Swanage Geography Trip

The Top Year enjoyed a fantastic 3 days on the Jurassic coast on their annual Geography Field Trip.

The group left Swanbourne House on a wet Wednesday and had a very pleasant drive to the sunny Dorset coastline. On arrival in Swanage the pupils had to collect data on ‘How Swanage Caters for Tourists’ and carried out three methods of data collection; questionnaires, service tallies and land use surveys. After a yummy tea of pizza it was off to the classroom to complete some graph work on the data collected. 

On Thursday, it was back to Swanage to complete some physical geography fieldwork. Led by Mike Gould, the pupils ‘Investigated the impacts of Longshore Drift on the beach and how effective the groynes have been’. After lunch, the group headed to the impressive Durdle Door and Lulworth Cove. Here they completed some field sketching of the coastal landforms. It was a long hard walk on a windy day but Swanbourne pupils showed true spirit and endeavour.

The last day was a visit to Studland Bay to look at the species bio-diversity along a sand dune succession. In groups, the pupils used quadrats to analyse the species diversity and percentage of vegetation coverage, the wind speed and the gradient over a section of the sand dune. What a great way to end a brillant trip to the Jurassic Coast!

Thank you to Mrs Markey, Mr Kirk, Mr Seddon and Miss K for all their help and a big thank you to all the TY Geographers who worked their socks off!