The field trips were of course the highlight of a geographers academic career. This was already confirmed by the time we got to University after epic trips to the Lake District and to Worms Head from school, so we sort of knew what to expect.
The first trip was on the first day we went to Manchester when we headed off to the Lake District for a surveying course. This was a shock to the system - being thrown into a situation where there were new "teachers" to come to terms with, as well as a new environment, the daunting prospect of doing your own cooking and washing to follow when you got back to Manchester, and a hundred new students to encounter! Have a look at my experiences on that first field trip here
Torquay
The Torquay field trip was a week in April 1975. My 1975 diary seems to have a disappeared but I do have some extracts from it so I stand half a chance of reminding you what we got up to! Typical - I'd just written this whole page when I find the detailed account of each day in the back of the diary I was already using! OK - I'll re-write it so what follows is the full version!
Monday April 21st Caught the bus from home at 7.15 am and met Ed at Nottingham railway station. We changed at Derby and had a carriage to ourselves all the way to Torquay (Blimey - this was before privatisation of the railways!). It was raining which doesn't look too promising for the week. We had a pastie on the seafront and then found the hotel quite easily. Yes I know we're supposed to be able to as we're all geographers! Ruth and G and a lot of the others were already there. I found I was sharing a room with G. We had dinner with G, Ed, John, Gareth and Steve and had a project meeting but no briefing as professor Rodgers hadn't arrived yet. We stayed in the bar all night and went to bed early. |
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Tuesday April 22nd Breakfast was at 8.00 am so we were up early and then had a briefing session with Prof Rodgers and were split into groups. Me, Steve, Maggie, Jim, Jan and Anne volunteered for Peinton. Despite yesterday's rain it was boiling hot and we walked down to the bus, then off to the park in Peinton. Steve and I went to Queens Park but it was shut so we found a small park where we ran through our questionnaires with some OAPs. We then found some playing fields where we managed to quiz some girls and housewives and then had our dinner, met the others and sunbathed on the seafront. Finally we managed to find more people in a large park and walked back along the seafront and cliffs. We had a fairly boring de-briefing at night and again a quiet drink in the bar and off to bed early |
Wednesday April 23rd Morphomapping! Keith Sutton drove us out in a minibus and we had a practice at two sites, then the two Steves and I were left on our own in the middle of no-where to get on with it! We walked down a field to the river and morphomapped some more, then back up again. We managed to get stuck in a muddy track, found an electric fence and got attacked by some farm dogs. At the top we couldn't find ourselves on the map but we morphed some more and walked down the other side of the hill. We found a very nice pub for a ploughman's/geographer's lunch. After lunch we did some scenic evaluation at a motorway construction site and then walked to Austin's bridge where we had to evaluate the river next to a sewage farm. We were picked up then, and got back fairly early. After debriefing we had a game of evaluation weighting bingo in which I was the caller! We went across to Micromet briefing with Morecambe and Wise (Tout and Musk) but it didn't take long. It took quite a while to finish the morphomapping work off but we saw it through and then went off down to Kent's Tavern for a drink with Jane, Anne, Pam, Eleanor etc. |
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Thursday April 24th Jim and Maggie and I took over the Micrometrology station on the beach. All we had to do was take readings every half an hour of the rainfall (none), temperature (absolutely boiling!) and sunshine (loads). Jim dragged Maggie and I into the sea and we all got soaked. She manned (or womanned) the station while Jim and I went into Babbacombe for fish and chips. We swapped to the cliff top station in the afternoon and sunbathed up there. I climbed down to get some crystals and Tout and Musk came over to talk to us. Some geology students from Portsmouth Poly (remember Poly's?) thought our anemometer, wet bulb and wind direction taking was hilarious for some reason. We had to climb back down the cliff with all the equipment and nearly got caught by the tide. Chuff Johnson was late with the minibus so we were late back to the hotel. |
Maggie was burnt to bits today - even the sun cream we'd invested in during the day didn't help and they had to call the doctor for her and she missed Friday. I think everyone had a little bit of sunstroke that evening but we decided to go out. Mike, Steve, Steve, John, Paul, G, ed, Kevin and myself went to the Four Seasons and then off into Torquay. We ended up in a pub with a no singing rule and finished the evening with a chorus of My Way and the rest of the pub joining in!
