Today started off with the training group meeting at "Rogie" on Forestry Commission land. The goal today was to teach the group about sampling and the various complications that one must deal with spatially and temporally. Rogie is an old settlement with a paddock (called a kale yard), grain dryer, and various outbuildings. Clare and Donald spoke about sampling and then broke the group up into two teams to sample the kale yard with soil cores and a shallow pit to the bottom of the anthropogenic soil. The teams then took various measures such as depth of the anthro soil, color, phosphorus content, pH (or Ph over here), and field texture. From this information they made inferences about land usage. It was quite amazing how much organic matter had accumulated in such a small area.
After we completed the work at Rogie, we had a bag lunch nearby overlooking the valley and then drove to Braemore (near Auchindrean) for the second stop. This stop is a mixed use site with Bronze Age to Victorian area structures. Again, the group was broken up into teams and we worked on this fluvial glacial terrace taking cores and describing the soils. As compared to Rogie, one noticeable difference was the phosphorus spike throughout th site...quite high.Donald's brother in-law was arriving for a few days that day for dinner at 7PM so we left at 3:30PM to be back in time. The drive back was quite nice and I did some filming of the drive with the MacBook. I will see if I can put it up. Quite frankly I was exhausted, yet enjoyed the scenery. We drove by the area of the last G8 summit (Glen Eagles) and then returned to Dunblane in record time thanks to Clare's able driving! Caroline's brother is a retired police officer from London and her sister in-law is very talented geneologist. She is here doing more work on their family tree in Edinburgh while in route to their vacation home north of here.
Well off to bed. The dinner was great and the port mellow. Tomorrow Stirling.
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