field trip – Centre for Environmental Humanities

Every year on the MA Environmental Humanities we plan fields trips for our students, which are embedded into our core ‘Introduction’ and ‘Themes’ units. We see lots of benefits to incorporating field trips, which are not typically teaching activities in the Humanities (but are common in eg. Geography and Earth Sciences).

In the Centre for Environmental Humanities, we value field trips as a research method and plan at least one a year (see here). Bringing them into our taught programme is a good way of connecting our research and teaching. Field trips offer an opportunity for the group to get to know each other better, and as our field trips are local, it’s also a chance for those new to Bristol to explore and for residents to see familiar places with fresh, EH-focused, eyes.

This year’s first field trip has become a firm favourite. We join Mathilde Braddock of Steps in Stone on a ‘Rivers Old and New’ walk along the Frome on the eastern edge of Bristol. The walk takes us through woodland along amazing rock formations and Mathilde shows us how to see traces of recent and ancient history in the stone.

Fig. 1 Mathilde teaches us to see like a geologist. All photographs by Marianna Dudley.

Mathilde relates the deep time histories which have shaped the geology, and gives us a chance to think about the role of storytelling in communicating environmental stories.

Prompted by Mathilde, we also practice some creative responses to the places we find ourselves in. This year the creative writing practice felt particularly rewarding, and the words below have been shared by two current students on the course. The prompts, sunny autumn riverbank setting, and the quiet, collective moment shared with the group helped me to write a poem, something I’ve not really done before. I’m increasingly interested in exploring how creative practices help us to not just communicate, but also to think in new ways about our subject(s), and I look forward to exploring this with the MA Environmental Humanities students more. Thanks, students, and Mathilde, for a great walk.

– Dr Marianna Dudley, MA Environmental Humanities Programme Director

Fig. 3. Rae holds the dust of ancient deserts in her hand (now friable sandstone).

Rae Ferner-Rose

Stones.

I think often of an early death. In deep time the difference between twenty-two and one hundred is the blink of an eye. How can we ever say that humans are the only true agent within nature when one rainfall can leave a footprint more significant than any one person is able? But when I rot down into the earth, I feel my real work will begin. My life as a fossil will be my greatest achievement, against all my superficial moments of profound, the record making potential of my remains is beyond any word I could leave with this mouth or any word I could write with these hands. After breath and before the end of the world I will be content as a letter in a story so much larger than myself.

In Judaism it is customary to leave a stone on a grave instead of flowers. Flowers die but stone can be carried into the afterlife. I like to think that in some time, the body I leave behind will have more to share with stone than flowers. Flowers are beautiful but transient, like life, but like death – lasting, meaningful, quiet – stone will carry me away into a time my body will understand in a way my embodied mind could never dream of. In health I feel like a flower in bloom, vibrant and alive but always with a view to wilting. In illness I felt like stone, static, peaceful ever closer and closer to the earth. Somewhere between twenty-two and a hundred I will drift back to that earth I arrived from. I do not dream of immortality but rather, living forever.

Jo Ram

It’s just so comforting walking around and looking, and also being taught how to look. That is what elders and teachers are for. To see a blank stoneface no longer blank. But there is a tension I feel between having to learn all the knowledge, to have expertise in order to connect and between feeling an emptiness when all that knowledge becomes facts rather than a way of knowing. Do we need to know all the facts to have a knowing? Do we need some facts? How many and how much facts do we need to start knowing? Or are facts at all relevant to knowing? But if it weren’t for facts, how do we know we are in the knowing? What is the practice of the knowing?

Marianna Dudley

Four seconds to midnight

is when we appeared

says the geologist, bending

time with her words.

Twenty-four hours of life on earth

most of it behind us

time spent in vastness.

Mountains, faults

delta plains awash with

flora, air dense with

oxygen, soil solid with

carbon. Dragonflies with wings

like birds, dragon-birds

dart through the density

we would never believe they lived

if we could not see them

in the stone.

Mathilde Braddock

I’ve always felt a particular magic in the cliff faces, towering trees and unassuming flow of the river in the Frome valley. For the second year in a row, I’ve seen this magic envelop the Environmental Humanities MA students and witnessed how sharing the deep time stories of the land opens us to greater wonder for the world. I am humbled by the words which the students and teachers share in response to the rocks, the river, the stories I tell, and the simple act of pausing and listening, together.

Offering this walk as part of the MA is a pleasure because it feels like the perfect fit: an eager and open-minded audience, an opportunity for them to get out and about, and a chance for us all to feel connected with our shared environment.

Fig. 4. A parting message from the Frome.

Dr Richard Stone, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History (University of Bristol), reflects on the recent CEH field trip to the Brecon Beacons.

If there was one thing the Centre for Environmental Humanities field trip to the Brecon Beacons in July 2022 brought home to me, it’s how each of us perceives the landscape in a different way, and how in turn our perception is shaped by interaction with each other.

The Dipper which flew up the river alongside the Blaen y Glyn waterfall trail is a perfect example of this. After 25 years of birdwatching, I took one look at the river valley and was expecting to see dippers there. It was a perfect habitat, with clean fast running water and not too much disturbance. I heard the call before I saw the bird, and was able to turn and point it out to others in the party before the portly little dart flashed round the bend and out of sight. The shape, sound, and behaviour of Dippers are all logged in my mind, so this brief glimpse was enough for me to know what I was looking at, to be aware of this aspect of the landscape. To me, this was a Dipper valley.

Perhaps most who walk that way, however, would not encounter the Dipper. Their ears might register its call, and eyes observe a bird shape fly past, but it would not break the surface of their consciousness. It was my knowledge of the Dipper and its behaviour, and the fact that I am always scanning the landscape for birds that bought it to the attention of the rest of the group, and meant that they too saw a Dipper and learned a little of its story.

Each of us views a landscape in a different way, and in turn draws out different features. Many of our group were wild swimmers, assessing the river not for its potential birdlife, but for pools which might be deep, clear, and accessible enough to bathe. While they did not pull me into the water and fully into their world, through sharing a walk with them I too learned to view the landscape through a different lens, and to see a layer of its nature which would normally pass me by. To me, this was now also a swimmers’ river.

I learned most about the way a landscape can be read, however, from our guide Paul as we walked from the Brecon Beacons National Park Visitor Centre. The way he recognised and understood the plants of the bogs and moor was perhaps similar to the way I was seeing their birds. But it was the way he could point to a parcel of land or a clump of trees and tell its story that really hit me, explaining what had shaped it from deep geological time up to what he himself had witnessed over the last twenty years. He knew why that patch of trees was there, and how it would dry out the bog over the next 500 or so years. And he knew that the patch of lighter green at the edge of the wet ground was where the peat cutters had turned their carts in the nineteenth century. Clearly some of this was knowledge and training as an environmental scientist, but there was something else there too. This was the kind of seeing, the kind of knowing, which can only be obtained by spending decades observing, shaping, and living with a single place. It was a privilege to be granted a glimpse of Paul’s Brecon Beacons.

Follow Richard on twitter @Dr_RGStone

Tag: field trip

Rivers Old and New: Field Trips as Teaching Method in the MA Environmental Humanities

Layers of the Landscape: Perception and Shared Experience on a trip to the Brecon Beacons