Land Manager's Diary: Read it here>

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Our volunteer work party found plenty to keep them busy this week with vital wall repairs and checking on our young saplings forming our 420m hedge. Volunteers also had the added distraction of being filmed as part of a pilot project to let you explore our land, it's features, history and our work on-site from the comfort of your own home.

Nearly a dozen volunteers helped us out yesterday on our land at High Borrowdale. We continued with our aftercare of the 420m of hedge planted in February, removing grass to give the plants the maximum chance to thrive in their first year.

A second gang of volunteers got on with wall repairs down near the river.

At first sight the stone looks lovely, nice and flat rather than uneven boulders. However, it has all at some point been reclaimed from the beck, so whilst the stonewashed nature gives us flat, it also gives us rounded which means the stones slip off the wall incredibly easily.

If a small bit of the wall comes down, the sheep notice immediately and it is not long before they are jumping in and several metres of wall are down…. All part of land management but when we were also joined by a bouncy deer, this can be quite an annoying aspect of it! 

We started on a rather exciting new project down at High Borrowdale which we thought we would tell you about. We are keen to make more of our land in terms of engaging with people and have been thinking about how we can engage with people in rather different ways to those we have done in the past. So as a pilot, we are working on a ‘virtual tour’ of High Borrowdale. This means people who cannot go down and visit in person for whatever reason can explore the site from home or phone and we can provide more information on all the aspects of the land and what we have been doing. We have had a film maker down on the land flying a drone to get footage, and we are now working with a gentleman who will put the tour together with us.

It will be comprised of an aerial 360 degree panorama which viewers can move around so they can have a look around the property. On top of this it will then be possible to deep dive into key elements, such as the buildings, or hay meadow where we are planning to provide more detailed information, e.g. what we have done, possibly some of our time-lapse footage, and some Vodcasts – small video clips of us talking about what we have done, the volunteers on why they volunteer, the importance of key features, etc. So yesterday was our first foray into trying to do the video clips.

Chris our Communications Officer joined us to begin filming some clips that we can use not only in the tour, but hopefully also to put onto NFC chips or QR codes on site so that people can download and listen via their phones when on site if they wish. The benefit of doing it this way is that hopefully we can provide a lot more information but in a way that is not intrusive on the land or detracts from its sense of tranquillity and remoteness. We will see how it goes and hopefully have something for you to look at in the next few months and see what you think!

If you’re a subscriber to our regular Postcard from the Lakes, you’ll get a glimpse of High Borrowdale in this Friday’s edition as I present a short video about High Borrowdale ably assisted by one camera shy Labrador! You can sign up to the 'Postcard' using the form at the foot of this page if you would like to receive our forthnightly news and events update.