Most people will know Mount Stewart for its wonderful gardens and neo-classical house, but the whole demesne actually covers 1000 acres including 600 acres of woodland, and arable and agricultural farmland that we manage with our tenants.
We have an extensive list of what are regarded as essential tasks so that’s why I’m working rather than staying home. It covers everything from animal welfare and conservation programmes, to health and safety and invasive species management, where, if we were to miss some of the treatment windows we could lose five to ten years of work.
So as you can imagine, there’s never an empty space on my to-do list!
Rangering is lone working anyway so there’s not been a huge amount of change for me over these past weeks. I’m passionate about my role which combines conservation and giving people access to this beautiful place. It’s a job that allows me to get up to close to nature each day and monitor the activity of the wonderful species that we’re working to protect such as red squirrels, barn owls and moths, which I find particularly fascinating!
It’s a bittersweet experience at the minute, in that it’s nice having the whole place to yourself but, on the other hand, part of my role is to connect people with the outdoors and nature and obviously I can’t do that at the minute.
That’s why I started to do the livestreams on Tuesday mornings and daily Mount Stewart Moments clips, to bring this wonderful place to the people. We use the videos to show not just visuals but also to describe the smells and the sound scape. And I’ve been quite surprised by the appetite there is for them. We’ve been getting responses from viewers around the world, people that maybe grew up in Northern Ireland and are getting the chance to reconnect via these livestreams.