Glastonbury Lake Village

Glastonbury Lake Village stands on a man-made island in the flat Somerset Levels, five kilometres north-west of Glastonbury. The crannog was built in the Iron Age by laying down timber and clay to raise a platform above the boggy ground. Five to seven groups of round houses stood here, each housing an extended family with sheds and barns made of hazel, willow and reeds. A wooden palisade surrounded the settlement, though archaeologists believe it was used to stabilise the clay floors rather than for defence. At its height the village held up to fifteen houses and two hundred people. The site was discovered in 1892 by Arthur Bulleid, a local medical student who had heard of similar villages in Switzerland. Excavations over fifteen years uncovered eighty-nine mounds, each with a central hearth, surrounded by an alder palisade. Bulleid worked with Harold St George Gray, who had trained under Augustus Pitt Rivers, to catalogue thousands of finds including pottery, bone, charcoal and metal tools. A replica of the Glastonbury Bowl was presented to the Prince of Wales during a royal visit in 1909. Visitors can see many artefacts in Glastonbury’s Lake Village Museum at The Tribunal. The displays include spinning whorls, weaving combs and evidence of bronze-casting and iron-smelting. Fragments of woven baskets up to seventy centimetres wide show Iron Age craftsmanship, while wooden objects such as wheel spokes and animal-skin frames reveal everyday life. The surrounding landscape remains waterlogged, preserving the buried timbers beneath a cover of peat.