Glastonbury Abbey with Scotland The Brave

Welcome back to the adventures of Scotland The Brave in Great Britain. After looking about London, Scotty visited Stonehenge and Bath and Exeter and Devon and Cornwall. Then headed north to Glastonbury in Somerset.

Unlike Buckfast Abbey, this one was in ruins. The bits of the Abbey that remain are huge. They soar to the sky. The original buildings must have been very impressive.

If ever there was a place to take Selfies it is this place. A “Selfie”, apparently, is a picture that says, “I was here.” This is a “Scottie” of Scotty and it says, “Scotty was here at Glastonbury.”

You can see how big the remains of the walls at Glastonbury are when you compare them to the People. They are just enormous. The walls, not the people.

Somehow, the ruins have a quality called Grandeur. There are trees hugging close to the old walls and some vegetation growing on them. Scotty could have stayed there all day just looking at it and soaking it in.

Apparently, the first little church built on the site may have been founded back in Roman days. (Romans are the people who had hot baths and conquered other people. ) Scotty settled down to absorb it all. He also arranged for another “Scottie” of himself to show that he really was there.

There was even a supposed site of King Arthurs Tomb exhumed in the time of King Edward I. Scotty imagined himself as a Bear of the Round Table.

Some of the ruins were so ruinous they were just foundations. Can you see Scotty here in the picture below? Right there in the middle.

But what happened here? Why the ruins? The abbey was torn down in the 1540’s by order of King Henry VIII. Henry closed hundreds of monasteries, confiscated the properties and sold most of them off to raise cash.

Not all the old Abbeys fell into ruins. Many were bought by wealthy families of the day who renovated them, as we would say now, into grand houses, some of which still exist.

WESSEX is a Long Way From Perth: In fact, it is 14,000 kilometres and nearly 1, 400 years away from Perth in Western Australia. King Ine of the West Saxons, who died around 726 CE, was the founder of Glastonbury Abbey. Guardian Mark has read about Wessex and its kings and the long struggle against the Great Army of the Danes since he was 10 years old.

Having lived steeped in the history and literature of another country, Britain, but never having seen it, Guardian Mark was really chuffed to be actually walking on the land of the old Germanic or ‘Saxon’ kingdom of Wessex.

In the next episode, Scotty travels into what was once the old kingdom of Mercia, from Glastonbury to Bristol and over a huge bridge to Cardiff, then on to Ludlow and Chester.

BOOKS with Scotland in them (our Scotty, that is)

Scotty is the star of a very special book called When A Brave Bear Fights Cancer: A Get Well Soon Gift by Carola Schmidt. In the book, Scotty a little bear who gets a bad sickness called cancer. He’s worried and often scared because cancer is scary.  But the doctors and nurses and other patients help him. The book is to help kids feel much more brave when they are getting treatment. It’s available in paperback and Kindle. Look for the brave little bear wearing trews on the cover.

Scotty in books by Mawson

You can also see Scotty in all the books by Mawson. One is called It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In (in that one he delivers the post) and another is She Ran Away From Love (he delivers the post again.) In Dreamy Days and Random Naps you can see him being a king and also a superb guitarist. Don’t miss that one! This is what the books look like:

Mawson’s Guardian says: You can find Mawson’s books on this Link here, and on his Writer-Bear Page on Amazon.

You have wandered into Mawson Bear’s web-den. Mawson is a Ponderer of Baffling Things (between naps) and the Writer-Bear of It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In  and She Ran Away From Love.

‘This little story made me well up. A lovely, poignant story with delightful illustrations.’ Jackie Law, Amazon Top 500 reviewer, about It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost in.

The book brings back such nostalagic memories that it made it comforting, like a  old security blanket.’  FNM Book reviews about Bright World.