If you’ve been to North Yorkshire’s stately home, Castle Howard, then you’ll know that they have acres of extremely impressive grounds. With beautiful views and plenty to see, the grounds are well-kept by a dedicated team. One such member is Guy Thallon, who has recently taken on a brand new role for the estate as Head of Natural Environment. This month, we were lucky enough to catch him for a little chat.
Hi Guy! Thanks so much for coming to chat to us. Firstly, can you tell us a bit about what you do here at Castle Howard?
My role at Castle Howard is Head of Natural Environment, this was a new role for the estate when I joined last autumn and aligns the efforts of our land management functions around protecting and engaging the natural environment.
In the latest news of the local gardening world, we hear that Castle Howard has a 15-year master plan to combat climate change and improve biodiversity. What are the first steps and what are the main aims of this plan?
The 15-year master plan was developed to set out to define what the role of an estate like Castle Howard is in modern times – the combined climate and biodiversity emergencies are the greatest challenge of our time so we need to understand how we reduce our impact dramatically and identify ways to provide a positive impact in addressing these challenges. We know we need to do this quickly and at scale but the first step is understanding what levers we can pull to have the greatest impact.
The theme surrounding this plan is Restore, Regenerate, and Revive. Is there anything that visitors coming to see the estate, can do to support this vision?
Over 250,000 visitors come to the estate each year which is a lot of journeys, teas, and minds. We’re working to reduce the impact our visitors have when they’re on-site and want to inspire people to see that there are novel ways to respond to these challenges. We encourage people to think about the journeys that they’re making to us, we discount tickets for people coming by bicycle or public transport and we’re setting up for electric vehicles as well as offsetting through tree planting.
We’ve also heard Castle Howard will be using the ‘Natural Capital Baseline’ to monitor various factors of the estate grounds. Can you tell us a bit more about this and what it does?
Natural Capital describes the building blocks of our natural environment, it describes the basic units of a landscape such as hedges, fields, and ponds. We’ve mapped these to a really high level of detail and identified 6093 different habitat units across the estate, this becomes our baseline from which we can plan alternative management strategies and measure progress.
And finally, as Head of Natural Environment, we’re curious to pick your brains. What’s the best eco-friendly tip you’ve ever been given?!
There are a thousand tips for changing your lifestyle to reduce your impact but one of the biggest changes you can make in your diet and reducing the amount of meat you’re eating in favour of things like beans, pulses, and mushrooms. You don’t need to go 100% vegetarian or vegan (there’s lots of sustainable meat available locally) but having a majority veg-based diet in the week it’s better for you and the planet. So the tip is “stop to think about what you’re eating”.
To find out more about Castle Howard please visit www.castlehoward.co.uk
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