What actually happened on the Geo trip to Somerset (it wasn’t all surfing and sun):

Now, most of you may be thinking that the Year 12 Geography Fieldwork trip to Somerset was full of laughs, sunbathing, swimming, surfing and all the whimsical, non-academic things that come to your mind. I am here as a survivor to tell you it was not. We were hard at graph most of the time and faced rather atrocious weather throughout the week. Although, the sun clearly appreciated how hard we were working and did give us some relief from the rain!

To begin with, those who chose to focus on Human Geography for their coursework literally had to go up to strangers and ask them a whole load of questions. Clearly, courage and confidence was needed. Tough skills to have coming from school where a lot of us don’t even like walking into the DH by ourselves! There were some trickkyyy people to converse with as well- for instance I heard that one person threatened one regeneration project with some rather (scarily?!) outrageous things. In Minehead, one student had some vulgar words thrown at them because the person most definitely didn’t want to take part in the questionnaire… I think a simple ‘no thanks’ was all they needed to say! Luckily, everyone ploughed on as this data is crucial for our coursework to go well.

Meanwhile, students at St Audrie’s Bay were busy collecting lots and lots of measurements. About rocks. Good fun if you are into cliffs (as some of us were) but not so much if you weren’t. Fortunately, rock-liking situation aside, we ploughed on through the heavy rain, wind, and sun and managed to get all the data we needed. This included one student having had to have done 1,200 (!!!!) measurements of a rock. 3 measurements per rock every 5m down a line along the beach. Other students had to do much more, as two of us were occupied with the sediment measurements, like measure the angle of the beach or wind speed or rate of longshore drift. All in all, waterproofs were the way to go and 15km up and down the beach had been completed. Long day at the office that’s for sure.

Before our 2 days of hard-grafting, we learnt all about the actual case studies we will write about in our geo papers next year…eek. This was a really good experience to understand just how different Somerset was to Ipswich and how rural isolation is a huge factor in some people’s lives. We also learnt about how coastal recession is literally ruining some people’s lives and how not much is really being done about it… not good! Don’t worry- the info we learnt is in more depth than this Bubble article I promise. Seeing cliff profiles and wave cut platforms extend into the see was also insightful.

Lastly, we did also have a really good time and it has been made so by the wonderful Geo department, so thank you very much for all the hours spent with us lot, and the hours spent organising and driving a mini bus back and forth! Surfing, which yes, we did do (but only after a morning and afternoon spent studying case studies), was great fun, hard work, and such a cool thing to do for the first time (as it was for most of us)! The dinners every night were awesome, from double smash burgers to chicken-pomegranate wrap things (can’t quite remember the name because I got the burger, obviously), everything was yummy. We were also treated to a pub dinner on the final night for some more burgers- with the option of different meals of course- and some good laughs.

All in all, whilst your lessons may have been slightly disrupted, we really appreciated the opportunity to collect everything needed for our coursework and experience our case studies. Hopefully you saw all of this on the Geogram (all done fantastically by Mrs Izod-Miller) and if not, keep up with it next year!