NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS

NATIONALISM
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FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
Nations and Nationalism 23 (2), 2017, 327–345.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12234

Visions of Albion: ancient landscapes,

Glastonbury and alternative forms of
nationalism
SHARIF GEMIE
Department of History, University of South Wales, Newport, UK

ABSTRACT. Nationalist visions are often connected with a cult of the land. This ar-
ticle considers some of the cultural-nationalist ideas linked to the Somerset town of
Glastonbury, a prominent New Age centre. It discusses the legacy of British pastoral-
ism as shown in the work of H. V. Morton and Cecil Sharp. It considers the evolution
of an English–Celtic tradition, drawing on the legacy of the Arthurian legend, but being
re-formulated in the late twentieth century as a vehicle for New Age conceptions of
British society. The article concludes by evaluating the political values inherent in the
New Age.

KEYWORDS: Arthuriana, Celticism, Glastonbury, New Age

Alice found the White King. They hurried to the town where the Lion and the
Unicorn were fighting in a great cloud of dust. Their combat stopped for a
break, during which the Unicorn met Alice. He was astonished. ‘What—is—
this?’ he asked. On learning she was a child, he remarked ‘I always thought
they were fabulous monsters’, to which Alice gave the obvious reply: ‘Do
you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters’. Their meeting
ends with one of Lewis Carroll’s greatest lines, spoken by Unicorn: ‘If you’ll
believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?’ (Carroll : 364–68).
Carroll’s masterful surrealist reconstruction of a child-eye’s view of the
world suggested that the imagery of the Lion and the Unicorn was an obscure
piece of fantastic symbolism, incomprehensible to Alice, to most children and
probably to most adults. Eighty years later, Orwell’s essay ‘The Lion and Uni-
corn’ made almost the same suggestion: it cited the animals’ appearance on
soldier’s cap-buttons as ‘an anachronism’ (Orwell 1969: 102). But in the early
twenty-first century, little seems to have changed. The two animals still grace
UK passports, accompanied by some mediaeval French doggerel: ‘Honi soit-
il qui mal y pense’. The majority of the UK population has no idea what the
animals symbolise and does not understand the French phrase. These points
illustrate a key issue concerning modern UK identity: there is no accepted,
comprehensible national symbolism, and the UK state relies on pseudo-medi-
aeval obscurantism as a means of covering this gap (Nairn 1988).

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328 Sharif Gemie

One can imagine two responses to this situation. One would be to propose a
stripped-down patriotism, loyal to an austere, rational polity, in which all
symbolism was cut back, and the nation-state accepted principally as a guaran-
tor of human rights (Habermas 2000). The other – more likely – response is a
search for new unicorns. This paper will discuss the second option: it will
examine some alternative nationalist narratives, each linked to the idea that
the landscape itself holds some answer to the riddle of modern identities. Much
of the substance of these visions is associated, directly or indirectly, with the
town of Glastonbury.
This small Somerset town, with its population of about 9,000, excites some
deep passions. ‘Sothely glastenbury is the holyest erth of england’ noted the
author of a sixteenth-century study (cited in Carley 1988: 87). Glastonbury
was ‘the English Jerusalem’ for Reverend Marson, who considered that ‘this
quiet little town holds in her heart the romance and pain of English history’
(1909: 11). ‘The story of Glastonbury is the central one of early English
history’ according to Neilson (1944: 14) the town shaped English culture for
1,500 years. For Benham (2006: 1), Glastonbury is the ‘chief holy place’ for
England. Hopkinson-Ball (2007: 44-46) lists four great spiritual centres: Rome,
Constantinople, Jerusalem and Glastonbury. Considering the Glastonbury
music festival, Flinn and Frew (2014: 420) find that it is ‘the iconic world
leader of music festivity’. Bowman (2000: 83) summarises the wilder claims
for Glastonbury. It is

the Isle of Avalon; the site of a great Druidic centre of learning; a significant prehistoric
centre of Goddess worship; the ‘cradle of English Christianity’ visited by Joseph of
Arimathea, and perhaps even by Christ himself; the ‘New Jerusalem’; a communication
point for alien contact; the ‘epicentre’ of New Age in England; and the ‘heart chakra’ of
planet earth.

This paper considers these claims concerning Glastonbury’s importance,

asking whether such claims have the potential to form new national myths
and narratives.
To a limited extent, such discussions could be compared with previous
analyses of the role religion has played in creating senses of nationalism. For
example, Ernest Gellner stressed the similarities between ‘Protestant-style’
religion and nationalism, and saw the former as having an affinity to the latter
(Gellner 1997: 77). Anthony Smith has characterised nationalism as a ‘surro-
gate political religion’ (Smith 1999: 35). However, there is a crucial difference
in our concerns: these new, alternative nationalisms are based on a
‘detraditionalisation’ of religion (Sutcliffe 2003: 38), on a late-modern sense
of spirituality, not on formal religions (see below).
One brief note on the geographic reach of this paper: while we will con-
centrate on England, our interests will range across the UK and Ireland.
Readers have to accept that the cyphers and elements discussed have a
certain ‘free-floating’ quality to them. Just as Saint George is the patron saint
of England, Georgia, Malta, Portugal and Romania, so the topics discussed

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Visions of Albion 329

below are not neatly contained within a single national discourse. They may
form the basis of a new English nationalism, they may suggest a new type of
cultural federalism for several polities, or they may evolve in another manner
altogether.1

