Where conservation meets combat
By David Blake, Rural Estate Delivery Manager (South West)
I came to work at Landmarc in the autumn of 2018, having been in a variety of land management roles starting in game management in the 1980s, then working on wildlife reserves, private estates, for the Forestry Commission and latterly in project management in protected landscapes.
Landmarc is the land management organisation you’ve never heard of, but almost certainly operates at a site near where you live and has been doing so since 2003. We provide the services that enable the armed forces to live, work and train on the Defence Training Estate (DTE) in ways that support its value as a place to train for warfighting, but also sustains the habitats and wildlife populations that are found there. The Ministry of Defence, through the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, owns the DTE freehold estate and leases almost as much again; the total amounting to about one percent of the UK land mass. While a few other public landholdings are larger (such as forestry), none are as diverse and complex, with such varied, specialised and downright weird – not to say kinetic – land uses occurring on them. This enormous estate ranges from Cape Wrath on Scotland’s north coast to Penhale Sands in Cornwall and from Castlemartin on the Pembrokeshire Coast to Stanford in North Norfolk. We are a company of about 1,500 people, with headquarters near Salisbury in Wiltshire, and between us we cover all the skills and trades needed to maintain 9,000 buildings on 120 sites and 21 million trees on 190,000 hectares, 35% of that area is designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest with Special Areas of Conservation, Special Protection Areas and the Ramsar Convention overlying much of it. We manage over 400 firing ranges where HM Armed Forces carry out live-firing with pistols, rifles, machine guns, tanks, artillery, bombs from aeroplanes and missiles from ships and submarines. Landmarc is the sole industry partner managing the DTE; there isn’t another company like us.
My job as Rural Estate Delivery Manager for South West England means that I have responsibility for all the ways in which we manage the rural DTE in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire. The sheer variety of the habitats we manage is an absolute feast for any nature conservation manager. I oversee the management of vast sand dune systems, coastal cliffs and parts of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site as well as the unique lagoon of the Fleet in Dorset. With the rural managers in each area, I maintain nearly 400 scheduled monuments across Dartmoor, Purbeck and Salisbury Plain – some of the most important multi-period historic landscapes in the UK as well as being amazing habitats with stunning species. Taken as a whole, Landmarc’s remit covers the richest smorgasbord of British wildlife that any organisation has as their daily business.
People like myself in operations are supported by full-time talent acquisition and human resource colleagues who carry out our recruitment and induct new employees. Most of the roles we offer are full-time with a defined contribution pension scheme, life assurance and a comprehensive benefits package. We all have access to health and wellbeing programmes that support our physical and mental health. Landmarc has family-friendly policies that enable us to mould our working lives around family commitments and we are encouraged to take paid volunteering days so that we can be actively involved in the communities in which we live and work. Personal development is also encouraged and supported through apprenticeships, qualifications and courses that prepare you for the next step in your career.
There are plenty of challenges in working on the DTE. The complexities and scale of the estate are slightly mind-bending when you first join Landmarc, but there is also a wonderful simplicity to the estate in that it is owned for one reason: military training. Operations on the rural estate, such as forestry harvesting or habitat management, can be postponed or cancelled at short notice, even if they have been in planning for many months. This can be hugely frustrating for us on the rare occasions it occurs, but the military requirement comes first. When we start an operation, we are working with hazards rarely encountered elsewhere and which need to be mitigated. Many parts of the estate have been shelled and bombed for over a century and there are a lot of those shells and bombs lurking beneath the surface of the ground that have not yet gone bang. Legacy unexploded ordnance is a consideration on other estates, but only on the DTE is the stock of nasty surprises being refreshed daily. Landmarc and the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) work together with Explosive Ordinance Disposal experts to make sure that we conduct operations safely and anyone working on a training area has to have a comprehensive safety briefing beforehand. The view from my office window is of miles of rolling species-rich chalk downland. The pastoral view is regularly interrupted by artillery shells going into the hillsides, tanks roll across the scene and every now and again a pair of Apache AH64 helicopters will cruise around hammering targets with 30mm cannon. That’s not normal. Frankly, for a civilian like me it’s a bit odd and the dissonance can be disconcerting.
Other challenges will be more familiar to anyone who has worked in nature conservation and land management. We work with a large number of tenants: permanent agricultural tenants, seasonal graziers, commercial and residential tenants, game shoots and fishing clubs. The farmers are integral to the management of the DTE; for instance, the 150 square miles of Salisbury Plain is managed mainly by a complex system of temporarily penning cattle and sheep; the product makes up a significant part of the red meat market in SW England. We face the perennial issues that affect all land management such as vandalism, fly-tipping and, despite the Ministry of Defence’s bespoke version of the Countryside Code, illegal and unwise public access.
The joys and wonderful peculiarities of working on the DTE far outweigh the frustrations. Our Landmarc Connect app – the internal platform where we share news and views – is full of the love and enthusiasm that we have for the estate: images of sunsets in one place, dawn in another, wildlife encountered when on duty and all while being paid!
Landmarc’s work is in the background, we will remain the land management company you’ve never heard of, but that does not detract from the endless enjoyment and constant surprises that come from working on such a large, varied and fascinating estate.
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Find all the articles in the CJS Focus on...Countryside Management Series here
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