Exmoor

I've just returned from a 4-day excursion to Exmoor and, for the record, I'm strongly tempted to give up the Mediterranean all together and just wander around Britain for the next 20 years climbing over Mesolithic barrows and tripping over "mini-lithic" stone rows and circles. Exmoor is southwest of Bristol - on the map, you travel down along the south side of the Severn Estuary to the almost-invisible green patch. It doesn't have monuments as well-studied or as dramatic as Stonehenge, but I learned a lot about identifying subtle earthworks (mounds, banks, ditches, etc.) and general surveying techniques.

All of the Archaeology/Anthropology programmes went along and split up to study different aspects of the area, but our group - the Meds and the MALAs (MA in Landscape Archaeology) - was by far the best. Our instructor Rob works for the Exmoor conservancy as a resident archaeologist and somehow managed to make us see building platforms, roads, and hill forts (and over-lying medieval ridge-and-furrow agriculture) in a landscape that at first glance looked vaguely bumpy with perhaps a few scattered rocks.

So, combine vigorous trampling over the moor with group dinner at the Exford pub every night with the opportunity to explore Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Age sites, and we had, to quote the department head, an utterly "fab" field trip.