Year 10 Geography Fieldwork
During the summer term, 3 groups from the year 10 geography classes went to Carding Mill Valley for our data collection for use in our controlled assessment. It was a cloudy day and a bit dull, but surprisingly it wasn’t too cold. We left school approximately at 9:00 and it took us about 1 and a half hours to get to Carding Mill Valley. On arrival, we changed into our wellington boots, gathered our equipment which consisted of ranging poles, clinometers, corks and a stopwatch and headed up the valley towards the source of the river, taking in the views of Light Spout waterfall on the way.
We ate our lunch on the Long Mynd plateau and had a wonderful view of the hills, which had lots of sheep. The sheep came towards us, probably from the smell of our lunch but they ran off because we scared them!
After lunch, we started our data collection with help from our teachers. We did our data collection at 4 sites and we measured velocity, width and depth of river and load size. To measure the velocity, we measured out 10 meters using our measuring tape along the river. We dropped the cork and timed how long it will take to reach the end of the 10 meter tape. To measure the width and depth, we got a tape measure and measured across the river. To measure the depth, we put a meter stick vertical to the ground and measured it along at each 10 cm interval of the measuring tape along the river. To measure the load, we got one person from each group to pick out 3 random rocks and measure the longest length and the shortest length of the three rocks. From our results we learnt that the further you are away from the source of the river, the velocity, width and depth increases and the size of the load decreases.
After we collected our data, we went back to the mini bus and packed the equipment away and changed our boots back to our trainers. We left at about 3:30 pm and arrived back to school at 5 pm. It was a long and hard day, with a lot of walking and getting wet, but it was really fun!
Adil Mahmood 10 Alfred.
