Geography Fieldtrip to the New Forest National Park
On Thursday 30th June all of the Year 10 met up with Miss Paybody, Mrs McGuiggan, Mr Walmsley, Mrs Crosbie and Mrs Palma, the New Forest National Park Authority Education Officers at the honeypot site of Lyndhurst. Our goal was to complete fieldwork for the AQA GCSE Geography Controlled Assessment. Our aim was to investigate a tourist honeypot site within a locality, in this case the New Forest. We wanted to test the hypothesis that; it is important to effectively manage tourism in Lyndhurst, a honeypot site in the New Forest National Park, to prevent any negative impacts.
After an introduction to the New Forest National Park, we divided into our study groups and carried out a number of surveys in the town of Lyndhurst including amenity surveys, traffic counts, car park surveys, litter surveys, environmental impacts assessments and questionnaires with visitors, locals and businesses. We were very lucky as it was a beautiful day despite all the rain we have had in June so there were lots of visitors to interview.
After lunch, we carried on to our next two study sites which were Bolton’s Bench and Park Pale. Here we again carried out environmental impact surveys, car park surveys and litter surveys but in addition we also carried out footpath erosion surveys to help analyse the impacts of visitors to the New Forest. The Education Officers gave us a detailed overview of the management strategies used to manage the park and how effective they are at the current time. In particular, we focused on the strategies that are being used in the car park at Bolton’s bench as an example of what can be done to limit the negative impacts of tourism.
The students were able to collect some good results for their Controlled Assessment write-up which they will complete when they come back to school in September.