Today’s article comes to us from Siobhan Ball, a writer and archivist living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Siobhan has degrees in information management and medieval history, making her lots of fun at parties. She’s written for Autostraddle, Broadly, and Diva, and is currently working on a book on the supernatural women of Ireland for Wolfenhowle Press.
GLASTONBURY, United Kingdom – Bride’s Mound in Glastonbury is getting a makeover, with plans to enhance the site to make it and its history more accessible to the public underway.
Bride’s Mound, also known as St. Bride’s Mound, is a fifth century monastic site of great importance to both British Christians and the contemporary Pagan community. This is due to the connections, and some would argue syncretism, between the Christian St. Brigid and the Irish goddess of the same name.
Urban art mural of the Seek Festival, Dundalk, County Louth [DSexton, Wikimedia Commons, CC 4.0]
Believed to be the location where St. Bride (also known as Brigid, Bridie, Brid, and Ffraid, depending on language and location) received her monastic training prior to founding the monastery in Kildare (whose sacred flame most definitely had pre-Christian origins), the site contains monastic ruins, the lost location of a holy well run dry, and incredible natural biodiversity.
In use since neolithic times, the continuity of human presence on the mound, coupled with the later Christian shrine suggesting it originally served another, pre-Christian religious function, Bride’s Mound played a key role in the spiritual revival of Glastonbury as well as the development of the divine feminine movement in the early 20th century.
It was there, in what then remained of Bride’s Spring, that Dr. John Goodchild chose to conceal the famous Blue Bowl he had acquired in Italy. He had received a vision that it was the holy grail, that it and the future of religion belonged in the hands of women, and needed to be hidden so it could be found by it’s true owners. There, seven years later, Kitty Tudor Pole, Christine and Janet Allen found it.
This bowl, and the people who found and cared for it were integral to Britain’s divine feminine and increasingly Pagan Christo-pagan movements, and while the Blue Bowl is now safely cared for in the Chalice Well it and the role it played seem largely forgotten.
Going back even further to before the dissolution of the monasteries, Bride’s Mound was an important stop on the Glastonbury Pilgrimage route, where pilgrims would spend the night before heading on to the town proper. The revived pilgrimage route, devised in 1920 by Alice Buckton, involved a stop to tie clootie rags on the thorn tree near the well’s probable location – a Celtic Christian practice with pre-Christian origins, representing the dual nature of St. Brigid/Bride.
Since then the nuns of Kildare have brought their relit Perpetual Flame to the mound, strengthening the connection between past and present, goddess and saint, Bride’s Mound and Bride’s Irish origins.
These days Bride’s Mound is subject to an annual Imbolc pilgrimage by members of the Glastonbury Goddess Temple, Friend’s of Bride’s Mound, and unaffiliated Pagans alike, that begins at the White Spring and heads down through the town to the Mound itself.
View from Brides Mound, Glastonbury, U.K. [Alwyn Ladell, Flickr, CC 2.0]
Despite the importance of Bride’s Mound both historically and religiously, the site, which is a scheduled Ancient Monument, has been left in relative obscurity, maintained by the independent non-profit organisation Friends of Bride’s Mound.
Now, thanks to Town Deal funding that’s been awarded to the site, new foot and cycle paths to make the Bride’s Mound more accessible to visitors are in the works, as is an elaborate visitor’s centre to educate people about the site. Plans should be finalised by the New Year (secular, not Celtic).
Hopefully this will help bring an important site in the country’s history into the public eye and help more Pagans discover a wonderful piece of Glastonbury’s rich spiritual tapestry.
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