On Wednesday 29th February the Lower Sixth Geographers together with their teachers Kate Palmer and JP Davies set off full of anticipation to the beautiful county of Shropshire with the aim of improving and developing their fieldwork skills.
The focus was on hydrology and the day spent in the grounds of the Preston Montford Fieldcentre where students hammered infiltration pipes into the ground (Tsvetan Donov was an expert with the mallet!). They then poured in lots of water to examine the rate of flow of water into the ground and whether it varied from grassland to woodland sites.
On Thursday a full day was spent in the Shropshire hills where a 2km stretch of Ashes Hollow River was surveyed downstream to see changes in relation to depth, width, velocity, wetted perimeter and gradient. The write-up at the Fieldcentre followed until 8.30pm much to the students’ pleasure before competitive snooker and bar football tournaments took place into the late evening along with some dance classes led by Eloise Broadway and Fiona Quirke.
On Friday (after all the students had enjoyed another cooked breakfast) we had a 2-hour visit to Shrewsbury to see new flood defences and assess the potential flood risk in different areas of the town. Some GIS processing took place back at the centre before we took the coach journey back to Oxford full of very tired students, each looking forward to their home comforts and with their Geography fieldwork knowledge and experience of the British countryside greatly expanded.
Kate Palmer
Head of Geography
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