Margam Castle & Eco-Poetry

S7E76 In this episode of BatChat, we explore bat conservation with experts Megan Price and Beth from Margam Park in South Wales. They share insights on the park's rich biodiversity, highlighting the fourteen bat species present and the importance of managing roosts while balancing conservation efforts with public access. 

Watch a short video of the bats at Margam Park

A short article on the bats of Margam

In the second half of the episode Dr. Briony Hughes from Royal Holloway University introduces her creative approach to conservation through eco-poetry, emphasising the role of public engagement and education in fostering appreciation for bats. The episode showcases the collaborative efforts of ecologists and creatives to enhance understanding and protect these essential species.

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Chapters

• 0:10 Welcome to Bat Chat
• 1:23 History of Margham Park
• 3:11 Bat Species in the Park
• 6:18 Ongoing Bat Surveys
• 7:00 Exploring the Castle
• 10:40 Managing Bats and Public Engagement
• 15:16 Nature Writing and Conservation
• 20:23 Conclusion and Next Episode
• 25:20 The Poetry of Bats

Transcript

Steve Roe

[0:05]Welcome to another episode of the Bat Conservation Trust's award-winning podcast, BatChat. I'm Steve Roe, your host, and this is episode 76. If you're new to the show, welcome along. Episodes of each series are released every other Wednesday during the winter months until the spring. Last time we were in Cornwall hearing about the career of Professor Paul Racey. Well, this week we've two interviews for you. Later on, we'll hear from Dr Bryony Hughes, but we start off in South Wales at Margam Country Park near Port Talbot. Our guests, Megan and Beth, have met me in the car park and led me past a large orange tree, across the grounds and to the inside of Margam Castle. It's half term and we find a room not open to the public where they introduce themselves before telling us about the bats in the parkland.

Megan Price

[0:53]Hi i'm Megan Price i'm an ecologist with need to help the council and i'm involved in Margam park as i provide all advice for works and potential works in the park regarding the bats

Beth

[1:04]Yeah um i'm beth i'm the green infrastructure project manager for the council so i'm just looking at ways that we can kind of work and build with nature but mostly i just help meg do lots of different bat surveys so that's why i'm here great

Steve Roe

[1:16]Stuff and there's we can hear kids screaming downstairs because it's very near

[1:23]

History of Margam Park

Steve Roe

[1:19]Halloween and the castle and park are all decorated in various Halloween bits and pieces. So just give us some history to Margam Park and the castle here and what the involvement is with the council, with the wider estate.

Megan Price

[1:31]Margam Park, it's been occupied for a long time by humans. And there's multiple buildings. Like we've got the historic sisters from Abbey ruins down the bottom. We've got Margam Abbey, which I think is from 1100. So it's a very old church. We've got Longhorns in there as well.

Beth

[1:47]We've got the Orangery. Yeah. And then obviously the castle itself, which is just kind of a big estate, essentially. Loads of different land use. So there's woodlands. There's like different ponds. There's then like the turbine house down the bottom. More recently there's go ape if anybody's you know really excited about that kind of thing and there's you know massive herds of different types of deer that kind of roam and go up into the mountains so yeah it's got a lot multi-faceted land use and then there's a kind of a farm towards the edge of the estate then yeah and as meg said earlier burnt down in the 1970s the castle itself um and then hasn't really been like majorly developed since then which is why it's such a good space for bats because there's loads of open areas for roosts and stuff like that

Steve Roe

[2:26]Nice and what sort of involvement has the council got with this state

Megan Price

[2:29]Um we own Margam Park and the sort of buildings on it I think we took it over in the 70s because it was in our ownership when it burnt down my team is the countryside and wildlife team so we just advise on the biodiversity we don't actually have anything to do with the management of it or repair work but yeah it's just run as sort of a country park and deer park and that in part is why it's so good for bats it's about 850 hectares and as it's a deer park there isn't a huge emphasis on the trees being well maintained and it being maintained for sort of public access. There's public bits like the gardens which are sort of well managed however the woods and things we've got lots of standing dead wood what would be classified as dangerous trees which of course makes it amazing from vergebrets and then the bats as well.

[3:11]

Bat Species in the Park

Steve Roe

[3:11]So just tell us a bit about the bats then. So I've heard it might be the best site for bats in Wales. What species have you got here and in what sort of numbers?

Megan Price

[3:19]We've got 14 species of bat in the park. So we have got greater and lesser horseshoes. The greater horseshoes tend to come into the park when we have cold winters. We haven't had them for a couple of years, but we get them hibernating in the cellar of the castle. Lesser horseshoes, we've got a maternity roost which has formed over the last about five years. and there's about 60 in there now at the minute, so it's growing really nicely. We've then got the three pips, common soprano and Nathusius' pips. We've got brown long-eared's, Daubenton's, whiskered, Brandt's, Natterer's, serotine, noctule, Leisler's and barbastelles.

