO many awesomely woo stores. I particularly liked The Coven, White Rabbit, Goddess and the Green Man, and Speaking Tree, but there were so many little shops with tarot cards, dragon statues, sword letter openers, needle felted goddesses, etc., interspersed with hippies on the street giving away free hugs and trying to sell beaded necklaces. 

We bought sandwiches and crisps from a little co-op grocery, ate them near another thorn tree on the grounds of St. John the Baptist Church, then hopped back in the car for a quick two-hour drive to the sea. 

We landed in an inn in Instow, which on this Saturday before a Bank Holiday Monday was HOPPING! The whole town was bonkers crowded. Matt had to drop us off and park a mile away at a cricket club, then he and I hung out downstairs in the pub chaos for a while before our proper dinner:

Our rooms above the pub didn't have any air conditioning, so we had to leave our windows open (also no screens--does England not have rabid bats?) to the noise below, including a live band. I really wanted my sleep, but it *was* pretty magical to be lying in bed, reading my surfer memoir--

--and listening to the magic that is every single person in the pub below me loudly singing the lyrics to an Oasis song:

I think it's the most British thing I experienced on this entire trip!

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!