Preparing the ground: rural visions

Forty years ago, Williams (1975: 9) pointed out a linguistic paradox: in

English, ‘country’ can mean both the whole of a society or just its rural
component. The significant point which flows from this linguistic imprecision
is the ease with which pastoral arguments can suggest that rural society is
the real country. Possibly the first example of such thinking was produced
by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch, in his innovative account of
an ascent of Mount Ventoux (Williams 1975: 150). Pastoralism remains impor-
tant, as nationhood is frequently intimately tied to the land, and it is here that
we must start our discussions.
Perhaps the last great surge of British pastoralism flowered in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the establishment of the
Clarion Cycling Clubs (1895) and the creation of Country Life magazine
(1897), and in reaction to industrialised destruction of the First World
War (Bennett 1993). H. V. Morton provides a telling example. He came
close to dying while serving with the British Army near Jerusalem. ‘There
rose up in my mind the picture of a village street at dusk with a smell of
wood smoke lying in the still air, and here and there, little red blinds shining
in the dusk under the thatch’ (Morton 1987: 1). The book which resulted
from this vision – In Search of England – was one of the last travel works
that evaluated the nation by travelling through it. It gave a definitive
statement of an English ruralism.

The village and the English country-side are the germs of all we are and all we have be-
come: our manufacturing cities belong to the last century and a half; our villages stand
with their roots in the Heptarchy…

As long as one English field lies against another there is something left in the world for a
man to love (Morton 1987: 2, 272).

Morton argued that this countryside has the power to connect directly to the
past, and it is therefore more authentic than the city. ‘This village that symbol-
izes England sleeps in the sub-consciousness of many a townsman’ he
commented (1987, 2).
One of the most revealing exploitations of such ruralist arguments was the
work of Morton’s contemporary, the master folk-song collector, Cecil James
Sharp (1859–1924). In her fine analysis of his work, Georgina Boyes argues
that Sharp established the forms and ideological structure for the ‘collecting’

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330 Sharif Gemie

of traditional folk music and his work created musical archives used to this
day. Sharp went into English villages, met singers and dancers, and then noted
their words, tunes and movements. Such research methods may seem innocent,
even praiseworthy, but – as Boyes demonstrates – Sharp tied them to a partic-
ular ideological project. It is in Sharp’s work that we find one of the most
effective uses of the cliché of the dying folk culture. The chain of tradition
had been definitively broken: ‘Some would attribute it to the invention of
railways, to the spread of education, to the industrial revival, or even to the
political unrest, which followed the passing of the Reform Bill’ (Sharp 1907:
120). Folk culture was therefore dependent on the intervention of an enlight-
ened, literate, activist elite to save it, even from itself (Sharp 1907: 119).
For Sharp, the late nineteenth-century English lower classes were divided
between ‘mob’ and ‘folk’: the first urban, unruly, unmannered and possibly
open to the unwelcome, subversive ideas of socialism; the second authentic,
organic, uneducated, unchanging in their culture, producing folk songs
through the ‘spontaneous and intuitive sense of [their] untrained faculties’
(Sharp 1907: 4). The task of Sharp’s Folk Revival was to manage and organise
this uncultured culture: to give it a definitive form to be taught in schools and
associations, thus preserving the population from the potentially dangerous
social and cultural effects of industrialization (Sharp 1907: 135–36).
Sharp had an ambivalent attitude to the ‘Folk’ themselves. If a group of
Morris Men explained their understanding of their dances to him in terms of
the aesthetics of the movements or even – heaven forbid – of the most effective
ways of gaining money from a watching crowd, Sharp would ignore this and
would concentrate on what he understood as their ‘real’ meaning. Sharp knew
that the clog dances of Lancaster mill girls or Cheshire factory lads did not
count as ‘real’ folk dances, for all modern adaptations of the original ancient
culture were merely degenerate forms. The ‘real’ ‘Folk’ were preserved in what
he termed ‘the South Country’, a timeless – imaginary – landscape somewhere
to the south or west of London, inhabited by ‘nameless, inarticulate, naïve,
unthinking markers of picturesquely non-standard English, their “genius” rap-
idly overwhelmed by the contamination of elementary education’ (Boyes 2010:
128). Significantly for the arguments to follow, Sharp grew increasingly inter-
ested in Somerset (1907: viii).
To add insult to injury, Sharp copyrighted the material he collected and
then charged dancers and singers for its use. Sharp effectively presented his
versions of these songs and dances as the only true ones (therefore out-
manoeuvring rival collections) and organised his texts pedagogically: his
followers were required to learn them in graded classes, without deviations,
and to pass exams in them.
The works of Morton and Sharp sketch out a myth of a gentle, rural,
unchanging England, providing an authentic link to the past, in contrast to
the uncertain future represented by the towns. They did not see a rural
landscape inhabited by agricultural labourers, commercial farmers or rural
workers. While their interpretation of folk culture was challenged by left-

