Geography fieldtrip visiting contrasting environments

Our Year 10 Geographers carried out their GCSE Geography fieldwork for paper 3 over two contrasting environments: Bream Down and Bristol City Centre.

We were so lucky with the weather! Standing on the headland at Bream, you could see Glastonbury Tor 50 miles inland, also the human geography of the coast including Weston-Super-Mare. Students were asked to investigate if Bream Down should be considered an AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty). The students collected data at 100m intervals down the headland towards Bream Down fort, measuring how the human and physical geography changed through a bi-polar survey.

The second fieldwork investigation in Bristol City Centre invested “To what extent does Bristol promote cycling in the CBD (Central Business District) as a strategy to reduce traffic congestion?” To measure this, we continued using bi-polar surveys at 8 sites across the center. In some sites cycling was used successfully to reduce traffic congestion through clearly signed and marked, well-lit bike lanes off the road, we also discovered this wasn’t the case in other locations. In the afternoon students interviewed members of the public about which mode of transport they use to get around Bristol and what is important to them as cyclists.

We had two great days out around our local area – now we will spend some time analyzing the data to prepare for paper 3 next year.