9th April 2013, 01:02 PM
Giving the bottom of the trench a decent hoe, if only to make the photos a bit nicer (you are taking photos presumably, even of empty trenches?) should be standard practice. There's plenty of types geology around that will make it unnecessary though, and other examples that leave such a ragged looking trench that to not give it a clean would be criminal. What is missed if you don't? Hard to say really, probably not a lot. Having said that, I've seen evaluation trenches cleaned onto 'natural' only to discover there were features below that anyway, so it's swings and roundabouts really. Depends on your natural, how familiar you are with it, what you are anticipating, experience and so on. Certainly seen a difference between Scottish and English units in terms of report writing for evaluations, the former seemingly happy to provide something so brief as to be virtually meaningless. Discuss.