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Visions of Albion 331

leaning collectors such as A. L. Lloyd, their success is indisputable (Brocken

2003). Such romantic ruralist images have been periodically revived. During
the 1960s, counter-cultural folk groups formed in the cities but looked for
‘rural enlightenment’. They adopted names such as Forest, Sunforest, Silver
Birch, Fuchsia, Oak and Trees (Young 2010: 281–82). Recently, a new
generation of British pastoralists has created a similarly idealistic rural vision,
claiming inspiration from psychogeography, even postmodernism, rather than
invoking Anglo-Saxon continuities. Rebecca Solnit (2001) and Robert
Macfarlane (2012) both celebrate the joys of solitary walking in undisturbed
countryside. Despite their avowed progressivism and literary sophistication,
the countryside they idealise is recognisably that which delighted Morton
and Sharp. Macfarlane even uses the term ‘South Country’ to identify the
areas of Britain which fascinate him (2012: 39).
These pastoral visions share some common features. They draw meaning
out from an apparently legible landscape. None of them is stridently, explicitly
nationalist: indeed, their avowed stance is a turning-away from the Big Politics
of the towns. There are few examples of political exploitation of their themes.
(The rural society defended by the Countryside Alliance, with its concerns for
agricultural lobbies and hunters’ rights, is quite different.) But such cults of the
‘real’ countryside carry with them a sense of who truly belongs to the nation.
Katherine Tyler’s research (2012) illustrates this point: she has uncovered the
survival of colonial world-views in a Leicestershire village. There, nationhood
is constructed around images of rural life and landscapes. Similar images form
the base for some more exotic expressions of alternative nationalisms, for they
suggest that the truth of the nation is out there, in the hills, woods and tracks of
an other England (Lowerson 1992).

Glastonbury

The Tor at Glastonbury, with its faint traces of an ancient circular path
winding round its slopes to the central point, serves as a fine image of this
much-admired rurality. It could be seen as an embodiment of Sharp’s
imagined ‘South Country’: a safe, gentle vision of a distant past, unclaimed
by any current lobby in the UK, resembling the ‘primitivist Celtic-tinged
celebration’ which seems to delight everyone during St. Patrick’s Day celebra-
tions, an innocuous English equivalent to the gwerin of rural Wales (Johnes
2012: 155; Scully 2012).
There have been few signs of official recognition of Glastonbury’s cultural
importance, and these either are located in the distant past or seem superficial.
Edward III visited the town in 1331 (Shenton 1999). In June 1909, the Prince of
Wales attended a ceremony to mark the handover of the ruins of Glastonbury
Abbey from a private owner to the Church of England (Hopkinson-Ball 2007:
66–67). Sprigs from the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury are sent every Christmas
by Glastonbury’s mayor to the Queen (Bowman 2006: 127–28). The forty-five

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332 Sharif Gemie

minute introduction to the 2012 London Olympics included a large, prominent

replica of Glastonbury Tor.
Why have wide-reaching claims been made for this little town? Initially,
there seem to be two answers. To young people and music fans, the town’s
primary connotation may well be as the site of the annual Glastonbury festival
(actually held in the nearby village of Pilton), regularly attended by over
150,000 people, making the event the largest pop festival in Europe. More
important than its size, however, is the Festival’s ethic: its prominent links with
CND and its colourful, exuberant display of New Age spirituality make it a
symbol of some counter-cultural spirit, distinctively different from other music
festivals (McKay 2000). At the same time, Glastonbury is a conservative
market town, and its magnificent green Tor is capped by a ruined tower dedi-
cated to St Michael. It is a site for annual Catholic and Protestant pilgrimages,
which take place on the same weekend as the Festival (Bowman 2006). Like
the celebrated Archers series on Radio 4, Glastonbury can be seen as ‘a gentle
relic of Old England, nostalgic, generous, incorruptible and (above all) valiant’
(Sandbrook 2005: 382), a town in an idealised rural landscape. Both these
arguments point to the same idea: Glastonbury seems a safe, consensual
symbol for young and old.

Glastonbury and the English Celts

Claims that Glastonbury is distinctive often draw on a reservoir of Celtic

themes.
Gransden (1976) provides a concise, coherent analysis of these Celtic
connections. Putting aside the legends of Joseph of Arimathea’s visit to
Glastonbury, the Christian presence in the town can plausibly be dated to
the fifth century. Following the Norman Conquest, there was an administra-
tive challenge to Celtic- and Saxon-Christian traditions of local autonomy.
This posed a particular problem for the monks at Glastonbury: the origins
of their abbey were obscure, and it was difficult to link it to any prestigious
saints. A propaganda campaign to re-assert the Abbey’s centrality began in
the twelfth century. The first commissioned works were cautious assertions
of Abbey’s great age. However, following the great fire which ruined the
Abbey in 1184, the monks forgot their caution, and in 1191 staged a discovery
of the bodies of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere in their grounds, and
claimed that the Isle of Avalon, Arthur’s legendary resting place, was actually
Glastonbury. Their claims may have been welcomed by Henry II for – break-
ing with the older legend of Avalon – the discovery of the bodies demonstrated
that Arthur was dead, and not merely sleeping, waiting to be called back to life
(Carley 1988: 158). The monks’ arguments worked: by 1535, Glastonbury was
one of the biggest monasteries in England, second only to Westminster
(Hopkinson-Ball 2007: 45).