Friday April 25th
Soils project at Gatcombe Brook today. On the way out there I chatted to Malcolm. It was very hot but everyone was barred from sunbathing after yesterday's overexposure. Huggett gave us our instructions - we had to dig a pit from one side to the other which Chris and Steve and I did. It was the Pig and Whistle for lunch and then in the afternoon we re-excavated a pit while Jenny and Chris played cricket with a gleyed horizon (I think that's a geographer's joke?). We were picked up fairly early after playing havoc with the topodrainage by damming the brook with trees! There was a lot of sleeping on the bus on the way back
Even the lecturers must be affect by the heat as there was no de-briefing tonight and no briefing other than deciding we were all doing pollution tomorrow. We all then went down to a bar where there was rumoured to be a rock club but it was useless, so we ended up in the Carlton club. It was very nice but cost us a fortune to get in (remember this is all relative - I think it was 70p!) and the beer was expensive. The disco was good though and we danced a lot
Saturday April 26th
Back down to the beach again - in Maggie's boyfriends car which was very nice! We walked along the beach measuring clumps of oil, then climbed around the cliffs to Petit Tor Beach which was very secluded. After lunch in the Fisherman's Inn we did some bird watching on the beach and eventually decided to give up. Maggie's boyfriend took us into Torquay where Chris and I walked around, then got a lift back to the hotel early for a shower.
We had a disco at night. The music that always come back to me when I think of Torquay is Oh Boy by Mud. I seem to remember us singing it everywhere we went - I just checked and it was number 1 in May 1975 so I guess it had just been released when we were in Torquay. I must have danced all night as the diary says I danced with Anne, Jane, Jan, Ruth, Gail, Melanie. And Viv - you got a special mention - it says I danced with you many times!! We crashed out upstairs drinking coffee and apparently Pete Lloyd was on the warpath as someone had taken his bed to bits!
Sunday April 27th
We had a coach trip to Plymouth and sat on the back seat with Chris, Steve, Mike etc. On the ferry across to Dartmouth our coach backed into a car which more interesting than the old mining port and disused canals were. Around lunchtime we had a walk around Plymouth and saw the Ho and the lighthouse and docks. It was a bit misty though - we had lunch in a holiday cafe and then back to the coach. The route back over Dartmoor meant we saw the ponies and the prison, and we stopped to look at a stone age settlement and a Tor.
At night we went down to Kent's Tavern again and met Lisa and the other waitress and bought them drinks. We talked to them most of the night and then went back to the hotel. The others went to bed and I crashed out in the lounge until everyone came back from swimming. I stayed up very late talking to Viv and then went to bed. Ah...I know what night this was as Viv and I were talking about it a couple of years ago...this would be the night she told me she was getting engaged to Alan. Is that right Viv? My diary doesn't tell me what my reaction was!
Monday April 28th Got up early and packed in the morning. Tried to arrange taxis but Ed and I walked to the station eventually. A group of us took a carriage and played Black Maria and sang "Oh Boy" all the way home. The others got off at Birmingham to change for Manchester and Ed, Jane and I carried on to Derby, where we met Neil and changed for Nottingham. Got home at 5.00 and stayed in for a well deserved rest at night! To the right Paul is attempting to act out a current joke!. Yes it's the famous "Meat pies have come - there's gravy all over the floor" joke. Altogether a fantastic field trip made all the better by the weather - we don't have summers like that now that we've got global warming! And of course by the excellent company - what a bunch of nice people those geographers were! |
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Delamere Forest Soils Trip
I bet no-one remembers it now, but we had a day trip out to Delamere Forest to look at soils. I wasn't much into soils at all, although I still have a copy of our soils textbook hidden away somewhere (hardback with a brown cover which I thought was very apt for soil science!) and it has all come in useful for the gardening. I did however really enjoy what we did that day - it was boring. No - you read that correctly it was boring - we had to drill holes in the earth and bring up samples, marking the depth that we got each sample from, and labelling the bags accurately, as incorrect labelling could really screw up your analysis afterwards!
| We then burnt all the samples - now you might think that this meant the day was a waste of time but lo and behold the residue left after burning all came out different colours, indicating what the organic content of each layer had been. I think we did some other equally destructive test that gave us different colours dependent on the mineral content of the soil. Then the clever part was that, to display the results, we stuck a piece of double sided sellotape in our books. We then measured to scale the soil layers vertically on the sellotape and sprinkled the actual soil samples onto the sellotape, giving us a diagram of the soil layers using the actual soil itself! Clever eh? Well, I was impressed! It was also good fun digging in the forest although it did rain as you can see from the pictures! |
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Austrian Field Trip
This was the field trip to get on - a week in Austria during April of the third year. Here are the diary recollections of the trip and a few photographs. Surely someone out there somewhere took some more photos - send them to me if you have any!
Tuesday April 20th 1976
Got up very early and caught the bus at 8.15 from Nottingham to London. It seemed to take ages to get to London with traffic jams all the way off the end of the M1 into central London. We did get a good tour of London due to the one way system and eventually arrived at Victoria Coach Station. I walked up to the railway station but couldn't find anyone so I decided to go for a walk. Outside I bumped into Kevin and Sheila, then G and John. After a while loads of people arrived and when I got back to the station after buying a film for my camera Janet arrived to see me off.
