Outdoor Leadership trip to Brecon

 

The School’s Outdoor and Leadership section visited Brecon over the Field Day weekend. Year 10 pupil Kayan writes about their time and the fantastic experience they had:

 

On the 5 March, the Year 10 OL Group made their way to the Parkwood Outdoors Centre in Dolygaer in South Wales. After a long drive there, we arrived at the centre and were given our first taste of the cold in Wales. As well as this, panic arose after we found out that there was no signal at the centre and that we had to socialise.

 On the first morning we woke up early and got to making our breakfast using Trangia’s. With some groups making porridge or hot chocolate, one group decided to make the most of this opportunity by cooking bacon. After breakfast we made our way to the shower blocks to put on our wet suits for our two activities that day: caving and gorge scrambling, both of which people were very excited for.

 

After getting suited up, we split into two groups and went to each place to start our activities. Gorge scrambling is an activity where you use a mixture of skills to make your way up a river. It’s harder than you think! The skills that we had to use were: climbing, wading and most importantly teamwork, which was essential if you didn’t want to submerge yourself in the freezing cold river! Despite the cold it was great fun and a once in a lifetime opportunity. 

The second activity that we did was caving, which was damp, cold and wet and involved squeezing yourself through small gaps. Our instructors didn’t force us to do anything, however they thought that we should try to do it as it was out of our comfort zone. They also gave us many challenges which meant that we would have to get stuck in or we would actually get stuck. These challenges were something that we wouldn’t usually come up against, so we had to think outside of the box.

After these amazing activities we had a 15 kilometre hike the next day around the area where we were staying which provided amazing views of the lakes, mountains and rolling hills around Wales.

 

I would like to thank Mr Teague, Mrs Hanlon, Mrs Von Truchess, Mr Roncarati and Mr Hughes-Caley as well as the instructors at Parkwood Outdoors Centre for helping us and providing an amazing time.