The Best Made Plans...

...don't involve children.

It's not her fault but my daughter isn't well so the planned trig bagging session didn't come off and, indeed, I've been more-or-less house bound for the weekend whilst looking longingly at the beautiful sun outside.

So in a bored moment I uploaded some photos. These relate to the Geomatics PG we had on 09 Dec, the day of the student demonstration/riot. I wrote about it here.

Working hard...

Us on the RICS terrace - before we hung over the edge to get a good look at the riots.

And at dinner afterwards.


I went up to London on 10 Jan for a re-run of Martin Pratt's Michael Barrett Award lecture. A fascinating insight into the world of boundaries - both offshore and onshore. He spoke of the unending connundrums of interpreting old, small scale, datum-free maps and relating them to the modern landscape. Boundaries are easy to draw when you have no knowledge of the geography of a region - but closer inspection of the physical geography, land use, settlements - give a complex picture to unravel. And even if the surveyor knows the optimum solution, trying to explain geodetic concepts to a legal advisor can sometimes be the biggest challenge.

Chit Chat

A bit of a miscellany post today.

Sad news on standing astride longitude at Greenwich. It will now cost an adult a tenner. Ah well, at least the majority of 0 degree longitude is free to stand on!

Picked up Modus, the RICS corporate magazine today. It was full, as ever, of property articles, but this U-tube site caught my eye. It's amazing what you can build in 2 days - well shell in 2 days, internal walls completed in 6. That's mighty quick.

And to continue the time lapse theme my Dad sent me this construction of new railway bridges at Reading Station. Fun eh?

Off for a trig hunt with my daughter tomorrow I hope. She doesn't yet know but once the words 'tea and buns' get injected into the conversation I'm sure she'll come around. Still not finding benchmarks easy to espy. I certainly haven't got my eye into those yet.

And to end my miscellany, a measurement quiz for those who haven't picked it up earlier. I suspect you will all beat my paltry 4 out of 9!

Sad but True

Went with the family down to the Quayside today. I went armed with a list of benchmarks and map; my husband took a GPS receiver and geocache hunt. We didn't find the geocache - mainly because after 3 clues we realised the cache was up a hill and across a mainroad. We were having too much fun at the Quayside to bother. But we did locate 4 benchmarks. They were all hard to find but perhaps I haven't got my eye in yet.


These rivets are small aren't they?!

Trigs and a Trig Lookalike

Decided we needed to bag some trig pillars today. Well, I did and the girls were dragged out on the promise of lunch out if we found 3.

Well we did. And we didn't.

First off is our nearest trig pillar which I'd never hunted before - it's on a railway embankment so we had to view from the bridge.

Then we went to find the trig on Constitutional Hill.

Here it is!

I was surprised there was no evidence of a spider or FB but I assumed this was a cheap and nasty OS version.

On returning I read the details properly and, lo-and-behold, there is the real trig pillar 100m further up the trail. Doh. What I want to know is why are there two trigs 100m apart from each other - one the official one and the other a poor cousin. It's exactly the same shape as an OS trig pillar and fooled me (no comments please). I wonder if the OS installed this one and then changed their minds for a slightly better location? Can anyone enlighten me?

Lastly, a real trig. This one involved a tramp across very gloopy mud but the views were worth it.