Glastonbury Tor (England)

Glastonbury Tor rises 518 feet above sea level in the English county of Somerset. Today, as in ages past, the cone-shaped hill is both a geological curiosity and a focus of deep-rooted mysticism. In antiquity it stood amid the water-logged peat flats of the Somerset Levels, an area that the sea regularly flooded at high tide. Early Britons therefore called it the “Isle of Glass” (Ynys Wydrin). Thanks to a peculiar micro-climate, the Tor is still wrapped in dense fogs and strange optical effects, including complex Fata Morgana mirages that make the summit look as though it’s floating free of the earth. Geologically, the hill consists of early-Jurassic layers: an upper cap of iron-hardened sandstone (the Bridport Sands), middle beds of porous limestone from the Dyrham Formation, and a lower, water-tight stratum of Blue Lias clay. Quartz veins and groundwater moving along tectonic faults create electromagnetic anomalies and piezo-electric charges that can directly affect human perception and trigger altered states of consciousness.

The hill is inseparable from Celtic beliefs about the Otherworld. Folklore says Glastonbury Tor is hollow, hiding a gate to Annwn, the underworld of the dead. Its ruler is the light-bringing god and psychopomp Gwyn ap Nudd, the “White Son of Mist,” whose image gradually darkened into that of a sinister fairy king. In the Welsh tale “Culhwch and Olwen,” Gwyn shows savage cruelty when he kidnaps the maiden Creiddylad from her betrothed, Gwythyr, kills her father Nwython, and forces her brother Cyledr to eat the dead man’s heart, driving him mad. King Arthur decrees that Gwyn and Gwythyr must battle for Creiddylad every year on Beltane until Judgment Day, a ritual that mirrors the turning of the seasons. During liminal times—Samhain, the winter solstice, and other moments when the veil thins—Gwyn unleashes the Hounds of Annwn: snow-white hounds with blood-red ears whose appearance foretells death. Later legend cast Arthur himself as leader of this Wild Hunt, said to ride out of Glastonbury along an ancient trackway.

A very real curse settled on the hill in the 1530s during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. The last abbot of wealthy Glastonbury Abbey, eighty-year-old Richard Whiting, refused to surrender the abbey’s treasures or accept the king as head of the church. After a show trial, Whiting and two monks—John Thorne and Roger James—were dragged through town on hurdles and executed atop the Tor: hanged, drawn, and quartered.

In the wake of that violence, witnesses began reporting a steady stream of paranormal events on the hill. People speak of the “Mists of Avalon,” space-and-time distortions in which travelers lose all contact with the outside world, and of wanderers who vanish altogether in an eerie, smothering silence.

From 100 Cursed Places · Fern Flower Press