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Visions of Albion 333

Glastonbury’s later development was tied to the Arthurian legend, which

developed in four stages: Celtic, British-monarchist, Victorian-gentlemanly
and New Age. It seems probable that the legend began as a celebration of a
victory by a (fictitious?) Celtic chieftain fighting the Saxon advance, perhaps
in the sixth century (Williams 1994). As the stories circulated through
mediaeval Brittany and France before returning to England, they changed
their nature. The new versions, re-formulated in the thirteenth century, no
longer spoke of a lost sense of Celtic honour but of sovereignty; Arthur no
longer represented legitimate Celtic rule but legitimate rule. Establishing his
death at Glastonbury may have finally eradicated the Celtic dimension to the
legend. In this new form, the Arthurian legend was popular at the English
court. Edward I (1239–1307) staged five Round Table ceremonies and visited
Glastonbury in 1278. Edward II (1284–1327), the Welsh-born king responsible
for the conquest and pacification of Wales, cited the Arthurian legend to justify
his project of a unification of the British Isles under a single king. Henry VII
(1457–1509) named his son ‘Arthur’ and appointed him Prince of Wales in a
move to strengthen his claim that his family was direct descendants from the
court at Camelot. After this period, the later British ruling dynasties made
little public use of the Arthurian legend (Shenton 1999; Williams 1994).
The representation of the Arthurian legend changed radically in the
succeeding centuries, moving from a stress on sovereignty to a focus on
personal ethics. Sir Thomas Malory wrote his Le Morte d’Arthur (1450s–60s)
as a portrayal of chivalric ideals. His publisher, Caxton, invited readers to
enjoy ‘the noble acts, feats of arms of chivalry, prowess, hardiness, humanity,
love, courtesy, and very gentleness’ that this re-working of the legend
presented (Caxton 2007: 28). By the seventeenth century, the legend was
understood as an expression of ruling-class ideals: the radicals of Civil War
were generally hostile to it (Hill 1958: 55–56), as was Mark Twain in his
Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, seeing the content of the
legend as antiquated and backward-looking. In fact, interest in the legend
faded away for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Victorian poets and painters such as Alfred Lord Tennyson and Sir Edward
Burne-Jones revived the legend as a vehicle for Christian imagery and a sense
of gentlemanly chivalry (Girouard 1981). William Dyce was commissioned to
paint idealised Arthurian scenes in Westminster Palace (Mancoff 1994).
Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur (1904) transformed the story into an
edifying, respectable, character-forming narrative, suitable for patriotic Boy
Scouts. T. H. White re-wrote the legend as The Once and Future King between
1938 and 1958: his story suggested conservative, anti-totalitarian values and
made implicit reference to the political, cultural and moral struggles of the Sec-
ond World War. In 1979, the Monty Python team (which included medievalist
Terry Jones) re-visited the legend to produce a satirical comic yarn, Monty
Python and the Holy Grail. Marion Bradley contributed a ponderous feminist
re-reading of the legend, The Mists of Avalon (1983), all murk, motherhood
and magick. The legend has appeared in film as a supernatural adventure

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334 Sharif Gemie

story: in 1981 as John Boorman’s Excalibur and in 2004 as Jerry

Bruckheimer’s King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table – the latter ac-
companied by the now-inevitable video-game. But more important than these
big-name productions are the countless small-scale examples of contemporary
Arthuriana, from King Arthur’s café in Tintangel, through the ‘Excalibur’
anti-car theft device, the ‘Excalibur’ and ‘Guinevere’ beers, part of the ‘Ales
of the Round Table’ produced by a Cotswold brewery, to the countless rock
and heavy metal groups who plagiarise from the legend (including Iron
Maiden’s ‘Isle of Avalon’ and the less-celebrated Excalibur rock group in
which one of my colleagues was lead guitarist). These various examples suggest
a substantial popular appreciation of the legend, which forms a lieu de
mémoire in the British imagination.
This legend’s popularity and longevity are hard to explain. Can it be
compared to the French celebration of Vercingetorix and the associated cult
of ‘our ancestors the Gauls’ (Buschsenschutz and Schnapp 1997; Dietler
1994)? This myth, still taught in French classrooms, suggests something more
subtle than simple defeat or victory. It offers some sympathy for the grave,
mysterious Celts (or Gauls), hovering silently at the borders of prehistory
before Caesar pulls them into the history books. Here, history is propelled
forward not by a simple series of defeats and victories but by incorporations
and integrations: firstly, in the form of a gallo-roman culture but, secondly,
as an optimistic, progressive imperialism, well-suited to its first patron,
Napoleon III. This form of Celticism did not die with the end of the Second
Empire in 1870: curiously, Napoleon III’s republican successors took his
myths and made them their own.
Another point of comparison could be with the foundation myth that
developed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland. This was largely
the result of the stupendous, innovative work of Sir Walter Scott and his
twenty-novel Waverley cycle (Craig 2001; Makdisi 1998; Nairn 1981;
Trevor-Roper 1983). Scott told a similar story to that recounted in the myth
of ‘our ancestors the Gauls’, although he considered a more recent period.
Diehard elements within Scotland had rebelled against English government
in two desperate wars in 1715 and 1745, fought by Scottish peasant-soldiers
against English armies (which included many Scottish mercenaries). Following
the conclusive defeat of the Scottish rebels, Scott argued that the future
prosperity of both nations lay in their union. His political values are difficult
to evaluate according to the today’s categories of ‘nationalist’, ‘autonomist’
and ‘regionalist’. Scott sincerely believed in the virtues of the Scottish nation
and equally sincerely believed that its interests were best served through union
with its southern neighbour.
One difference between Scott’s narrative in the Waverley cycle and that
presented by the official French myth of ‘our ancestors’ is that Scott rarely
used the term ‘Celtic’. The differences between the intransigent Scots and the
English were easy to identify: the rebel Highlanders, from northern and
western Scotland, were marked by their religion (sometimes Catholic), their

