Glastonbury Tor - Terraces

Terraces

The seven deep, roughly symmetrical terraces are one of the Tor's enduring mysteries. A number of possible explanations for them have been put forward:

• Agriculture — many cultures, not least the British farmers of the Middle Ages have terraced hills to make ploughing for crops easier. Mann, however, observes that if agriculture had been the reason for the creation of the terraces, it would be expected that the effort would be concentrated on the south side, where the sunny conditions would provide a good yield, however it may be seen that the terraces are equally deep on the north, where there would be little benefit. Additionally, none of the other slopes of the island have been terraced, even though the more sheltered locations would provide a greater return on the labour involved.
• Cattle grazing — over long periods of time, cattle grazing can cause terraces to develop, but these are usually of a much smaller size than those observed at Glastonbury and also tend to run parallel to the contours of the hill. In some places, the terraces of Glastonbury are quite steep and it is difficult to point to other hills with comparable patterns of livestock-induced erosion.
• Defensive ramparts — Other Iron Age hill forts in the area show evidence of extensive fortification of the slopes of hills, (for example, South Cadbury Castle). However, the normal form of these ramparts is that of a bank and ditch and on the Tor, there is no evidence of this arrangement. Additionally, South Cadbury, as one of the most extensively fortified places in early Britain had three concentric rings of banks and ditches supporting an 18 hectare enclosure. By contrast, the Tor has seven rings and very little space on top for the safekeeping of a community, making it a strange thing indeed to have spent so much effort to have gained so little.
• Labyrinth — Professor Rahtz felt that the theory that the Tor terraces formed the remains of a three dimensional labyrinth was "well worth consideration" (in Mann, 1993). The theory, first put forward by Geoffrey Russell in 1968, states that the 'classical labyrinth' (Caerdroia), a design found all over the Neolithic world, can be easily transposed onto the Tor so that by walking around the terraces one eventually reaches the top in the same pattern. Evaluating this hypothesis is not easy. A Labyrinth would very likely place the terraces in the Neolithic era (Rahtz, in Mann, 1993), but given the amount of occupation since then, there may have been substantial modifications by farmers and/or monks and conclusive excavations have not been carried out.