Spring. Wells often feature in Welsh and Irish mythology as gateways to the spirit world. One legend is that Chalice Well marks the site where Joseph of Arimathea placed the chalice that had caught the drops of Christ's blood at the Crucifixion, linking the Well to the wealth of speculation surrounding the existence of the Holy Grail. Wearyall or Wirrall Hill According to legend, Joseph of Arimathea visited Glastonbury with the Holy Grail and thrust his staff into Wearyall Hill, which then grew into the original thorn tree. The original tree has been propagated several times, with one tree growing at Glastonbury Abbey and another in the churchyard of the Church of St John. The "original" Glastonbury thorn was cut down and burned as a relic of superstition during the English Civil War, and one was planted on Wearyall Hill in 1951 to replace it. Myths and legends of Glastonbury Influences Not only is A Glastonbury Romance concerned with the legend that Joseph of Arimathea brought the Grail, a vessel containing the blood of Christ, to the town, but the further tradition that King Arthur was buried there. Powys's wide reading in the literature relating to the Grail, King Arthur, fertility ritual, and Celtic mythology shaped the mythological ideas that underlie this novel. This includes John Rhys's Studies in the Arthurian Legend, the works of the Cambridge classical scholars, Jane Harrison, Francis Cornford, and Gilbert Murray, Roger Loomis on the Fisher King and W. E. Mead on Merlin. In addition Alfred Nutt "on the Celtic version" of the Grail Legend. However, "it was Jessie Weston's controversial theories of the Grail's origins ... that particularly absorbed him". In writing this novel Powys was also clearly influenced by both James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Just as Joyce established a series of parallels between Homer's Odyssey and his novel, Powys used the Grail as "a peg upon which to hang his huge narrative". In a letter to Kenneth Hopkins, Powys comments "There is all the way through the book a constant undercurrent of secret references to the Grail Legends, various incidents playing roles parallel to those in the old romances of the Grail". Eliot in his first note to his poem attributes the title to Jessie Weston's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance. The allusion is to the wounding of the Fisher King and the