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language (often Gaelic), their economy (an undeveloped agricultural

economy), their culture (they were often illiterate) and even their physical
appearance: they were tall, muscular people who towered over the English.
To identify the differences between the Highlanders and the English, Scott
did not need the term ‘Celtic’.
In both the French-Celtic and the Scott-ish narratives, a Phoenix-like cycle
of defeat and victory, of victory-through-defeat, is celebrated. It is through the
defeat of the prehistoric Celts that modern France was constructed. It is
through the defeat of the primitive Jacobite rebels that modern Scotland could
be united with England. Could Glastonbury play a similar role for the contem-
porary England, as the place marking King Arthur’s death, the necessary
defeat of the Noble Celt, and the creation of a modern English-British culture?
Is it this drama that inspires the countless examples of Arthuriana in the
contemporary UK?
The problem with such plausible arguments is that Celticism has been not
so much defeated as transformed. Following the re-formulation of Celticism
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Celtic values have been asserted
in a number of forms. In Ireland, following the secular-patriotic and Catholic
protest movements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, it was
Celticism that gave a vocabulary to the Irish nationalist movement that
rebelled against British power (Chríost 2012; Hutchinson 2001; Trumpener
1997: 37–66). More importantly for this study, there was also a late nine-
teenth-century Celtic revival in Britain.
In Ireland, Celticism functioned in two ways: firstly, as a vehicle for a
nationalist argument for independence and, secondly, as ‘a spiritual counter
to the base materialism’ of British culture, a means to ‘de-Anglicize’ the Irish
population (Chríost 2012). Initially, Celticist arguments had some appeal
among Irish-based Protestant patriots: in the 1790s and 1800s, such people
understood Celticism as a non-sectarian means by which to regenerate Ireland.
After all, a stress on Celtic values could imply a challenge to Rome’s claim as a
Christian centre. In the nineteenth century, however, the possibilities of a non-
sectarian Celticism receded. The Gaelic League, created in 1893, initially
included some prominent Protestant leaders; they left in the first decade of
the twentieth century (Fitzpatrick 1989: 186). But in other Protestant-majority
parts of the Isles, Celticism became increasingly attractive: it challenged
established cultural hierarchies and – above all – suggested a different attitude
to the ancient past.
The dominant arguments which circulated in nineteenth-century Britain
implied that the valid past was Roman: Latinate, classicist and rationalist.
The new concepts of evolution suggested that there was little of value in other
ancient civilisations. Both Charles Darwin and the leading archaeologist O.
G. S. Crawford seemed to suggest that ‘pre-civilised peoples lived in truly
Hobbesian gloom: a state of perpetual warfare’ (Stout 2008: 54). The concept
of the precivilised savage was cited as a justification for colonial projects
overseas and within the Isles. Such ideas were enforced with very practical effect

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in Ireland. Katie Trumpener points out that even the Irish landscape was viewed
in moralistic terms: projects to reclaim bog land reveal ‘a quasi-theological sense
of the bog as a source of sin and sloth, a site of social and moral darkness:
drainage takes on the status of an exorcism’ (Trumpener 1997: 52; O’Sullivan
2001). These ideas illustrate the cult of progress, a dominant value in Western
civilisation: the (British) future would inevitably be better than the (Celtic)
past.
How could such arguments be challenged? W. B. Yeats’s essay ‘The Celtic
Element in Literature’ (1903) demonstrates the tactics used to turn tables. As
Yeats acknowledged, he built on previous counter-arguments from writers
such as Ernest Renan and Mathew Arnold. Firstly, Yeats established an alter-
native cultural lineage, from the Welsh folk tales of the Mabinogion, through
the Arthurian legends, Shakespeare, Scott, to Wagner, the pre-Raphaelites,
Ibsen and d’Annunzio. This allowed him to claim that Celtic culture ‘has been
for centuries close to the main river of European literature’ (1903: 290).
Secondly, he reversed the moral-cultural polarities: he celebrated ‘unlearning’,
that ‘impassioned meditation which brings men beyond the edge of trace and
makes trees, and beasts, and dead things talk with human voices’ (1903:
273). The Celts are located within this specific landscape and acclaimed for
their love of nature, their ‘delight in wild and beautiful lamentations’. The
Celtic revival, according to Yeats, heralded ‘a new intoxication’, a worthy
reaction against both eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century
materialism (Leerssen 1996).
For Yeats, the logical consequence of such arguments was the political
project of Irish republican nationalism. Within Britain, such arguments could
be interpreted in different ways. For example, Arthur Machen, best remem-
bered for his contribution to the supernatural and horror genre (Woodcock
2000: 60–67), could write ecstatically about his native Gwent and ‘Caerleon-
on-Usk, the little silent, deserted village… that is golden for ever and immortal
in the romances of King Arthur and the Graal and the Round Table’. He
summed up his literary work as ‘one endeavour… I had been inventing tales
…by which I had tried to realise my boyish impressions of that wonderful
magic Gwent’ (Machen 2011: 5 and 13). For Machen (and others), this new,
positive sense of Welshness and the passion for Celticism did not lead to a
nationalist project (Jones 1992).
Another substantial response was to consider Celticism as an alternative to
the Orientalist cult of the East. While Madame Blavatsky and her
Theosophists were encouraging an admiration for Hinduism and Buddhism,
those who shared her interests in the occult but who sought inspiration from
within the UK’s horizons could turn to Celticism. Benham notes:

There was a minority in England that found it could easily identify with the develop-
ments happening just beyond its borders to the north and west, mindful that it had once
itself been a Celtic land in ancient times. We can fairly identify this seeming anomaly as
the ‘English Celtic revival’; if it requires a venue, then we need look no further than
Glastonbury, with its green hills and apple-orchards (2006: 5).

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Within England, Celticism could draw together many divergent adherents.

