Chalice Well

Research by Exeter University School of Geology in 2009 found that the Chalice Well is fed by a deep aquifer in the lower levels of the Pennard Sands.

Philip Rahtz found several dozen flints from the upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic, and a shard of Iron Age pottery nearby.

[citation needed] The overlapping of the inner and outer worlds is represented by the well cover, designed by the church architect and archaeologist Frederick Bligh Bond and presented as a gift after the Great War in 1919.

Bligh Bond wrote that the vesica design for the well cover was "typical of many early diagrams, all having the same object – the rendering of spiritual truth by means of the purest, most intellectual system of imagery conceived by the mind, namely, truth which is ‘aeonial’ or eternal, of which geometry is the best interpreter, since it can figure for us with remarkable suggestiveness those formative principles upon which the Father has built his Creation, principles which shall endure when heaven and earth have died.

[5] Frequent events are held in the grounds of Chalice Well including annual celebrations for the winter and summer solstices, World Peace Day, Easter, Michaelmas and Samhain (Halloween).

[6] Hakeem Noor-ud-Din and Mirza Basheer-ud-Din Mahmood Ahmad in their commentaries on the Quran considered the possibility that the story of the Seven Sleepers (from surah 18, Al-Kahf, “The Cave”) was based on the earlier legend of Joseph of Arimathea having come to Glastonbury, with the cave being a metaphor for England, though they considered the Catacombs of Rome a more likely source of the legend.

[citation needed] The Chalice Well symbol was also an inspiration for the Eye of Elena in Sarah J. Maas' Throne of Glass series and also featured in the Kingdom of Mei series as the key teaching of Christianity being a cyclical cataclysm[7] The Chalice Well is an important location in the Peter James thriller novel Absolute Proof.

A similar pipe on the opposite side of the lane provides water from the neighbouring White Spring, which flows from beneath Glastonbury Tor.