Glastonbury, the ‘ancient Isle of Avalon’, is a fascinating small town in South West England. One of its ancient Celtic names is Ynys Witrin, the ‘island of seeing’. It is a sacred pilgrimage place dating back at least 5,000 years to Megalithic/Bronze Age times – the banks on the Tor come from this time, together with a prehistoric mound on Windmill Hill.

Two thousand years ago it was once the site of a Druid college and perpetual choir, reputed to have been visited by Jesus when a young man, brought by Joseph of Arimathaea. After the Crucifixion, Joseph is said to have returned here, to found what later became Glastonbury Abbey.

In medieval times it was one of Europe’s greatest monastic centres, ‘England’s Holyest Earthe’, and a last vestige of the Ancient British (Celtic) church. It possessed an enormous library, attracting many of the freethinkers of the day – including natural philosophers, Templars, mendicant Arabs, Celtic saints and assorted religious refugees (such as odd Waldensians and Cathars). This library burned down in the late 1300s; a great loss.

After the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s in Henry VIII’s time, Glastonbury Abbey lay wrecked and desolate, and the Abbey lands around Glastonbury fell largely into disuse. The town declined – its purpose had always been spiritual.

Yet the town later attracted the attentions of mystics through the centuries, such as John Dee in Elizabethan times, and the Romantics William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Then in the 1890s a cultural revival came, when creative oddbods, psychics and spiritual questers started gathering here, and throughout the 20th Century it became home to freethinkers, hippies, healers, authors, musicians and a wide spectrum of unconventional people.

Things accelerated from the 1960s onwards and, by 1980, the High Street was visibly changing and the alternative community was gaining numbers and momentum. By the end of the 1980s things were going full swing. This was helped by the famous Glastonbury rock festival (actually held at nearby Pilton), though not as much as many people believe, since the year-round activities in Glastonbury and people moving here were what truly fuelled this growth.