About
The Glastonbury Lake Village Museum, housed in a converted 19th-century stable block on the High Street of Glastonbury, tells the remarkable story of one of the most important Iron Age archaeological discoveries ever made in Britain — the Glastonbury Lake Village, an ancient crannóg-style settlement built on wooden piles in the Somerset marshes near Godney, approximately 3 miles north-west of Glastonbury town.
Excavated between 1892 and 1907 by Arthur Bulleid, a young medical student who had been inspired by Swiss lake-dwelling archaeology, the lake village yielded an extraordinary assemblage of organic material preserved by the anaerobic, waterlogged conditions of the peat: wooden bowls, baskets, cordage, clothing, tools, and personal ornaments that document Iron Age life with an intimacy and completeness almost unique in British archaeology.
The village, occupied roughly between 300 and 100 BC, appears to have been home to a community of perhaps a hundred people living in circular wattle-and-daub huts built on timber platforms in the marsh — a choice of location that may have offered protection from raiders, access to marsh resources, or spiritual significance connected to the sacred character that Somerset's wetlands evidently held for Iron Age communities.
The museum holds the most important collection of material from this excavation, including the famous Glastonbury ware pottery — a distinctive and highly accomplished curvilinear ceramic style that represents one of the finest artistic achievements of British Iron Age culture — alongside wooden tools, glass beads, bronze fibulae (brooches), weaving equipment, and the bones of domesticated and wild animals.
The wider context of the Glastonbury landscape — its connections to Arthurian legend, the early Christian community at Glastonbury Abbey, and the mythological significance of the Somerset Levels as a liminal, transitional landscape between the worlds — is explored alongside the archaeological evidence, making this small but exceptional museum a gateway to one of England's most resonant historic landscapes.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- The museum is in the medieval Tribunal building on the High Street — the building itself is a significant historic site, so look up and around as you enter
- Combine with Glastonbury Abbey (a short walk up the hill) for a complete picture of Glastonbury's extraordinary heritage spanning Iron Age to medieval — both are within easy walking distance
- The lake village site itself (near Godney, about 3 miles north) is farmland and not open to visitors, but the museum's reconstruction shows what the site would have looked like
- Glastonbury is famously colourful and eccentric as a town — the High Street's mix of crystal shops, vegetarian cafés, and New Age bookshops alongside ancient historic buildings is unlike anywhere else in England
- The museum is modest in size but exceptional in content — the Glastonbury ware pottery is worth a trip in itself for anyone interested in prehistoric art
- Parking in Glastonbury can be difficult on busy summer weekends — arrive early or use the Magdalene Street car park behind the High Street
- The Somerset Rural Life Museum (SWE-50026) is in Glastonbury too and covers the agricultural history of Somerset from the same era through to the 20th century
Highlights
Glastonbury Ware Pottery — Iron Age Artistic Masterpieces
The finest Iron Age pottery in Britain is widely held to be the ceramics produced by the craftspeople of the Glastonbury Lake Village — a tradition of high-fired, brilliantly burnished pottery decorated with flowing geometric and curvilinear patterns that represents the La Tène art style at its most expressive in British terms.
The Glastonbury ware tradition is characterised by its swirling, asymmetric decoration: S-curves, leaf shapes, and running spirals that cover the exterior of bowls and jars in complex compositions that the eye follows without reaching a resolution. The craftspeople who made these pots were clearly highly skilled specialists, and the museum holds a significant selection of original examples alongside photographs and reconstructions that allow the full achievement of this tradition to be appreciated.
Organic Finds — Wood, Basket, and Textile
What makes the Glastonbury Lake Village assemblage uniquely important is the survival of organic materials — objects made of wood, plant fibres, and leather that almost never survive in ordinary archaeological deposits. The waterlogged, anaerobic conditions of the peat preserved these materials for over two thousand years with remarkable completeness.
Wooden bowls and ladles turned on pole lathes, wicker baskets still retaining their weave structure, wooden handles for iron tools, fragments of woven cloth, and lengths of plaited cordage give a three-dimensional picture of everyday Iron Age material culture that bone and pottery alone cannot provide.
These organic finds transform the Glastonbury assemblage from an interesting archaeological collection into a window directly onto daily life.
Arthur Bulleid and the Discovery
The story of how the lake village was discovered is itself remarkable. Arthur Bulleid, a young medical student and enthusiastic archaeologist from Somerset, had been reading about Swiss lake dwellings — the famous pile-dwelling settlements discovered in Lake Zurich in the 1850s — and wondered whether similar sites might exist in the Somerset Levels.
Methodically examining the surface of the flat marshy land north of Glastonbury in 1892, he found a field pocked with the raised mounds of individual hut platforms, exactly as described for Swiss sites.
His subsequent excavations, conducted with admirable care for the era, produced the extraordinary assemblage now in the museum. The museum commemorates Bulleid's achievement and his influence on British prehistoric archaeology.
The Village Life Reconstruction
A detailed reconstruction of Iron Age lake village life — based directly on the archaeological evidence — shows how the community of approximately a hundred people may have organised their settlement, their daily routines, and their seasonal activities. Circular wattle-and-daub houses on timber platforms connected by boardwalks over the marsh, with canoes moored at landing stages, herds of cattle, sheep, and pigs on the drier ground nearby, and the smoke of cooking fires rising in the marsh mist: the reconstruction brings together everything the archaeological evidence allows to be inferred about how this community lived.
The model is displayed alongside the actual objects that inform it.
Collections
The Glastonbury Lake Village Museum holds the most important collection from the excavations of the Iron Age lake village at Glastonbury and Meare, conducted between 1892 and 1956 by Arthur Bulleid, Harold St George Gray, and other archaeologists. The collection includes pottery (Glastonbury ware and other ceramic types), organic finds (wood, basketry, textile, cordage), bronze and iron metalwork (tools, weapons, personal ornaments), glass objects (beads), bone tools and animal remains, and documentary material from the excavations including Bulleid's original field notes and photographs.
The assemblage is of international archaeological importance and is one of the fullest records of Middle Iron Age community life in Britain.
The Iron Age Lake Village
Permanent display of finds from the 1892–1907 excavations with interpretation of lake village life and archaeology
The Somerset Landscape
The prehistoric and historic landscape context of the Somerset Levels and Glastonbury
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.