From Frome to Glastonbury

I was invited to give a couple of talks at the Speaker’s Forum in the Glastonbury Festival in June, which I’ve just reprised at the Green Gathering this weekend. In this post, I’m going to tell some stories loosely about my trip to Glastonbury, focusing less on the talks and more on the trip.

There’s a chapter in my forthcoming book in which a narrator living in a crisis-ridden fictional future walks from London to Glastonbury, so when it came to speaking at the festival I felt I had no option but to stick with that storyline and walk there. Okay, so the Glastonbury Festival isn’t quite in Glastonbury, and my home is a lot closer to it than London, but let us not be distracted by such trifles. The walk was about fifteen miles, with another couple added for getting lost halfway along the route and then getting lost in the festival site itself. That felt plenty enough for the day.

So then, I left home early on an overcast Thursday morning and was on unfamiliar terrain within the hour. The small circle of my days amazes me sometimes.

The first part of the walk saw me traversing thick woodland on the eastern edge of the Mendips, edging around the gigantic Whatley quarry. Some of this woodland area itself was a working quarry until the mid-twentieth century, but on that morning all was quiet in the woods. A buzzard perched on an oak branch with its back to me, oblivious to my presence until I was within a few yards. It’s amazing how quickly nature can bounce back. Although sadly permission has recently been granted to open some of this ground for quarrying again.

The most striking thing about the walk was that until I got to Shepton Mallet, the small town nearest to the festival site, I barely encountered another soul. A woman walking a dog crossed my path a hundred yards ahead. Later, two walkers likewise crossed in front. That was it. The handful of villages I walked through were deserted. The only people I otherwise saw were motorists on the country lanes I occasionally crossed. If it hadn’t been for their relaxed demeanour as they swooshed past it could easily have felt as if I’d stumbled into a zombie apocalypse.

The underpopulation of the countryside tallied with the underuse of its fields. Occasionally there was a ...