An essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor

Abstract

This paper offers a personal account of ascending Glastonbury Tor, a prominent hill in Somerset, south-west England. Aiming to abet but also inflect interpretation of the contemporary and historical cultural significance of hill-climbing, the paper uses the ascent of the Tor as a means of illustrating the possibility of writing otherwise the ontological and epistemological motifs commonly associated with practices of ascension and elevation. After briefly outlining Glastonbury's complex cultural histories, the well-known story of Francesco Petrarch's ascent of Mt. Ventoux in France serves as a point of entry into the links between an `elevated' view and Cartesian spectatorial epistemologies. I then advocate the writings of Merleau-Ponty as offering a sustained antidote to the binarism of subject and object, seer and seen, which is central to such models of knowing. Following Merleau-Ponty, I argue that ascension and elevation are amenable to description as enlacements of self and landscape, as intertwinings of vision and the visible. The account of ascending Glastonbury Tor presented here may be regarded as an attempt to explore and exemplify this position. The claim is that the production of an incarnate subjectivity within practices of ascension may be understood in the context of an ontology of visibility which both accounts for, and problematises, the distinction of seer and seen.