News Year 8 Geography Trip to Burnham Beeches 17.10.2019

The Geography department took the Year 8s on a day trip to Burnham Beeches to study the workings of a deciduous woodland ecosystem.

The girls walked through the forest comparing the beech woodland with the oak and the pine. This forest has a long history; it was listed in the Domesday book, and was a royal hunting grounds for a number of years. More recently, walks through the woodland provided tranquillity and inspiration to composer Felix Mendelssohn and, more recently still, the forest was used as a filming location for the Harry Potter series. The forest is a wonderful place to visit in autumn and, despite the forecast, we were lucky with the weather and even saw some blue sky in the afternoon.

The girls were exemplary; they used clinometers, tape measures and their iPads to measure the height of trees and calculated the age by measuring the circumference of the trunk. They also wrote a haiku about a coppiced area of woodland and drew field sketches of the upper pond, complete with moorhens and ducks. The next step is to write up a geographical investigation using the data collected.