‘Poetic and mystical, in touch with nature and the ancient world… the “prehis-
toric” world which the Celts exemplified was beginning to emerge as a major
site of intellectual resistance to the mainstream’ (Stout 2008: 121). The most
prominent results of the English-Celtic revival was the reported finding of
the Holy Grail in Glastonbury in 1905 (Hopkinson-Ball 2007: 46–48,
150–52; Benham 2006: 66–70), the appearance of about 700 self-declared
druids at Stonehenge in August 1905 (Stout 2008: 126), and – curiously – a
new argument for Irish and Scottish tenants’ rights (Dewey 1974).
English Celticism is alive and well today. Kent (2002) has detailed its
expressions: the passionate – if historically confused – fascination with the
mysteries associated with Avebury and Stonehenge, the (pseudo-)Celtic refer-
ences in the music of Hawkwind, Led Zeppelin and Yes, and the continuing
popularity of Celtic tattoos all contribute to a ‘British mystical tradition’.
Thomas O’Loughlin (2002) writes in similar terms of a contemporary Celtic
Christianity which – as in 1800 – challenges Rome’s power and also functions
within the Anglican Communion as an alternative to High Church traditions.
These ideas challenge dominant cultural concepts in many ways, but
perhaps their most interesting implication is that of a revised sense of history.
All ruling cultures need a usable past: as has already been noted, in contempo-
rary France, this is done through the cult of ‘Our Ancestors the Gauls’. In part,
the new Celticists perform a similar role: they provide roots for the rootless
through a new historical narrative. But sometimes they aim to do still more.
Rather than accepting the inevitability of progress from a bad past to a better
tomorrow, sometimes the new Celticists seem to say that maybe the past was
actually better than the present.
Celtic Glastonbury therefore raises some potentially serious political and
cultural themes. The centrality given to the Tor during the 2012 Olympic
Opening Ceremony can be read as an ambiguous response to the various
regionalist movements currently active within the UK: at once, not only an
acknowledgement of the contribution of Celtic cultures to the creation of the
modern UK polity but also – via the implicit reference to the post-1191
versions of the Arthurian legends – as a rebuttal of regionalism and a renewed
assertion of the importance of central rule.

New Age Glastonbury

The modern use of the term ‘New Age’ can be dated to 1907, when Alfred
Orage became the editor of the New Age weekly (Heelas 1996: 17). However,
the exact significance of the term is subject to debate.
The substance of these beliefs varies widely, stretching from forms of witch-
craft to self-transformation courses for executives. ‘One’s initial impression is
of an eclectic hotch-potch of beliefs, practices and ways of life’, notes Heelas
(1996: 1), of ‘a loose idiom of humanistic potential and psychotherapeutic

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338 Sharif Gemie

change’ for Sutcliffe (2003: 10). Beneath this diversity, continues Heelas, there
are some consistent points, centred on the idea of self-spirituality: ‘the initial
task is to make contact with the spirituality which lies within the person’
(1996: 2). Chryssides (2007) provides a clearer characterisation: New Age
thinking is marked by an optimistic view of the self, a belief in self-improve-
ment, a questioning of traditional authority and an ‘essential eclecticism’.
Whichever definition is preferred for the New Age, it is clear that Glastonbury,
with its semi-permanent population of about 700 New Agers, can claim to be
its centre in the UK (Prince and Riches 2000: 8).
The point where New Age thinking and historical awareness begin to
connect (or collide) is through the idea of ‘sacred landscapes’. One theme that
runs through many New Age works is that a landscape can be read or sensed
as revealing a particular spiritual condition. This idea has a number of prece-
dents: John Michell has written a lyrical description of John Aubrey visiting
the village of Avebury in 1648, observing the ancient stone circle which lies
around the village, and then actually seeing ‘a vast prehistoric temple’ (1972:
1). William Stukeley, the author of the first detailed analysis of Stonehenge
(published in 1740), was – according to Michell – gripped by a similar vision:
he saw that ‘from the northern islands of Scotland to the southern plains of
Wessex, the Druids had stamped the country with the sign of the serpent and
the winged disc’ (1972: 5). Such early modern thinkers inevitably saw the Celts
as the originators of these ancient features: given that these monuments were
clearly pre-Roman and history only recorded one culture existent in the Isles
before the Romans, who else could be credited with their construction? The
landscape around Glastonbury itself has also been the inspiration for similar
New Age visions: in the 1920s, the Canadian Theosophist Katherine
Maltwood identified a huge planisphere around the town. She argued that this
formed the true ‘round table’ of the Arthurian legend (Bowman 2007).
One of the first systematic works to see in the British landscape a legible
record of a past culture was The Old Straight Track, published by Alfred
Watkins in 1925, a small contribution to the larger ruralist turn in British
culture. Watkins saw himself as a practical archaeologist, not a mystic. His
key idea was simple enough: he began with the observation that sites of ancient
significance, whether standing stones, churches (often built over more ancient
monuments2), forts, hilltops or springs, frequently seemed to form straight
lines. Watkins speculated that such lines suggested the existence of a vast
network of ‘straight trackways in prehistoric times’ based on various sighting
posts which would allow the traveller to orientate themselves (1974: xx). These
tracks had worked well in the Neolithic period, he argued, and were not
completely eradicated when the Romans arrived, assisting them in building
their straight roads across the British landscape (1974: 206). He labelled these
tracks ‘the ley system’ and encouraged others to hunt for them: this involved
studying the ground, seeing what could be gleaned from place names, and
researching old legends (1974: xix). He explicitly refused any spiritual meaning
in this network: ‘utility was the primary object’, he insisted, but Watkins did

