Farewell to Hallsands

I still had equipment at the Hallsands field site, so Christine and I did a quick trip to the South Hams of Devon to do a final data download and to remove the field equipment for shipment back to Boone. We had heard horror stories about traffic on this day – it was the last day of school for most of England and many Brits make a beeline for Cornwall – so we planned an alternate route home through Dartmoor National Park and Tavistock to avoid major delays over the Tamar Bridge. Plus, we would get one more glimpse of this wonderful national park.

It is a real testament to the safety of England that my field equipment was still there. I had installed a monitoring well in the beach, right along the route that most walkers would take if walking the South West Coast Path. That well was in the beach for two months and had $2000 worth of equipment in it. When I arrived to download the data and remove the well, it was still there. Sadly, the same would not likely have been true in the US. I had monitoring wells on Hatteras Island for years and as remote as they were, they were still vandalized and shot full of holes. I’ll miss that aspect of English life.

I did the final data collection

and Christine helped with pulling out the well.

We celebrated with a coffee break on the beach, including some of our favorite biscuits. The girls love the custard crèmes!

We enjoyed the sunshine and the waves

and the coffee,

and then headed home. Goodbye Hallsands!

Incidentally, the same day that we did this trip I received the radiocarbon dates from the other four organic samples that Roland and I had cored out of the marsh. I plotted them on the existing graph and our new methodology was confirmed: the fit is ideal! 

We ended up hitting a fair amount of traffic on the way home. We also left the beautiful sunshine and travelled through rain most of the way. We still made our way across Dartmoor National Park, stopping at a 15^th Century pub, the Tavistock Inn, for a great pub lunch. This pub is famous as the location at which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote much of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was a great way to spend out last time in the park.