Never mind being in the field, I was wearing most of it!

Last week I was out in the field alll weeek down in Somerset!

I had a really good time and found it all very interesting. This was my first major field work trip in my new job and saw me hammering in corers to collect Soil Cores! The work was a little more physical than I was expecting as there was there was a lot of heavy equipment to carry around the field and from the vehicles.

We were collecting soil cores from different locations around Somerset looking at different fields, including grassland, arable, Willow and my good friend Miscanthus! Yes the huge crop was back again and this time it was even thicker! It was also more difficult to get through because of the heavy equipment I was carrying.

I was beginning to think I was cursed during this trip however, as everything seemed to go wrong! Whenever I was with the 1m corer named "Trevor" it broke every time! Not my doing like, but it took a while to get it fixed. One of these times I went to find another colleague that was doing the smaller cores and as soon as I arrived there, she lost one of the pins that was used in the instrument and there was no spare!! Luckily I found it after ten minutes of looking through all the leaf litter and mud!

But everything else went well and my curse rubbed off.

Apart from being cold the weather was great and was nice and dry! However, the fields were still muddy and the constant kneeling and sitting and bending over for instruments meant that I was caked in mud! In fact I thought I was wearing more mud from the field than what was in the field!

During this trip we were staying in an old cottage in the village of Horton. It was very old, dating back to 1857 and had been a holiday cottage since 1987! I read through the old guest book from back then and was pretty funny what they had written. The old cottage was pretty spooky, there was many a small doorways and creaky floors. With a huggeee log fire and some really old furniture it was cool but very spooky. The guest book showed that others thought it was spooky stating they had had no paranormal experiences! Luckily neither did I! :)

I also saw no big spiders which had been mentioned in past guests comments.

Overall, I had a great trip, I ended up coming home early to avoid the snow, which was a good thing as it snowed for the entire trip back the night before and the news today showed Somerset with a deep blanket of snow!

I did come out with a few injuries including a big lump on the head from some equipment! And cuts and bruises from the Bramble and Willow. I almost got stampeded on also by some deer that were in the Miscanthus about 4m away. After stopping to shout for a colleague an almighty crash of falling miscanthus saw three deer running through the crop! Didn't half make me jump though!

But yes all in all a great time!

Bring on the next!