Wednesday & Thursday, 24th/25th. March 1976

Swansea field trip day 3

Day 3 and our intrepid geographers make the short trip from Swansea University to the Gower Peninsula. We were here to gain a ‘feel’ for the place in a combination of coach tour and very windy hill walking.

I am fairly sure that the objective for the day was to ensure we were told as little about the objective as possible, in order to ensure we would develop as objective a view of the landscape as possible. Does that make sense?

Possibly not, but all became clear as we headed back, sooner than anticipated, to university. An early dinner followed by “…a bloody great long lecture on landscape evaluation…” according to my ever-so succinct diary entry.

I was not expecting this, and I suspect most of us were now thinking that perhaps we should have paid more attention on our little tour. For some reason I found that many of my classmates seemed to be focussing a greater than usual degree of attention on me. Very nice, but why?

I suspected it might have something to do with me being from Devon, where tourism – and areas of outstanding natural beauty – were rife. That somehow made me an expert, and I am not at all sure I was.

We learned just about everything there was to know about landscape evaluation. Since tourism and the creation of holidays was a popular job role for geography graduates it was important for us to know about such things.

I was a sceptic. How could you objectively ‘grade’ a landscape from absolutely lovely to probably best avoided? How do you give scores out of 10 for hills, valleys, rivers, woods, fields, lakes – the general undulations of the landscape? Are hills and valleys more beautiful than flat featureless plains? We were about to do it for ourselves.

Swansea field trip day 3

First thing in the morning we were split into groups of five; my group was Andy, Mick, Derek and Mark. Each group was given a transept across the Gower from north to south, with regular stopping points marked on a map where we would ‘evaluate’ the landscape.

I took ‘measurements’ of landscape beauty at various points and, in general, there was broad agreement amongst us between what was 4/10 and what 8/10. However, I distinctly remember stopping on a high plain roughly half-way across the peninsula where strong disagreement broke out.

The exposed grassland had recently been the subject of a brush fire, revealing a blackened landscape that was rather like walking on burnt toast. Somewhat crunchy underfoot. A majority thought this was not nice, and gave it only 1-3 out of ten.

However, I had to be honest and spoil everything. To me the landscape was dramatic rather than ‘beautiful’, so I gave it a high score. Call me perverse if you like, but to me a landscape did not have to be all safe and twee to attract my attention. Furthermore, it seemed to me that, just like the regular gorse fires I was familiar with on Dartmoor, blackened crunchiness is temporary. The landscape recovers pretty quickly.

Anyway, at this point we had the misfortune to come upon a pub smack in the middle of our transept – the Gower Inn. With unanimity we agreed that further evaluation of this landscape feature would be essential, and further agreed that it might require more time than was strictly available to us.

Having thoroughly evaluated the pub there was very little time to finish the transept, and I am sorry to say that we made up the final quarter of our transept. Never mind. We had a great deal of data to share back at the university.

We later learned that our transept was the only one that contained a pub. How lucky was that?

It would appear that we were confronted with more evening lectures, which left less time than we would have liked to enjoy a few beers in the local. I am pleased to say that we were all safely tucked-in at 01:30 and no doubt thinking of outstanding natural beauty.

Postscript

Looking back I think I ended up enjoying these two days on the Gower. The evidence of subsequent diary entries over the next few months would certainly suggest as much, judging by the amount of time, care and thought I put Into writing up notes and drawing maps of our little journey.

There is so much landscape evaluation these days and I am not at all sure if many people know how the landscape is ‘scored’ and ‘designated’. Well, it is people like me that do all the work, and it is quite possible that one or two of my fellow geography students had a hand in defining an area near you. It is also quite possible that you may disagree with them. And why not? Landscape evaluation is not a science, despite our attempts to make it so. There is just too much subjectivity, like my burnt toast.