Refusing a Legend: Writing Glastonbury Tor Minus Avalon | Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry

Glastonbury Tor is the most mythologised hill in England. I wrote a poem about clay shrinkage instead — and I am still not certain I was right.

A realistic wide landscape photograph of Glastonbury Tor in Somerset, England, seen from across the flooded winter levels.

Glastonbury Tor has been the Isle of Avalon since at least the twelfth century. It carries Arthur, Guinevere, Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, the ley lines and a great deal of living spiritual practice. Walk up it on a summer evening and you will meet people for whom every one of those things is simply true.

And what did I do? I wrote a poem about clay shrinkage.

That was the hardest decision I made in the whole of Somerset In Verse, and I want to talk it through properly — because the choice between the legend and the ground is one that almost every writer faces sooner or later, usually without noticing it.

Here is the poem first. The argument comes after it.

Glastonbury Tor

The plain is a flat expanse of winter water,

where the softer Jurassic rock was stripped and carried off.

What remains is a resistant cap of Bridport Sand,

rising one hundred and fifty-eight metres into the wind,

protecting a core of yielding Dyrham clay beneath—

a residual outlier left standing by the slow subtraction of the marsh.

Gravity pulls the saturated topsoil down the incline.

The flanks are scarred by seven horizontal terraces

whose disputed origins vanish into the steep soil.

Movement here is strictly funnelled into linear corridors;

boot soles grind the perennial grass to a slick brown paste,

exposing the compacted earth to the rain.

At the summit, the wind accelerates against the stone.

St Michael's Tower stands anchored by iron tie bars,

a roofless rebuild raised after a documented earthquake

felled the timber church in twelve seventy-five.

Here Abbot Whiting was quartered in fifteen thirty-nine.

The mortar joints are pitted and blown hollow.

The horizon compresses into a two-dimensional ring.

Beside the masonry, a painted concrete pillar

marks the geodetic peak.

When summer evaporation dries the slopes,

the underlying clays shrink and deeply fracture—

a seasonal pulse of swell and contraction beneath the mass.

From Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry, published on Amazon, 3rd September 2026.

The temptation I was refusing

I want to be fair to the legend, because it isn't a stupid temptation. Iti's the better material, and any writer who pretends otherwise is posturing.

The legend is more beautiful. It's more moving. And — this is the part that matters — it's already load-bearing. Thousands of people have done the emotional work of believing it, which means a poem can lean on that belief without having to earn anything for itself.

Tennyson is the proof. Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow is one of the loveliest lines in Victorian poetry, and it does its work on you instantly, before you have decided whether to let it.

The documented version has no such advantages. Bridport Sand over Dyrham clay doesn't move anybody. It has to be made to matter, line by line, and it may fail.

So why refuse it?

The hill underneath the story

It helps to say plainly what Glastonbury Tor actually is, because the facts are stranger than they get credit for.

It's a residual outlier — a fragment of higher ground left standing while everything around it was worn away. The cap is Bridport Sand, tough enough to resist erosion; underneath sits soft Dyrham clay, which the cap has been protecting for a very long time. It stands one hundred and fifty-eight metres above a plain that was, until drainage, a winter sea.

Seven terraces ring the slopes. Nobody agrees what they are — cultivation strynches, a processional maze, natural slumping — and the argument has been running for a century.

At the summit, St Michael's Tower is roofless and held together with iron tie bars. It's a rebuild: an earthquake in 1275 brought down the church that stood there before it. In 1539 the last Abbot of Glastonbury, Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered on that summit during the dissolution of his abbey.

And every summer the clay beneath the whole mass dries, shrinks and cracks, then swells again with the rain. The hill breathes, on a cycle, without anybody's permission.

Exemption versus endurance

Here is the real reason I refused the legend, and it isn't that I dislike legends.

It's that the legend and the hill make opposite claims, and only one of them is checkable.

Avalon promises exemption from weather. That is the whole content of Tennyson's line: a place where the ordinary conditions are suspended. This hill has never had a single year of exemption from anything. Gravity is pulling its topsoil downhill as you read this. The clay swells and cracks on schedule. The tower needs iron bars to stand up. The abbot wasn't healed of his grievous wound; he was cut into four pieces at the top of it.

The story says the wound closes. The ground says the wound is the ongoing condition.

And here is what the honest version buys you, when it works — which is the part I didn't expect.