I sat with Gareth and John and Kevin on the train and had the first McKewans of the trip in the train bar. We got onto the boat quite quickly and bought some duty free - Paul spent the crossing being sick. We were first on the train at Ostend and grabbed a couchette with G, Paul, John, Gareth and Ilse. We spent the night travelling through Belgium drinking vodka and martini mixed, and G's bottle of Beaujolais (a mighty fine liqueur!). I stayed awake until we got to Aachen as it was my first visit to Germany. I woke Graham Whitney up shouting hand der hochs and waving at two German girls - a drunk got thrown off the train at Aachen so I decided to retire gracefully to bed!
Wednesday April 21st 1976
Got up at 7.30. Paul felt better after his sea-sickness and rough night. We got off the train and onto Carl's super-smooth, super-efficient coach to St Gilgen. I'm sharing a room with Graham. We had our lunch which was very nice and then went for a short walk round the lake - well...Geoff North called it a short walk! The fishing village was very beautiful and we ended up at a shrine which commemorated a wedding where all the guests had gone to dance on the frozen lake, and fallen through the ice. We made our own way back to St Gilgen and I stopped for a drink with Ann and Pam and John Hampshire - it was a lovely sunny peaceful day.
We had dinner, which was very nice with unusual soup, and met Elfie - our own personal waitress. Then we had to sit through a lecture on St Gilgen before we were let loose for our first taste of Austrian nightlife. We went to the Kegelbahn, or bowling alley, and did quite well with the language as we were with Elfie. Beer was expensive at one of bars in the bowling alley and cheaper at the other which made for some interesting communication problems, especially as the favoured tactic was to buy it in the cheap bit and walk round to the expensive bit! Beer was 12 schillings a pint in the cheap bar and 16 schillings in the expensive one - when John Pindar was charged 17 schillings for his lemonade he was none too pleased! I sat with Graham and Carolyn and Pam, but everyone was a bit tired from the train journey so it was an early night for most.
Thursday April 22nd 1976
Got up very early by Manchester standards and it was raining quite hard - we still went for a walk up the hill by St Gilgen to see examples of 2 farmhouses. Geoff North stopped us before we got there though and sent us back as it was too wet (although Chuff wanted to carry on). After lunch we surveyed St Gilgen for land use - our group was Gareth, John, me, G, Paul, and Graham, with Bob as an extra. We got the furthest patch from the hotel and had to walk miles. We split up but our map didn't really match the ground - new houses, changed houses, new roads and guard dogs. Running down a shortcut I buried my foot in about six inches of mud but eventually met the others by the lake.
After dinner we had a lecture from Chuff on glaciation - it seemed to last for hours and we were dying to get out for a drink. After the expensive bowling alley we found a new bar by the lake - Fischers. We eventually filled it up and the waitresses were really nice - beer was only 10 or 11 schillings. We left about 12.30 and stayed awake talking for ages.
After dinner we had a couple of drinks in Fischer's and Graham and I went down to Zwolf Ulm (or whatever it was called). Beer was very expensive - it worked out at £1.38 a pint and so we started buying smaller quantities. They stopped playing English records to try and get rid of us but they had so few German records they had to go back to the English. I had a dance with little Christine but it didn't last long as they started playing "Streets of London"!They should've done that instead of playing the German records! Some Austrian gave us free hot buns and we didn't get in until very late!
Saturday April 24th 1976
Up to Salzburg for the day - Uncle Geoff gave us a guided tour and then we went up in the lift to the something gardens and restaurant. We took lots of photos but Anne didn't feel well because of the height. We set off from the Mirabelle Gardens to do our land use mapping. After eating our lunch sitting on the grass verge we managed to find the cheapest beer so far - 9 schillings for half a litre. This enabled us to sing songs while we mapped and we got it done very quickly!
After dinner we multi tasked and had a beer while we listened to a lecture. We had a lock in at Fischer's while we were drinking our wine but unfortunately Caroline and Pam were locked out! We left and walked around the village and the only place open was a bar called Falzi's. Graham and I walked Pam and Carolyn back to the hotel and came back to the bar to find G and the others still there. G was very drunk and was shouting "it's alreet, it's alreet" at the top of his voice, but he eventually got home in one piece!
Sunday April 25th 1976
Woke with a ginormous hangover and as we have the morning free, decided to go for a walk round the lake.....to the bar! Had a kleine and felt a bit better. It was pouring with rain in the afternoon and we thought we'd have to stay in, but Geoff took us on the boat trip across to St Wolfgang. It was a very pleasant trip and we went for a coffee in the village. I treated the others to several renderings of "singing in the rain" during the day! We went down to Flossies at night and "supped some stuff" then walked back with Pam and Carolyn. Yet again they were locked out so we went down to our room. We tried again eventually and found their door had been opened again. Graham and I went off to bed and talked for a while. After we'd been asleep for a time our door burst open and a hysterical figure appeared laughing it's head off. It was only after it started reciting poems like "I'm big P, where's big G" we realised it was Paul, extremely the worse for wear. Apparently Anne had been sick, Paul had fallen out with G...I don't know how we got any sleep at all!