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Visions of Albion 339

speculate that superstitions and beliefs may later have gathered around the
tracks (1974: 215).
Perhaps inevitably, Watkins’s sober-minded, relatively limited speculations
have been transformed by later followers into something quite different. Ley-
lines are no longer seen as prehistoric direction signs but as lines of energy.
‘The whole landscape of Britain has been laid out to a celestial pattern’, argued
Michell, ‘the vast pattern imposed on the landscape according to some harmo-
nious, magic principle which we are now hardly able to conceive’ (1972: 34 and
43). Within this pattern, Michell argues that Glastonbury plays a central role:
his research concentrates on Glastonbury Abbey, which Michell claims was
‘originally conceived on the model of the New Jerusalem, the holy city
described by St John in Revelation 21’ (Michell 1972 144).
These New Age visions of sacred landscapes imply a form of national con-
sciousness: firstly, because sites are being claimed, in the name of specific ideas,
as ‘really’ representing the identity of the nation. This frequently presents an
implicit or explicit challenge to existing authorities. The regular solstice clashes
at Stonehenge illustrate this (Blain and Wallis 2004). Secondly, by giving
certain sacred landscapes a centrality in the construction of the modern UK,
a distinct version of the national story is being suggested. For example, when
Hopkinson-Ball (2007: 46) writes that ‘the Glastonbury “traditions” are
inextricably linked to the spiritual origins and life of the English nation…
Glastonbury remains a national shrine’, his words suggest a certain vision of
what constitutes Englishness.

Towards a political reading of the New Age

Laruelle’s analysis (2008) of Neopaganism in contemporary Russia sounds a

relevant warning note. She examines a series of new far-right movements
which have been inspired by variants of the Aryan myth, by readings of Bud-
dhism and by other ancient Indian texts, and which have adopted aggressively
racist and homophobic positions. Laruelle’s study suggests that such move-
ments form a ‘conjunction between New Age and New Right’ (284). Rudgley
(2006) identifies similar tendencies towards ethnic exclusivity among some cen-
tral European neopagan groups. Looking further, one can find some evidence
of similar tendencies within the UK (Macklin 2005; Woden’s Folk Undated).
Are they also present among the New Age groups associated with Glastonbury?
Curiously, in the many studies of Glastonbury and related movements,
there are few political evaluations. Ivakhiv notes that Michell has presented
‘a mystical paleo-conservatism and romantic British (Anglo-Celtic) national-
ism’ (2001: 132), and Wood (1994) warns of the authoritarianism inherent in
modern adaptions of the Arthurian myth. But such observations seem
exceptional.
It seems likely that there is a contrast between Western and Eastern
European receptions of New Age culture. Significantly, even Michell was

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340 Sharif Gemie

concerned about a German variant of Watkins’ theses, condemning its pioneer

as ‘a fanatic… a violently argumentative evangelist, a tireless propagandist for
the superiority in historical culture and innate talents of the north European
people above all others’ (Michell 1989: 64). Referring back to Laruelle’s study,
one can challenge its conceptual basis. As noted above, one of the essential
characteristics of the New Age movement is its eclecticism. Those neopagans
who look back to the past to find ‘a golden age of ideological and geographic
communalism’ (Saunders 2012: 796) are searching for certainties: they are
ideologically quite distinct from the essentially eclectic New Age movement
which has thrived at Glastonbury, and so the condemnation of the New Age
as inherently ‘New Right’ can certainly be challenged.
Let us turn to consider the historiography on which the New Age visions
are based. In them, there is much to infuriate academic historians. They can
be seen as naively reviving eighteenth-century perceptions of druidism and
thus ignoring two centuries of scholarship (Hutton 2013). Certainly, aca-
demic rebuttals of New Age visions are possible. Writing specifically about
Celtic Christianity, Meek (1996) assembles strong counter-arguments.
Rather than ‘gentle’, the centuries in which Celtic mystical texts were writ-
ten saw wars between Irish monasteries, including the tactical participation
by some monasteries in Viking raids. Rather than marginalised figures on
the periphery of European culture, early Irish writers saw themselves as
up to date and knowledgeable about recent thinking. Rather than being
anti-hierarchical, they developed parish structures for rural Ireland. Rather
than tolerant, they repeatedly condemned pagan beliefs. Well-researched
analyses also suggest that there is less evidence for a Celtic presence at
Glastonbury than in other nearby sites (Rahtz and Watts 2009) and that
the concept of ley lines is an arbitrary mish-mash of false connections, ‘a
pathetic alternative’ to conventional archaeology (Williamson and Bellamy
1983: 211). Such stern lessons are unlikely to do anything to prevent the
continuing circulation of Arthuriana, the youthful delight in speculation
about past ages and the periodic gatherings at Stonehenge and Avebury.
Even Meek acknowledges the spiritual strengths and beauty of the Irish
mystics’ works, and Williamson and Bellamy concede that ley hunting is
‘great fun’ (1983: 133).
New Age thinking has been most effective in popularising new attitudes to
the ancient past. Watkins was eloquent and persuasive about this point. ‘Out
from the soil we wrench a new knowledge, of old, old human skill and effort,
that came to the making of this England of ours’, he noted (1974: 218),
suggesting that something in that ancient past is worthy of respect. Michell
argues in a similar manner, for example, seeing ‘the temple of Stonehenge as
the work of a civilised, scientifically active people, who could legitimately be
studied in relation to sacred and mythological records and Old Testament
chronology. By the same token the Druids were… dignified, sage and
philosophical’ (Michell 1989: 43). In such passages, New Agers refuse the
platitudes of the myth of progress.

