dawesberry adventures my view of the big family adventure.

Mark & Tara’s place in Bruton is pretty close to Glastonbury, so we made a day trip there to climb the Tor. We drove the van there, with Tahli (+my family of 4), meeting Ella there after school, and Mark who was working nearby. We had some cranky moments in the van, finding parking and deciding what to do in Glast while we met up with Ella and Mark – the usual fare with trying to please so many folks at once. Marley didn’t even want to go but he wasn’t given a choice, Gem protested to stay home and wasn’t challenged by Tara who feels the threat of him going to live with his Dad looming. Before we went up, we had lunch in the town. Its got this abbey where Henry the 8th massacred the members of the monastery, as Mark explained. Mark found a copy of nifty history book, written for teenagers (and me), about the life and kingdom of Henry VIII, “Henry VIII, The Exploding King” – euw, gross!. We ended up reading this (maybe Meg didn’t finish it) together, and I found it most enlightening, not really knowing anything about european history except maybe bits of worldwars. Now I know what all the references to him are about. Mark took us up to the beginning of the path to the Tor, stopping to show is the water sources of the white water (full of calcium?) and the red water (full of iron). Both tasted awful. There was a weird building that this water was flowing through, in channels dug in the floor. Really, I didn’t get it, it was most strange, cold, damp, dark. Why would they do this? It might’nt have been the best mo to stop there, as they were “cleaning” the building, but it seemed the method wasn’t very clean at all. Unimpressed. As soon as we started up the trail, Steve and I bringing up the rear, a young lad joined us. Weird. Steve immediately asked him all questions regarding how he got here, where he lived and where his parents were. He was dressed in school uniform, but just kept hiking along. Told us his address, that he didn’t know where his parents were. He didn’t hang out with us once we were at the tor, but as soon as he saw us leaving, he made sure he was with us. Then the kids started asking him why he was here alone. At the bottom again, he then started asking where this place was, which none of us could answer, but Ella was the cluiest, and started to take the lead in finding out where he should be. The others couldn’t be bothered and we made an arrangement to meet somewhere after Ella, Steve and I figured out what to do. In the end we walked the long and steep way back to where we’d found him. Ella was such good big person for him to be with, she took him by the hand and made conversation with him. She realized that she knew his brother, and after we returned him, we pieced together that his was probably trying to escape his neglectful/abusive father. His mom left when the boys were quite young, the brother that Ella knows is violent. The boy seemed to wish we would take him to the police, which in the end I wish I had done… maybe he was looking for some help! We probably just delivered him to his problems again. Sad.