Glastonbury Abbey
Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset is one of the most historically significant and most atmospheric monastic ruins in England, the remains of what was once the wealthiest and most prestigious Benedictine abbey in medieval Britain, a house claiming foundations by Joseph of Arimathea himself and the burial of King Arthur and his queen Guinevere, traditions that made it one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in Christendom and the focus of a mythology of extraordinary power that persists to the present day. The ruins of the great abbey church and the surviving domestic buildings stand in extensive grounds in the centre of Glastonbury town.
The abbey's claim to be the oldest Christian foundation in Britain rested on the tradition that Joseph of Arimathea, who according to the Gospels donated his tomb for Christ's burial, travelled to Britain after the Crucifixion and established the first Christian community at Glastonbury. This tradition cannot be historically verified but was accepted as genuine throughout the medieval period and gave Glastonbury an authority in the English church second only to Canterbury. The discovery of the supposed tomb of Arthur and Guinevere in the abbey grounds in 1191, suspiciously opportune following the destruction of an earlier church by fire in 1184, reinforced the abbey's claims and stimulated a surge of pilgrimage and royal patronage.
The ruins of the Lady Chapel, the oldest surviving structure on the site, retain their Romanesque arcading and decorative stonework in a form that gives a powerful impression of the quality of the twelfth-century building before Henry VIII's dissolution destroyed what was then the largest and most elaborate monastic complex in England. The Abbot's Kitchen, a remarkable fourteenth-century octagonal building surviving almost intact, is one of the finest medieval domestic buildings of its type in Britain.