Glastonbury Abbey

The abbey ruins — a religious site since the seventh century — belong to no national body: an independent charity with eleven unpaid trustees owns and runs the thirty-six acres, its governance formalised by a Charity Commission scheme in 2009. Admission through the Magdalene Street gatehouse funds the whole operation — £14 in 2026, with two children free per paying adult — and the offer keeps renewing: the Abbey Yard opened in 2024, an augmented-reality app now raises the vanished buildings around you, and the events calendar runs from a spring medieval fayre to concerts in the ruins in September. Open every day of the week, ten to six.