Fen School A, Walk 3

This walk, with 10 of the children from Years 5-6 (ages 9-11) and their teacher, took us to the Recreation Ground and then to the woods near the school.

The children start by pointing out old things along Main Road. There is a round house here which the children suggest once was “a pigeon house”, and they also single out the telephone box as old. However, they all agree that the oldest thing in the village is the church. One boy tells me that once, when playing, he found some coloured pieces of glass and wonders if they might be from the church, as he had learned in school that the church windows had been smashed in Oliver Cromwell's time.

In addition to pointing out old buildings, the children also note recent development “that shows that the village is growing”. Nevertheless, one of the boys is keen to point out that there's moss on some of the new houses, which makes them look older.

They point out the path between Main Street and the Recreation Ground (which we had originally planned on come back through). The children are eager to show us their own ways of getting around the village: “there's a shortcut to the Wreck here, can we go down there?”. As we go along the path they make a point of rustling through the leaves on the path and trying to record the rustling on the voice recorders.

At the Wreck, they point out the Social Club and tell us about how this is a space that is not only important to them as children, but also for adult recreation and therefore for the whole community. “The wreck is just for playing around with friends, but that's for training” (pointing to the pitches). All of the children say that they play games here with other kids from the school: hide and seek, it, manhunt, cricket. While on the subject of the games they like to play, they also tell us that they like to play manhunt in the cemetery in the dark.

We stand in silence with our eyes closed for a minute, and then ask the children what they sensed. They tell us that they heard cars; a chainsaw; and birds. They felt the air; and smelled manure.

Once again, the children take charge of the walk and suggest we go through towards the pond. At the gate is a horseshoe, which all the children touch on the way through: “it carries luck or something is what everyone says”. They all go directly into the pond area and straight past the 'keep out' signs, while one child stands and videos the safety notices. One of the boys points out an island in the centre of the pond: “There's an island – I've claimed that island.” For older children, this is apparently a “favourite place to swim; I've seen people swimming in it”. Speculating about its origins, one boy says the pond is probably left over from when the land was flooded: “when there was flooding probably all of this was water and now there's just the pond”.

One of the things we had been struck by in Fens VillageA was the fact that when so many of the children in both of the classes we worked with chose a particular route from the Recreation Ground to the Thetford Catchwater (a drainage ditch); “it seems like some kind of ancestral route” joked the teacher. In advance of walking the routes with the children we had scouted them out – but try as we might, we could not find a way to get from the Recreation Ground to the Catchwater. The route simply seemed impossible, so reluctantly we plotted an alternative which would still take in the destinations the children had chosen but would go a slightly different way. We were nevertheless eager to understand the route they had plotted, so during this walk we asked one of the boys who had chosen this route where exactly it was meant to be. “Oh, it’s easy. We all go over the ditch, it’s fun. You just have to crawl through the trees, then go under a wire, it’s not electric or anything, then you get to the ditch and you jump over that.” It became clear that children had their own ‘routes’ through the fenland terrain that were not always apparent to teachers or other adults.

On the way out of the conservation area, one boy trips over a bit of raised ground and falls. As he gets back up again he remarks, “everyone touched the horseshoe for luck, but it didn't work for me”.

Back on Main Road and heading towards the woods, one of the boys insists to me that there's a quicker way going behind the school. In order to avoid confusion, the teacher and researchers decide we should stick to the route on the map (which is, as with all of these walks, based on the route the children plotted), but the boy is indeed right that we’re going the longer way, and when we get to the woods he gives us a certain amount of grief for making them go the long way round and not listening to him.

While the adults walk along to the marked entrance to the woods, several of the children take a short cut hopping over the ditch. It turns out that the majority of the group had never been to these woods, although most of children know that it's where the Forest School takes place. Two boys, however, say they have been here: “I don't come here unless I'm walking the dog”; “I come here collecting conkers”. The children explore the area and improvise with the things they find there to make it a playground: “I've found a see-saw” (bouncing on a log); “here's a trampoline” (on a discarded tyre). One of the boys directs the other to video a spider web hanging between trees.

It is now lunchtime, and as we are close to the school we can hear children playing in the playground. We try to make our way out through to the school by the most direct route. We struggle to find a route out through low-hanging branches and brambles: one of the boys cries out “use lunch as your momentum!”