Hello Glastonbury!

isobelfrowde
Feb 19, 2023
4 min read

Updated: Mar 8, 2023

For today's litter pick, we went to Glastonbury. We were going to do a big one for our 25th, but when Dad was collating all of our stats he realised that somewhere along the line we have forgotten to record 1 of our picks in our stats – so today was actually our 26th litter pick!

We walked 6.3km.over about 3 hours and got 14.39kg of litter overall.

We were a bit late leaving and Glastonbury was a bit more of a drive than normal so we did not manage to start our pick until 11.30 – as a consequence we had packed a picnic in our bag to have at the top of the Tor.

We parked in the centre of Glastonbury and headed up towards the church near the car park and then up one of the main streets and from then onto the Tor. Just out of the car park we found a cluster of litter in a place with a lot of leaves – clearly stuff blown by the wind and congregating in the same location.

Todays most found thing seemed to be tissues\toilet paper – or that is what stood out – partly because it was fiddly to pick up and so stuck in our minds more – it seems quite an odd thing to find so much of. We also found several bagged dog poos and 2 unbagged dog poos (Dad drew the short straw with these again).

We found quite a lot on the way the short path leading to the National Trust gate leading up to Glastonbury tor. Going up the Tor and at the top it was very windy, so I think a lot of the paper type litter would have blown away. We did however find some tissues stuck in some longer vegetation. We did also find some bottles, sweet wrappers and tennis balls. It was a lovely day to walk up the Tor and the views were really good.

We walked up across and then down the other side of the Tor – we were trying not to walk back on ourselves. Our return from the Tor was down a small country lane – we found lots of bottles and plastic and several dog poos in bags but discarded in hedges.

We then joined the road we came to the tor on, but switched sides of the road. We found a lot of rubbish here, including more dog poos!

We walked past the Someset Museum of Rural Life and found quite a lot of plastic cups and several cans and bottles that had been thrown over their wall - we tried to get all of these although there was a cup I think that we couldn't reach.

We then made our way to a small park where Mum and Dad had taken us (with my Nanna & Grandad) several years ago - long enough ago that I don’t remember it!

We walked around the park and did our best to clean it up. We found lots of broken glass which we picked up. Some of it was by the benches – some of it seemed to be where people had just thrown their bottles against the grand old wall and left the remnants in the grass at the bottom of the wall - the glass can be dangerous for dogs and children that use the park as they could stand on it, so we made sure to try and get it all up. It's so frustrating when people do this – there are loads of bins in this park.

Whilst picking up the litter in this park I did find a large 5 litre bottle half filled with what we think was wee. We generally empty bottles that have liquid in them before we put them in our bags – but Dad drew the line at this one – so I dragged it to a bin and left it next to that. We cant count it as part of our pick but we have put it somewhere where it will hopefully get collected.

We had planned to complete our walk back to the car – but both our rubbish bags were full and our car parking was about to run out. So Dad left me with the rubbish and hurried back to get the car – we had done enough distance and had picked up quite a lot of litter so didn’t think it would matter adjusting our route/plan.

On the way back we stopped off at Burrow Mump – Dad says he has driven by it so many times but doesn’t remember going up it so we thought we would take the opportunity to walk up it.

Our walk took about 3 hours in total (including a brief stop for lunch).

Our stats today were 6.3 km - although Dad did forget to restart Strava so we’re down a little bit from what we actually walked. 8.89 kg of recycling 5.5 kg of rubbish

Dad has put together a google map of all our picks which you can see here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit...

We also have a chart which shows details for each pick as well as how the cumulative total has grown over time.