Wales forum 38 room
Image by postman
close
more_vert

Branwen wrote:
What does IIRC mean?

Isn't Inis Witrin/Yniswytrin the older name the Britons had for Glastonbury? Before the Saxons renamed it?

Been meaning to answer this from Rahtz's Myth and Archaeology of Glastonbury...
He takes Glastonbury to be A/S which is pretty obvious, 'byrig' which either means a strong place or a monastery, the 'Glasteing', (first used in charters 7th/8th century) the name of a person who founded an A/S estate..there is a story that a man named Glasteing came down from the north chasing a sow to Glastonbury, and finally found her suckling her piglets under a fruit tree next to the old church...a good celtic saint story, especially with the pig....
'Inyswitrin' (British or Gaelic) attributed to a 601 ad charter, but not really accepted as genuine, its not used to the 12th century, and then the word was of course interpreted as the Island of Glass = Glas..

The other thing of course is the Chalice Well which was excavated in 1961;
Original ground surface was reached at a depth of four metres and had flints and roman pottery, it was after all the principal well for the Tor. But what was interesting was that it had the stump of an old yew by the well dated to the Roman period... which seems to suggest that yews and celtic christianity gives evidence for a very early establishment here on top of a pagan shrine ??

Glast son of Cunnedda. Nothing to do with woad.

South facing well with a thorn tree growing beside it, common pagan sacred site. The chalice well symbol is a visica piscus bisected by a sword, another obvious modernisation of a pagan symbol for a sacred place. Or maybe that's just the trunk of the thorn tree

A lot of jewellery ranges include chalice well symbols, proven very popular. If I win the lottery I'd spend money improving the wells around Edinburgh, I think.

There's an autistic lad that wanders the streets of newcastle, playing his bongos in the sun, and picking the wild fruit from the trees in the autumn - he knows where the almond trees are - and I've asked him where can I leave him stuff. (A DVD about crop circles most recently). His reply has been 'the yew tree in Nun's Moor Park' - so it appears there was an ancient chapel somewhere near there too. The nun's moor is a bit of a giveaway too, though they used to be based where the Grainger Market is now (Nun Street). We still have the little sisters of mercy.

The longbows - bits of boats were made of yew I dimly remember. The foliage is fatal to ruminants - stops the heart - like that *