Nine years ago I was traveling with a friend in the early autumn beauty of Somerset, England. The weather was spectacular as we made our way across the channel from France to London, and then by car into the pastoral beauty of what was once known as the Summer Country. We were intent on exploring an unusual hill and its sacred springs, a place known since antiquity as “the Tor” of mythical Avalon. These sacred sites exist today as part of the small town of Glastonbury, the site of a popular annual music festival known throughout England. People love Glastonbury for many reasons, but most of all because it’s a place of archaic lore that was once called Ynis Witrin (Isle of Glass). As we walked the streets, browsed in book and memorabilia shops, and enjoyed the cafes, I pondered its secrets.

As we walked down Magdalene Street, I was drawn to the green, park-like grounds where the old monastery and cathedral once stood. I soon found myself wandering in rain-soaked grass amidst the stone walls of a stark ruin. Very little remained of the great church, and yet the stones shouted to me of the Sacred, whispered a story of hidden secrets.

A lover of gothic architecture and its symbolic art, I’ve visited countless cathedrals, churches, and ancient chapels over many years of travel in Europe and Britain. Just the day before, we had visited the magnificent, seven-hundred-year-old cathedral in Wells—less than thirty miles away from Glastonbury. We marveled at its sculptured beauty and symmetry, its well-kept gardens and lawns, its lake and tall trees, so perfectly preserved over the centuries. Speaking in quiet tones, we walked under vaulted stone ceilings and looked up at stained glass windows that glowed in vibrant colors. A beloved religious monument, the local folk still attended worship services in the church at Wells.

In Glastonbury, I was intrigued and strangely awed by the stunning raw destruction of the devastated abbey ruins, which presented such a flagrant juxtaposition to the church at Wells. Only a few walls remained of the once-majestic, soaring stone cathedral that had been brutally razed to the ground in 1539 during the religious reform of Henry VIII. The sensation of a deep, powerful story reverberated from the sculpted stones of the remaining walls, encoded as they were with a mystery that lingered in this place along with the question: What had really happened here?

Mulling it over, I almost stumbled upon a stone slab hidden in the emerald grass. It was engraved with the epithet, “Here lies King Arthur and his queen on the Isle of Avalon.” The greatest mythic legend of the western world came instantly to life in the panoramic scope of my imagination! Now I was really captured.

Over the past forty years I’d absorbed the Arthurian legend in novels (with gratitude to the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, for her ground-breaking, perennially popular The Mists of Avalon), movies, scholarly texts and histories. I had studied and contemplated the key players of the myth from diverse perspectives—spiritual, historic, symbolic and archetypal. In fact, I’d come on this trip to Glastonbury, or ancient Ynis Witrin, because of the spectacular mythology surrounding the famous hill of the Tor, long held to be the location of mystic Avalon and the entrance to Annwfyn, the Otherworld of Celtic lore. As the story goes, when King Arthur died, his body was taken to rest in Avalon by the priestess Morgan, his half-sister. And sure enough, here amidst the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey was where the bones once lay. But where were they now?

Amazed, I continued across the abbey grounds, checking out the square stone building of the kitchen, with its four fireplaces for cooking. It had miraculously survived, as I would discover, to feed the king’s men as they took up their chisels and pick axes, their hammers and crow bars to tear down the church (already quite ancient even in the sixteenth century, having been founded in the first century CE) while the village locals carried off the stones for their own use. Sobered by many questions, I made my way to the visitor center.

Today, Glastonbury Abbey is classified as an ancient monument and heritage site of England. I spent an hour browsing the impressive visitor center and its treasure house of information. There I soaked up the juicy but heart-rending story told on panels that lined the spacious main room. The infamous tyrant Henry VIII famously beheaded two of his six wives and executed or burned to death over two hundred of his subjects in his personal religious reform (conducted while the Reformation begun by Martin Luther was sweeping across Europe), which deposed the Pope in Rome and placed Henry at the head of his own church, while the riches of English monasteries and abbeys flowed into the royal coffers as gold, silver, land, and power.

As I stood reading about the real life character of Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, it was as if the full, untold story of the characters, and the arc of their dramatic narrative, was “downloaded” to me. A bit shocked and overwhelmed by that experience, I continued the tour with my friend as we made our way to the sacred springs and the Tor of Glastonbury, amazing places that figure prominently in my books. That night, back in our hotel room in Bath and hungry for more, I plunged into some initial internet research. I soon discovered that the historical figure of Richard Whiting, by all accounts, a man of virtue, courage, and rare spiritual integrity. He was even more fascinating and compelling than I’d first thought.

My curiosity was further piqued as I learned that the bones of Arthur and his queen had mysteriously disappeared in 1539 when the cathedral was destroyed, along with rare manuscripts and precious relics brought by Joseph of Arimathea, the monastery founder, in whose tomb the body of Jesus was laid to rest after the crucifixion. I also discovered that, according to historical records, while Henry VIII craved the wealth and land of the religious houses he destroyed or claimed, at Glastonbury he coveted the bones of the great King Arthur more than the riches of the abbey.

These intriguing facts burrowed into my imagination as the seeds of the story that grew and took on a life of its own over the next few years. I had written the first draft of the book when my ongoing avid digging for facts yielded the lore surrounding the “Company of Avalon,” which amazed me and confirmed the shape that my story had taken. The saga of Glastonbury Abbey grew in scope and detail, demanded to be told in the written word, and eventually evolved into not just one book, but three, all of them taking place primarily in Somerset, England, known to antiquity as the Summer Country.

Strangely, the bones disappeared before his hinge men could collect them. The secret of the bones and relics has been so well-kept that, five hundred years later, no one knows where they are. Of course, you’ll find out what happened to them in Book One of The Summer Country, which is a tribute to the magic and fascination of historical fiction.

Book One has fascinating underpinnings in mythology of King Arthur, Queen Gwenhyfar, and Camelot, which evolved into Book Two, The Queen’s Tale (coming soon), a contemporary retelling of this classic legend in which Gwenhyfar—usually depicted as the unfaithful wife who brought down Camelot—is brought to life as a strong, inspiring female protagonist and the sovereign queen of her people. You’ll find more about The Queen’s Tale in the Books section of this website.