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£36,000, and chose Bond, who was an architect, to excavate the ruins.What the Church did not know was that Bond was keenly interested in Spiritualism and telepathy.
    There was one minor problem—there was no money to organise a full-scale dig.So Bond decided to try a short cut.He asked a psychic friend, John Allen Bartlett, to try ‘automatic writing’.On the afternoon of November 7, 1907, Bartlett and Bond sat facing one another, Bartlett holding a pencil and Bond resting his hand gently on it.Bond asked: ‘Can you tell us anything about Glastonbury?’, and the pencil wrote: ‘All knowledge is eternal and open to mental sympathy.I was not in sympathy with the monks—I cannot find a monk yet.’This, it seemed, must be Bartlett’s ‘guide’.Bond suggested that he knew a few living monks who might form a sympathetic link.Soon after, the pencil traced an outline that they recognised as the abbey, but with a long rectangle —which they did not recognise—stuck on its eastern end.The sketch was signed ‘Gulielmus Monachus’—William the Monk.And when Bond asked for more details, he obliged with a more precise sketch of the rectangle—which was obviously a chapel—and added two smaller rectangles—probably towers—to the north.Another monk who called himself Johannes Bryant the Lapidator (stonemason) added more details.Other monks, including the Abbot Bere, Ambrosius the Cellarer and Peter Lightfoot the Clockmaker provided more information in Latin and Old English.
    By the time the money was finally available to start excavations—in 1908—Bond had accumulated remarkably detailed information about the abbey from his ghostly informants.In May 1909 the workmen began to dig trenches along the lines indicated by William the Monk.Bond’s rival Caroe came to look, and must have been mystified by their apparently random arrangement.A few days later, Bond proved he knew exactly what he was doing when the digging revealed an immense and unsuspected wall running north and south for 31 feet—the east chapel.Digging at the other end revealed two towers.From then on, discovery followed discovery.The monks told Bond of a door in the east wall leading into the street; this sounded unlikely, because east doorways are rare it proved to be exactly where they said it was.Bond was slightly sceptical when they told him that the chapel was 90 feet long—that seemed too big; but it proved to be 87 feet, and the wall and plinth added the extra three feet.They even told him that he would find the remains of azure-coloured windows, although most of the stained glass of that period was white and gold; but the azure glass was duly found.When a skeleton was uncovered, with its damaged skull between its legs, the monks explained that it was one Radulphus Cancellarius, Radulphus the Treasurer, who had slain in fair fight an earl called Eawulf of Edgarley.No one had ever heard of an earldom in Edgarley (a nearby village), but ancient records unearthed a nobleman called Eanwulf of Somerton, very close to Edgarley...
    After nine years of non-stop success, Bond decided that it would now be safe to tell the true story of the ‘Company of Avalon’ (as the monks called themselves).In 1918, he did so in a book called The Gate of Remembrance. The effect was instantaneous and disastrous.Budgets were cut; Bond was obstructed by red tape, and in 1922 was dismissed.He lived on, a lonely and embittered man, for another quarter of a century.While the abbey became a tourist attraction that brought the Church a satisfactory return for its investment, Bond’s book was not even sold in the abbey bookshop.
    Oddly enough, Bond himself did not believe that his information came from dead monks; he thought it probably originated in the ‘racial unconscious’.That made no difference; the Church of England was not only opposed to Spiritualism, but to anything that sounded ‘supernatural’.Fourteen years after Bond’s dismissal, Archbishop Cosmo Lang