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Monday April 26th 1976 We went into Salzburg again in the morning to finish off the land use survey. The coach dropped our group off on the way in so we didn't have to walk so far and we made a great effort and finished in an hour. We had a walk down to the Mirabelle Gardens and then up to the castle. We met the girls on the way and called in for a bier on the way. The view from the top was tremendous - Anne was scared to go too close to the edge but I suspect most people were! On the way back down we called into a Yugoslavian restaurant for a beer - not a former Yugoslavian restaurant! Trying not to get lost we had to hurry back to the coach. At night it as down to the inevitable Flossies for dome more drinks! John and Gareth stayed in - they obviously couldn't stand the pace! I walked Carolyn back to the hotel and then stayed up for ages talking to Graham again. |
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Tuesday April 27th 1976 Got up at 7.00 am to go to Munich for the day - Munich was second choice as we were apparently supposed to be going to Linz. We crossed the border with no problems despite the border guards having very nice shiny machine guns! The high alps were beautiful and on arrival in music Geoff gave us a short guided tour, then we were free to do what we liked. After visiting the banks to change schillings into marks (it was much more fun before Euro's!)we had a wander to the cathedral and ate our hotel provided buns in a fountain! Then it was off to another church for a look round. I looked up Penny's (who I'd met on the school sixth form field course in Grasmere) number in the phone book and found it but figured it was pointless ringing here as she'd probably be in the UK. |
We found an underground shopping centre where Martini was 50p a bottle and so was wine. After buying a bottle of each we had to visit the biggest bierkeller in Europe. With half a bottle of Martini on the coach I fell asleep and felt awful by the time we got back to St Gilgen. Dinner that night was wiener schnitzel so that revived me, but I didn't exactly have a lot to drink that evening!
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Wednesday April 28th 1976 It's our last day! We went for a coach trip to the salt mines in the afternoon as the weather was so bad in the morning. That meant we had to miss out the high alps which I'd been looking forward to. We firstly had to go up in a cable car which seems strange to go down a mine! Anne was petrified so she stayed at the bottom. Surprisingly G was also fairly scared in the cable car and Carolyn was worse - it was a bit un-nerving! As G was in a weakened state when he got out at the top he was immediately attacked by a good quantity of snowballs as there was about six inches of snow at the top. I claimed the credit for being the first to hit Miss Lowcock's brolly with a snowball. It was a short walk to the top so we had snowball fights all the way including a cracker against some Austrian kids. We had to get changed into convict uniforms to enter the mine and then descended down through the various levels on wooden slides - excellent fun!On the way back down again we had the snowball fight of the century. We had to stop at Bad Ischl on the way back to St Gilgen so that Geoff North could visit the best cake shop in the world! |
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At night it was wild at Flossie's - it was Ilse and Christine's birthdays so there were jugs of free beer everywhere. Even Elfie from our hotel was buying us beers. We had a party arranged at Paul and G's room but no-one quite made it there. Me and Carolyn went to look for Paul but he was crying on Anne or Pam's shoulders so we went off to search for G. He was still in the pub at 2.30 am so we went back to the hotel and Geoff nearly locked me in the girls section!
Thursday April 29th 1976
Oh no - time to go home! We had breakfast - I had a bit of Christine's champagne breakfast as apparently I'm a very very special friend of hers so I was allowed! After packing we went off for a last walk around the lake, past Fischer's and the swans. By special request the hotel had put on Wiener Schnitzel for lunch. The coach back called in Salzburg so we could do some last minute shopping. Geoff had gone on to Amsterdam so Chuff had to lead us back to the train. G had had quite a bit to drink so he fell asleep but we all had a party in the carriage with my tape recorder for music and our bottles of wine from Munich. We stayed up way too late as usual and Carolyn and I managed to fall asleep holding hands even though she was in the top couchette on one side and I was in the middle couchette on the other!
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Friday April 30th 1976 Woke up at Brussels - it's quite a pleasant place to wake up I suppose! It was quite a subdued trip back - partly because Carolyn's boyfriend was going to meet her at Victoria station. I walked to Victoria coach station with G , Paul, Anne and Pam and caught the bus back to Nottingham. I had that experience where everyone in Austria had been so nice and helpful, and the coach driver in London was the most unhelpful, obnoxious man you could meet. The journey seemed to take ages up to Nottingham as well, but luckily I slept through most of it. |
