I am trying to find out how footpath erosion on Pen Y Fan which is a national park, compares to footpath erosion on Cock Marsh which is in a village and is not in a national park.

Authors Avatar

                

Section 1

I am trying to find out how footpath erosion on Pen Y Fan which is a national park, compares to footpath erosion on Cock Marsh which is in a village and is not in a national park. The question is ‘how does footpath erosion on Pen Y Fan compare to footpath erosion on Cock Marsh’.

Backround information on Pen Y Fan and the Brecon Beacons

The Brecon Beacons is a lived and worked in national park. The area within the national park covers 519 square miles. Nearly half of this is 1,000 ft above sea level.

Pen Y Fan is the highest mountain in South Wales and is 2,907 ft above sea level.

The Brecon Beacons also has other peaks such as cribyn and corn Du. the east of the brecon beacons are known as the black mountains. In the far west of the national park is the upland range known as Black Mountain. This is a remote location and has a well-known ridge walk called the beacon horseshoe.

                 

In the south there is a place called waterfall country and in the north is sennybridge. Pen Y Fan has a problem with footpath erosion due to walkers walking over the footpath with heavy walking boots which pulls up mud and vegetation and it falls off in a different area. Also this may get worse and the footpath may widen because the footpath is stoney and the walkers would find the grassy banks easier to walk on so the boots would erode the banks and the process wont stop. There are many activities that interest people to come to the Brecon Beacons e.g. gorge walking and challenging high ridges for the walkers and cycling etc. these examples all cause erosion. Also the S.A.S trains on the mountains in which they run over the mountains which causes erosion to the footpaths and may cause more footpaths if the run on different routes. While we were working on Pen Y Fan 92 people walked past on the footpath including ourselves, and on Cock Marsh over 20 walkers walked past. Pen Y Fan is one of the biggest tourist attractions in the Brecon Beacons, it draws nearly 100,000 people a year.

Backround information on Cock Marsh.

Cock Marsh is located in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire and is by the river Thames. Which would attract more people to the footpath so they could see the river and enjoy leisure activities.

Backround information on the earths soil erosion problems worldwide.

Six to eight inches of topsoil is all that stands between much of the world and starvation. Yet each year a huge amount of agricultural land is lost to erosion, Stalinization (the accumulation of salt in water or soil), and other forms of soil degradation. Less topsoil means less food: degraded soils have lowered global yields by 13 percent since World War 2. Soil scientist Hari Eswaren, chair of an international working group on land degradation, calls it “the root of all socio-economic problems” in developing nations.

Join now!

Maps

Aims

The aims of this fieldwork is to:

∙ Measure the depth and width of the footpath in a national park called brecon beacons on pen y fan.

∙Measure the depth and width of the footpath in bourne end on Cock Marsh.

∙Compare the amount of footpath erosion at both sites and think of ways to slow them down.

∙Measure the angle of slope and the amount of vegetation on both paths.

Location

Pen Y Fan is located ...

This is a preview of the whole essay