A Sort of Pilgrimage - Glastonbury Tor

We'd forgotten about the Tor. It had faded into the grey zone of "life before child" - all the more so because the gap between our trip and our daughter's birth was not long at all.

My wife has a steel will, but is also very pragmatic. At the second bench on the hillside she had stopped and sent me on ahead. I went to the top, looked around, came down and told her about it. I don't remember anything about it.

This time, all three of us were going to make it to the top. Having gone round an insane number of roundabouts (another reason not to do what computers tell you), we were not going to be defeated by the forecast rain. "Let's get going," I said, and our daughter started to run.

"I'm surprised I got this far," said my wife as we passed through a gate just as the slope steepened, but her steady pace left her at the back as the other two of us strode on.

I often tackle a hill climb by taking it at speed, knocking back gradient with every step. Somehow this has transferred to the next generation, and our daughter took the steps effortlessly. She ran, I ran, I told her "real hill walkers never stop", and we ran some more. We were heads down, feet quick on the soft ground, our minds filled with calculations of the next step on the white-green grass, or the pale gravel of the stairway cut into the side of the Tor. My wife shouted "Kestrel!"

We stopped and looked where she was pointing. The bird was close against the ground, holding its weight in the face of the wind. Its black-tipped wings flexed and angled as gusts threw its body back. After a few seconds it changed its place by a few metres, chose somewhere else to fix its stare.

"It's like the White Horse," our daughter said, recalling a similar sight and climb at Uffington. That's a place with myths about St George. My mind, so far set simply on tackling the hill, opened to some of the stories of the Tor.

*

Richard Whiting, last prior of Glastonbury Abbey, was hanged on the Tor in 1538 - that was the first thing I remembered. The crows, which sat like coal in the uncut grass, put me in mind of the Old English trope of battlefield scavengers. Neither of these things was something to talk about with a six-year-old, nor very fair to the thousands of generations who found some sort of god up here.

The tower doesn't inspire cheery thoughts. On a grey day it has all the severity Gothic architecture can muster - its cuboid form insists an idea of punishment. It was not until we reached the circular viewpoint marker with its arrows pointing to various places of interest that I remembered that a very different set of stories were associated with the Tor.

We climbed onto the viewpoint marker. We looked at all the people who shared the hilltop with us, and then out across the landscape.

On two sides the clouds determined everything. Farmland extended as far as green could make it through grey. We could see rain's outposts, where the darker shades of trees and hedges were surrounded and rubbed out. The wind was from that direction.

We turned the other way, to look across fields and more ordered fields, some pale green, others bright yellow. In the distance these flat squares glowed, as did the hills beyond - a front of sun, falling back.

We looked down at the arrows under our feet - here was one our daughter would be interested in. "Camelot's over there," I said, pointing at a fold in the hills. (In fact it's Cadbury Castle, an Iron Age hill fort.)

She grinned. "That's my house." King Arthur is her alter ego. We talked a bit about whether we'd be able to see Sir Gawain riding north for his encounter with the Green Knight in Staffordshire (perhaps), my home county. We also thought about Glastonbury as the Isle of Avalon, Arthur's supposed place of refuge after the Battle of Camlann. Something clicked in my brain, and I told her I thought that all around us might have been the Lake with the Lady and Excalibur.

The Somerset Levels' history as a floodplain is much better known now than it was before later winter's storms. From the Tor we could see the thing strings of drainage channels between the hedges. I described how all this land used to become water every winter, how there's be a lake from the bottom of this tor all the way to Camelot's hills. On a day like this almost everything would have been white, but for where the wind scrawled a text of waves' shadows on the surface.

We didn't catch it quite as bad in Oxford as they did in Somerset, but still the sense of what Willy Loman calls "feeling temporary about myself" drifted over me, as it had as I watched the water rise in our back garden.

Looking down at this lake-in-abeyance, the size of the problem is clear. Dredging the rivers and channels would make little difference because of the sheer volume of water - the measures that made the place farmland were immense, and it will take something similar to keep it that way in the long term. Land use needs to change so that water is held back in "sacrificial land" for longer, and the soil is more capable of absorbing it when it does arrive. Best of all, the rate of climate change needs to slow that there's more time to adapt - but that's not going to happen.

Strange that what is "normal" now - the patchwork fields, the crops growing well on the alluvial (and heavily fertilised) soil, is so separate from the main thread of human history in the Levels, of inundation, in which the Tor stood out as a sacred beacon. Where would Alfred escape from the Vikings now (and burn or not burn the cakes)? I think I'd pick east London.

Another train of thought that's a bit much for a six-year-old, at least while she's on holiday. She was keen to tell her mum all about the knights she had corralled at Camelot, but stopped mid-sentence to point out an October butterfly, a red admiral, buffeted by the strengthening wind and making halting progress across the grim face of the tower. As it passed, the crows and kestrel made their way down the side of the hill in short, reluctant flights.

Then the rain hit. We put on our coats while everyone else, bizarrely unprepared, huddled under the tower.

"Time to go," my wife said. At first we only walked, but soon our daughter and I were running with our arms outstretched. We jumped and shouted. There's something fantastic about defying the rain on a hillside. It's not just the rain that's being defied, but ordinary days of work and school and trivial irritations. When we got to the bottom we were laughing.