X Close

UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage Blog

Home

Menu

Estates Director at Burghley, David Pennell’s blog for the project, Looking at old ground in a new way

By Daisy Voake, on 19 July 2017

Aerial View of park
It is now a month to the day that we had our first workshop session at Burghley with most of the team that has been carefully and considerately brought together by the Institute of Sustainability at UCL.
What a fascinating day it was, apart from the Torrential rain.  It started off with a  meet and greet session with lots of people with fascinating job roles from our Event Director of the Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials, to a professor of Sociology to a Geo physicist from Heritage England, the job roles alone whet the appetite for what proved to an intellectually challenging yet inspiring morning.  The one question remains in mind a month on is that why had we not brought such disciplines together before on this topic and actually where else on the varied activities of the Burghley Estate could I apply the same attitude to assessment of our position both currently and in terms of the future.
Given my diary management can be tricky with so much going on across the estate I had a long standing meeting that I needed to attend to during the morning session.  I stepped out for an hour to go and meet with our contractors, building 24 affordable homes for us elsewhere on the estate, but came back to a fascinating talk about the biomechanics of the horse and how this can be affected in so many ways.  Russell Guire who was giving this talk, one of the research team assembled, had everyone gripped, even those with no equine knowledge to those with a lifetime of equine experience. It was fascinating to listen to him talk, understand his reasoning for assessment and at the same appreciate the factual data he and his research team have collected through various studies. At the time, my mind kept thinking of British Cycling and the marginal gains to be made in that sport that have transformed British fortunes in terms of cycling reward and advancement. I do very much hope that the application that Russell feels could be brought to equine study through his research will be looked on in the same positive light.
Where do we go from here, well the board of Governors of the Burghley House Preservation Trust, the charitable trust body that owns the Burghley Horse Trials, has given the firm seal of approval for the project to continue and are enthusiastic to see how the various disciplines formed under the UCL research banner will report in the future on the future of a sustainable heritage and horse trials together in the same listed parkland surrounding the greatest example of an Elizabethan House and its Capability Brown landscape.

We continue with May Cassar and Shaun McKinnar and the project team towards our next research goal in the autumn, which will also have seen the Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials 2017 take place.

David Pennell
Estates Director at Burghley
June 2017

Leave a Reply