Field trip: surveying and end

For the past few years, we have surveyed in the beach at Newborough on the Friday of the field trip. Natural Resources Wales wants to know what is happening with the beach, and if you survey it every year, you find out. Is the sand accumulating, is it vanishing? Last year we had the strong impression it was vanishing, as a lot of our benchmarks that had been in the dunes only the year before had ended up in the sea now. But still, hard data is the way forward.

This year, Martin had assigned me the same survey line as two years previously. No problem! And I got a rather switched-on group. And that was good; this year, there was not going to be a demonstration of how to do surveying, to remind the students. I figured we would work it out. I could walk directly to our transact as I knew where it was, and the top was in the dunes, so I knew we would have some shelter from the wind if we wanted to look into the documentation.

We did need that documentation. The survey forms you need to fill out are not intuitive, and even if someone has done it before, it is initially a bit of a puzzle. So we started slow, but then the students had largely worked out themselves what to do and how. The best way! With a few hints. And then we were on a roll.

The weather wasn't very good; it was windy and a bit rainy. Not catastrophically so, but it does complicate things. And in the distance we could see Martin with his group. They seemed to be working fast.

Surveying on a rainy beach with Llanddwyn in the background 

We surveyed out to the sea, and then back. We had a  rather big closing error! That reeked to me of a calculation having gone wrong somewhere, rather than just inaccuracy. But we knew that most groups were already finished. We had the measurements; I suggested we just go to headquarters, and see if we could work it out there, under a roof, and with a nice hot beverage in our hand. The students agreed.

It turned out we were really the last group to finish, but two of the groups had only survived out, not back. They had no idea what their closing error would have been. So we may have been slow but a lot more thorough than these.

Once back at headquarters, there was a lot of scrutiny of our calculations. And, of course, some tidying up and loading kit into vehicles. And then, without much occasion, the field trip came to an end! No final speech or anything. We just piled into the vehicles and went back to campus.The field trip episode 2025 was over!