On Wednesday, thirty Year 12 geographers traveled to Herefordshire and the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park to undertake residential fieldwork in a variety of lowland glaciated landscapes.
The first stop was Frankland’s Gate Quarry to explore an old gravel pit with exposed beds of very coarse gravel, sand and silt. Whilst at this location the students reminded themselves of the glacial evolution of Herefordshire although the physical search for striations at this location was beyond everyone. The next location was near Berrington Hall to discover the Devensian terminal moraine. After lunch, they travelled onto New House Farm, where they enjoyed hunting for fossils before recording a sediment log of a particular section of the gravel pit identifying different layers of coarse-to-fine sediment.
There was a brief stop at Mortimers Cross to gain a sense of scale of the meltwater channel within the valley, before heading to Shobdon, to consolidate their knowledge with a simple field sketch that picked out the key topographic high areas. The final stop of the day was Sturts Nature Reserve, Norton Cannon, which is an area covered by glacial ponds that appear to be pitted sandur. At this location, Eve Cavey, our Duncan Louis Stewart Natural History Fellow, spoke about the flora and fauna you would expect to find in this environment and helped the students identify some newts.
