Wellies were much in evidence on this L6 geography field trip. Amy Walker and Louisa Hadfield tell us all about it:

On Friday 23 March 2007 the L6 geography group left school to travel by train to Taunton, West Somerset. We were staying at a field studies centre, Nettlecombe Court. We were shown around the beautiful old house which would be our home for the next three days. It has many facilities: 4 workrooms, an IT room, a large dining room with a roaring fire and student common room for all the different schools to get to know each other.

We went immediately into the fields, dressed in wellies and waterproof trousers, to study the characteristics of a short section of a meandering river. We measured the width, depth, velocity and wetted perimeter of one cross section of the stream in either an area of riffles or pools. Back at the centre we collected all the group data together and discussed data presentation and ways of analysis.

On Saturday we returned to Taunton to study the land use and retail change which had occurred in the past 18 years. Before leaving we studied secondary census data to find out what we would expect to find when collecting our own data. Once in the town we measure environmental quality, number of pedestrians and traffic every 200m along a 2km transect from the town centre. When walking around the town we also compared the retail land use today with a GOAD map of the town from 1989. In the evening we were taught different statistical tests which could be used to prove the hypothesis we had produced before going out.

On Sunday we headed to Braunton Burrows, Devon, to study the succession of plant communities in a coastal dune system. After watching the surfers while eating lunch on the beach we were given equipment to measure wind speed, soil pH, temperature, vegetation cover, humidity and soil compactness. We walked from the strand line into the dune system and at regular intervals stopped to collect the data required. Fortunately it did not rain all day but it was fairly windy and cold. After a large hot chocolate each to warm us up, we headed back to the centre to calculate species diversity, which would hopefully prove our hypothesis correct.

We returned to school on Monday after a very enjoyable and educational weekend. The information we collected will be needed in the applied geographical skills paper in the summer AS exams.

To see more photos, please click below:
http://www.kingsleygallery.co.uk/index_files/somerset2007.htm