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Visions of Albion 341

This does not necessarily imply conservatism. The political attitudes of New
Age activists are frequently radical. Frederick Bligh Bond, the influential
spiritualist who led the excavations of Glastonbury Abbey, was a Christian
Socialist and a follower of Ruskin and Morris (Hopkinson-Ball 2007:
64–65). George Watson Macgregor Reid, the first leader of the English druids,
was a member of the quasi-Marxist Social-Democratic Federation in 1888–89,
a militant worker in the Glasgow docks, the chairman of Clapham Labour
Party in 1918 and a supporter of the General Strike in 1926 (Stout 2008:
123–35). Rutland Boughton was a composer associated with Glastonbury,
who composed music-dramas inspired by the Arthurian legends. He was an
enthusiastic supporter of the General Strike and joined the Communist Party
in 1926 (Benham 2006: 183–84). Writing of New Age Travellers of the 1970s
and 1980s, McKay (1996) stresses their connections to Green and anarchist
thinking.
Rather than uncovering the past in any meaningful way, New Age de-
scriptions of sacred landscapes often aim to arouse a specific emotion within
the informed viewer. George McKay, in his sensitive analysis of the Albion
Fairs held in the 1970s and 1980s, captures both the simple fun to be de-
rived from such practices and their ambiguity. ‘Albion as constructed is
an earthy, mystical, mythical Blakean alternate world of British history,
all mists and Merlin… a parody of history’ (McKay 1996: 38) (ref.). The
Fairs (or Fayres) illustrate ‘a desire for a truly alternative society, even an
alternative history’ (1996: 38). New Age visions of history are constructed
with an often playful sense of ‘what if…’ rather than through a desire to es-
tablish facts. As a historical analysis, this is clearly weak, limited and even
narrow-minded. Williamson and Bellamy’s sharp criticisms of ley-hunting
ring true: ‘The ley hunters’ analysis of the past is really only the assertion
that the country was once covered with leys and now it is not’ (1983:
182). There is no scope for conceptual or theoretical development within
this framework.
Looking again at the writings of Watkins and Michell, one can note that
despite their obvious emotional attachment to the landscapes they describe
and despite their respect for the makers of those landscapes, their visions of
past societies remain curiously empty. Nowhere in Watkins’s work is there
any interest in the people who created his beloved ley-lines: there is one chance
reference to ‘astronomer-priests’ but no consideration concerning the society
that might have required this intricate network of guiding lines etched into
the landscape (1974: 215). In the case of Michell, it often remains unclear
whether he considers that the features that fascinate him were wrought by
human hands or whether they formed through the actions of some super-hu-
man force.
Michell rehearses the argument that a specific kind of sensibility is
required to see the features which he describes: ‘The ley system may be
actually invisible to those whose previous knowledge tells them it cannot
exist’ (1972: 19). The poetic form of knowledge that he celebrates is not

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342 Sharif Gemie

based on academic skills of analysis and observation. Others make still

grander claims that they can ‘see’ the landscape in the same manner as a
Neolithic shaman, with ‘Western rational and linear perspectives… set aside’
(Wallis and Blain 2003: 311). Such attitudes reflect the solecism inherent in
almost all New Age thinking, with its stress on ‘the spirituality which lies
within the person’, rather than on the external influences on the person
(Heelas 1996: 2).
This stance is a significant one and suggests important limitations to New
Age thinking. Watkins, Michell and other New Age thinkers seem to resem-
ble Raymond Williams’s ‘self-conscious observer’. ‘The man who is not only
looking at land but who is conscious that he is doing so, as an experience in
itself, and who has prepared social models and analogies from elsewhere to
support and justify the experience’ (1975: 150). The ancient people of the
past are valued insomuch as they were – or appear to be – visionaries or
druids: they are rarely valued in themselves, as contributors to the human
story. The landscape they created is abstracted away from labour and
human activity; the form of observation taken by New Age thinkers is that
of the superior outsider, conscious of the effect on the reader, and – like
Cecil Sharp – claiming ownership of the view and the experience. It is this
essential solecism that limits the potential political importance of New
Age thinking: on the one hand, it effectively short-circuits its exploitation
by far right groups seeking cultural and ethnic certainties; on the other
hand, it also stops New Age thinking developing into a humanistic, major-
itarian political platform.

Conclusion

‘Well, if that’s the way you feel’, said the Unicorn, ‘then I’ll have to stop believ-
ing in you’.
‘New unicorns’ are there to be found in this over-idealised, pastoralised
landscape. It has been an ever-fecund source of dreams, visions and projects
for a bewildering collection of ramblers, mystics, self-styled Anglo-Celts and
free-wheeling radicals, but its potential importance goes still deeper than
this. As the UK inches towards a federal political structure, it is more than
possible that the great myths associated with the little town of Glastonbury
will – in true Arthurian fashion – be re-born as quasi-official narratives.
Their development may mark the final end of the centrality of the lion,
the unicorn and the rest of the UK’s pseudo-mediaeval monarchist
symbolism. These ‘new unicorns’ will draw on cosmopolitan cultural tropes
which could be more comprehensible and more relevant to the changing
population of the Isles. Boyle’s choice of Glastonbury for the 2012 Olympic
ceremony can be seen as a feather in the wind: a suggestion of a new
foundation myth for a newly-understood federation of the Isles.

© The author(s) 2016. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2016
Visions of Albion 343

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their
advice and encouragement in writing this article: Francesca Amorini, Brian
Ireland, Paul Chambers, Ronan LeCoadic and Gavin Edwards.

Endnotes

1 Obviously, the issues discussed are affected by recent political developments such as Scottish,
Welsh and Northern Irish devolution and the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland. These
complicate contemporary perceptions of UK-ness, Britishness and Englishness.
2 Watkins’s assumption that this type of monumental continuity was common appears to be
inaccurate: Neolithic sites developed according to the needs of the Neolithic population; early
Christian Saxon sites according to the needs of Saxon society: there was no substantial overlap
between the two. See Williamson and Bellamy 1983: 77–80.

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