MAGGIE and I spent a day in Glastonbury on our way down to Cornwall, where I was booked to do a couple of poetry readings. It was a coincidental journey in many ways, not least because I am in the midst of writing Merlin’s Isle, my cycle of ballads about the Grail and the other Arthurian legends, and both Glastonbury and Cornwall feature strongly in the stories, and still carry, in some sense, the memory of the tales, and the air of mystery and legend.

They keep especially the tradition that Joseph of Arimathaea brought the Grail, with the spear that pierced Christ’s side, to England (or Albion, as it was then) and founded a church at Glastonbury. Certainly, Glastonbury Abbey, once of the greatest in England, was, for many centuries, a place of pilgrimage, where people could visit, in the crypt of the great abbey, the little church — the most ancient in Britain — that Joseph was said to have founded and dedicated in honour of Mary.

An intriguing feature of the Arthurian legends, at least in their medieval sources, is that, although they have their full share of magical and perhaps pre-Christian characters and episodes — ladies of the lake, wizards, giants, shapeshifters, magic swords — they also have a deep engagement with the Christian story, centred on the Grail itself, but also embedded in the way in which each tale is associated with a Christian feast, such as Christmas or Easter. Indeed, the great oath of chivalry which the knights take is known as the Pentecostal oath.

What we see in the Arthurian tradition is a fruitful meeting of Celtic magic and Christian mystery, and, in my view, it is the Christian mystery that shines through, refocused, and indeed enhanced, in its magical and faerie setting. Unfortunately, in many modern retellings, the Christian mystery is marginalised or erased, and the magic is Disneyfied, trivialised.

The erasure of the Christian element in the stories seems complete in Glastonbury High Street, which appears to consist entirely of wicca, mystic crystals, rune workshops, karmic/cosmic healing, and a general hotchpotch of mystical titbits skimmed off “Eastern” religion, and anything remotely esoteric. That’s the high street. But, still, at the heart of the vale is the beautiful form of the abbey, numinous even in its ruin, still a place of extraordinary stillness and prayer, bearing its mute witness both to the prayerfulness that founded it and to the cupidity that destroyed it.

I touch the stones and let them take me back. In my poem, I imagine the young Arthur, with his foster family, seeing Glastonbury for the first time, on his way to the encounter with the sword in the stone which will change his life:

Then, on all-hallows eve at last
So tells the ancient tale
They saw below them, spreading fair
Clear in the crisp and frosty air
That storied vale, with church most rare
Beneath the ancient, hallowed Tor
Great Glastonbury vale.

Then Ector paused, and crossed himself
And told the company:
“Now we have come to God’s own vale
As saints have told in song and tale
Deeper than rune or druid spell
Its ancient mystery.”