It does seem, though, that some places are more likely to be ascribed ethereal qualities, that some places possess a capacity to inspire the imagination. “Magic” is always a subjective quality attributed to a place or experience by a person where one person saw a stone tower, John Steinbeck saw something else. Why would a writer remembered for detailed depictions of people’s struggle for daily existence talk in terms of a place possessing “all kinds of magic?” His novel The Grapes of Wrath describes lives lived in the context of grim realities, not much magic of any sort.

It would not have been hard to imagine how Steinbeck had looked across a nocturnal landscape and thought it had a certain undefinable quality.Ī Nobel laureate, John Steinbeck was a writer who captured a sense of 1930s America, the years of the Great Depression. When a blanket of mist comes down over the Levels, if you look north-east from the village, the Tor, that had caught the eye of John Steinbeck, rises like an island from a sea of white fluffiness. “You should have come to High Ham, instead,” I thought, “you wouldn’t have had to go fifty feet from your house.”

There is no question that there is magic here, and all kinds of magic. The other night, I discovered that fifty feet from our house, through a break in the trees, you can see St Michael’s Tor at Glastonbury. Quotes from famous writers include words that are pejorative as well as ones more complimentary, words from unexpected sources appear, among them a comment from John Steinbeck, who stayed in the east Somerset town of Bruton in 1959: The walls of a circular room at the county museum in Taunton are inscribed with comments on Somerset and its people.

My friend thinks Glastonbury is a magical place, she is not alone in her opinion.

Quotes about glastonbury tor