Fen School A, Walk 2

This walk, with 10 of the children from Years 5-6 (ages 9-11) and their teacher, took us to the Cemetery, the conservation area behind the Recreation Ground, and then to the River Great Ouse.

We reach the cemetery and Elsa asks why the children chose this for their walk route. A boy answers, “I picked it because its 100 years since World War 1”. The village’s war memorial is here in the cemetery, and this has been a focus for village commemorations, in which the school have been involved. We ask the children what changes might have taken place in Fens VillageA since World War I. There’s a general sense of the village having grown in size: “There's definitely more houses since then; I think it's changed”. Some children focus on change in use of particular buildings, such as noting that the old post office would have been a post office. In addition, some of the children who went to the Little Acorns pre-school point out that this is new.

Although the cemetery is a place of commemoration and several of the children tell us that they have relatives buried here, this does not prevent it from being a space for play, and the children who live in the village tell us that they do play games in the cemetery sometimes, especially manhunt.

We go through the Recreation Ground (which the children uniformly abbreviate, in the planning sessions where they wrote out their special places, as “the Wreck”) and to the Conservation Area; as we pass through the gate, one of the boys whispers “We're going on a bear hunt”. We ask one of the children what creatures are conserved at the conservation area; one girl explains, “goldfish... somebody put goldfish there and now there's loads”.

By the pond in the conservation area, there's another gate, this one with a sign which the grown-ups on the walk remark upon: “It says keep out...”, but this objection is brushed aside by the girl who opens the gate and goes straight through: “I've been here many times”; at the same time, a boy clambers under the wire: “the easy way!” We hear a booming sound which startles one of the children, but it is quickly identified by others; “isn't it like a bird-scarer?”

On the way back through the wreck, one of the girls talks to me about her family interest in fossils: “My dad used to really like collecting fossils... he found an ammonite and an eagle. But now he doesn't have time, he's a builder. He's working all the time. I try and find fossils but all I find is pottery.” Interestingly, for her fossils are about traces left in the ground and she’s interested in the ‘fossils’ that could be made from more recent traces of movement in the land such as footprints. The class have been making plaster cast ‘fossils’ as part of a recent lesson, and this may explain some of the connection being made between fossils and casts. The girl goes on to tell me about a helicopter crash in Witchford in 2012. The incident left traces near where she lives, with ambulance tyre tracks through the snow to get to the scene of the crash: “that would make a really good fossil”. She then goes on to say that her dad found a large skull “of a mammal, maybe a horse”, but he doesn't have it anymore.

As we move through the village and towards the railway crossing, one boys tells us “I've been down here, just finding things”; another boy asks him “found anything interesting?”; “yes, loads”. “Well, what haven't you found?” “Fossils”. We ask them what they know about the river, and they say that they know it used to be a lot bigger, hundreds of years ago. Importantly for them, it's a good place for fishes and fishing – both of them have been fishing there with their families.

As we reach the bank of the river, some of the children refer to this as a “hill”, although when we ask about this they are aware that it is a manmade bank and that this is for the purpose of flood defence. One of the girls tells us that when she came blackberry picking here with her nan, her nan fell down ‘the hill’ through all the nettles.

One of the girls runs up to the teacher: “miss, have you got a pencil? Perfect. We know there's a geocache around here and I know where it's hidden.” This girl is a keen on geocaching, which she does as a family activity. We invite her to explain to everyone about geocaching and how it works.