Geography Fieldwork
GCSE Geography students headed to Constable country to undertake urban and coastal fieldwork.
54 Geographers arrived at Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre, ready to get to grips with new equipment. Chiara and Freddie report back on their hands-on experience as geographers:
We followed our instructor up to a glorious field of wildflowers, with a panoramic view of the surrounding towns in Suffolk. Inevitably, the majority of us ended up transforming the idyllic landscape – one of the UK’s Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) – into a smudged pencil scrawl, but it was interesting to understand more of our surroundings, including the airplane landmark in the nearby town of Manningtree which directed planes on their way to Stansted. Our next activity was the ‘bucket challenge’: we were given a bucket of various geographical equipment to conduct an experiment of our choice. After a brief rummage, we were intrigued by the soil penetrometer, which we then used to measure the compaction of soil at one metre intervals from the footpath to the field.
On the second day, we were once again blessed with divine weather which prompted many members of our group to enjoy an ice cream in the town. At Ipswich waterfront, we asked the passers by about their perceptions of the regeneration project; unfortunately, the overall consensus was that the council had not been successful in their plan. We went back to Flatford to analyse our data and start learning about our next site: Walton-on-the-Naze.
Our third day was spent by the coast. Due to hundreds of years of costal erosion, the ‘Naze’ (old English word for nose) has since been greatly reduced. In its place is now a beach, formed due to the erosion of the cliffs that used to form it. We had lots of fun using dumpy levels (camera-like devices mounted on tripods, that looked like an invasion of yellow robotic spiders) to measure beach relief, and using quadrants to measure sediment size, before heading back to the classroom for a brief recap, and piling into the coach back to London.