The legend offers comfort you have to accept on trust. The hill offers something smaller and much sturdier: the fact that it's still there. It has been eroding for millions of years and it's still the highest thing for miles in every direction. That isn't exemption. It's endurance, which is the only version of survival actually on offer to any of us, and it doesn't require you to believe anything at all.

Three questions for writing about a mythologised place

If you are facing the same choice in your own work, these are the three questions I now use. They aren't a formula. They are just the things I wish I had asked earlier.

1. Who benefits from the story being true?

   Not cynically — just honestly. The Glastonbury monks needed pilgrims, and shortly after a fire had gutted their abbey, they announced they had found the graves of Arthur and Guinevere. That doesn't make the legend worthless. But it tells you exactly what to weigh, and who was holding the scales.

2. 2. What does the documented version cost me?

   If the honest account is harder to make beautiful, that is usually a sign you are onto something real. The legend has been polished by eight centuries of retelling. The fact hasn't been polished at all. Difficulty here isn't a warning; it's a receipt.

3. 3. Does the legend do the feeling for me?

   This is the decisive one. If the emotional work is already finished before your poem starts, your poem is decoration on someone else's building.

   The hill gave me nothing pre-felt. There is no inherited emotion attached to soil creep. Every ounce of feeling in that poem had to be built out of sand, clay, mortar and a date — which is exhausting, and is also the only reason the poem is mine.

What this doesn't mean

I'm not making the argument that facts are true and myths are lies, and I would rather not be read that way.

Legends are real objects. They are made by real people for real reasons, they shape how a place is walked and cared for, and the belief itself is often the most interesting thing happening on the hill. A poem that took Avalon seriously as a human act would be a good poem, and somebody should write it.

What I am arguing against is narrower: borrowing an emotion that a legend has already generated, and presenting the result as though you produced it. That isn't writing about myth. That's subletting.

This isn't only about hills

Most of us face this far more often than we notice, because legends aren't confined to famous places.

Family stories are legends. So are company origin stories, local histories, the account of the argument that everyone in the room has agreed on, and the version of your own childhood you have told so many times that the telling has replaced the memory. All of them arrive pre-felt. All of them have somebody who benefits from their being true.

If you write memoir, family history or anything drawn from the place you grew up, the three questions above transfer without modification. The only difference is that with Glastonbury Tor you can go and put your hand on the clay.

I'm still not sure

I want to end honestly, because I haven't resolved this.

The poem I wrote may well be the lesser one. There is a version of Glastonbury Tor full of Avalon and apple trees that would move more people, and I know roughly what it looks like, and some days I think I was a coward for not attempting it.

But I would rather write the hill that is there.

About Somerset In Verse - Exmoor To Levels In Poetry

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry is the fourth volume in British Counties In Verse, published in paperback on Amazon on 3rd September 2026.

It runs from the heights of Exmoor down to the drowning Levels: a twelve-metre tide that resets the coastline twice a day, rivers held above the fields they drain, a limestone gorge being quarried and walked to dust at the same time, and a hill that refuses to be Avalon.

Readers of the earlier volumes should know that this one is harder-edged. There is less mortar of sentiment in it than in Cornwall, Cumbria or North Yorkshire. The language is treated more like masonry — the heavy, specific, correct names of things, laid one on top of another and left to hold their own weight. Everything above explains why.

Volume	Status
Cornwall In Verse — Tide To Tor In Poetry	Available now
Cumbria In Verse — Lakes To Fells In Poetry	Available now
North Yorkshire In Verse — Moor To Shore In Poetry	Available now
Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry	3rd September 2026
Northumberland — Coast to Cheviot	In progress, March 2027

There is no publisher's marketing budget behind this series. What it has instead is readers — which means three small things genuinely move the needle.

Note the date. Launch week is when it counts, because early sales are what persuade Amazon to show a book to strangers.

Leave a review. Two honest sentences in the first fortnight does more than anything I could pay for. It doesn't need to be kind, only honest.

Tell one person. The friend who walks, the relation who lives down there, the colleague who used to read poetry and stopped. That single handover is how nearly every reader I have has arrived.

And if you aren't in a position to buy a book, please do not give it a second thought. The reading is the thing. It always was.

The plain floods. The clay cracks and closes. The tower holds, on iron bars, one more winter. No exemption was ever offered — only the hill, still standing, still going down.

Somerset In Verse — Exmoor To Levels In Poetry Paperback, on Amazon, from 3rd September 2026.