Steve Roe

[3:58]You mentioned there the lesser horseshoe roost. In terms of the different places, presumably the castle's got loads of places where bats might be. You mentioned the woodland there. What types of roosts and what do you know in terms of the roosts around the estate that you've surveyed over the last few years

Megan Price

[4:11]Um pretty much every structure on the estate has got bats in it at some point in the year we've got maternity hibernation transitionary roost however number wise it's very difficult to count especially with the castle because there's sort of bare walls there's lots of gaps and cracks the roof's all exposed so like you'll be sitting in a room watching long along it was used on one end coming on from the next night then, it's shot the other end of the room. So number wise, we have absolutely, you know, I've been serving the castle since 2014. And yeah, we're kind of no closer to estimating numbers. We've got the species down and we've done, the park has been surveyed over a number of years by many different consultants from that point of view. And Richard Crompton runs trapping courses here. So a lot of the species have been confirmed by trapping as well as sort of bat surveys with sonogram analysis and things. So that tends to be how we've got all our species confirmed that we've got in the park at the minute. Margam Abbey's got long yards. We've got pips in the orange tree. We've got our lesser horse and maternity roost we've got quite a few tree roosts however especially in terms of trees there are so many trees we haven't even looked at yeah yeah we've got sort of numbers and how many roosts we've got it's all complete guests we just know there are lots of bats when we walk around yeah

Beth

[5:30]We tend to kind of map where they go really more than anything so if you if there's a load of us here on the survey you just hear us all shouting that they've gone into different rooms um but yeah it's just everybody normally experiences the same we you could assume is the same bat or maybe not flying in between the rooms that we survey so it's very hard to count but definitely populated with a lot of bats

Megan Price

[5:49]Yeah our current survey work focuses on the castle because there are plans in the future to sort of not modernize it but allow the public to access rooms which they currently can't sell and there's also repair work to be done so a lot of our survey workers focus on the castle to allow the repair work and help sort of the proposed plans develop whilst making sure the bats have got the best outcome for them before

Steve Roe

[6:11]We hit the You said there's money constantly being sought because it's an awful

[6:18]

Ongoing Bat Surveys

Steve Roe

[6:16]lot of money to keep this sort of building updated. I guess the ongoing survey works. I guess they're never up to date all the time because it's such a long term project isn't it?

Megan Price

[6:25]Yeah we're just constantly survey through the summer. We hear every week, every other week. We've constantly got static detectors running to get a constant background of activity. And when it comes in with some sort of specific repair work on a building, we'll go and survey that specifically. But yeah, we just constantly survey. I'm here at least every other week in the park doing some form of bad survey.

Beth

[6:46]Yeah, we did joke earlier that Meg should probably just set up shop here and live here at the moment.

Steve Roe

[6:51]Tell us a bit more about the castle. I've seen a very small part of it and gone up a lot of stairs and we're in a very big room that, out of context,

[7:00]

Exploring the Castle

Steve Roe

[6:58]almost looks like a barn, essentially.

Beth

[7:00]So it's rather than like an old school medieval castle, It's more like one of those stately home castles. You would expect it to have loads of stained glass windows, but like we said, it burned down in the 70s, so kind of less like that. But yeah, it's what, three turrets?

Megan Price

[7:13]We've got the big octagonal sewing room turret, which sort of sits up the middle of the castle and goes up, I think, I want to say to 60 feet. So it's a very tall building. The rest of the castle tends to be on sort of three floors. Kind of a maze, unless you know where you're around it. But again, since it burnt down, we kind of just sort of re-roofed it, put floors in, and there hasn't been sort of any heritage restoration. So it's all open to bats. Bats can fly through. There's multiple roost spaces. And yeah.

Beth

[7:43]Yeah, if you do a survey in here or you walk around in here, you're kind of sat in one space, but there's so many different open doorways or open kind of internal windows or stairs up into the next turret or like mezzanines that mean that you can see on multiple different floors, which means that when you're doing a survey, there's so many access points for bats to kind of travel around the castle, which is why we tend to do a lot of mapping about where they're going and where they're coming from. And when you walk around here, you know, before the survey starts, you can see the roosts and you can see the bats and the roosts because there's lots of exposed rafters, bare brickwork and kind of gaps where they can just, you know, they're really happy to hibernate and fill out. So it's a really good space for them. But it means that in reality, it's just a very big open space. I think there's what the first floor, the mezzanine, the tower, and then there's obviously the cellars downstairs, which is an even better and kind of much less visited place than this even because there's lots of events and stuff and people moving around inside the main part of the castle although the public doesn't have access up here the sellers don't really get nobody

Megan Price

[8:45]Goes down the seller without a licensed bat worker with them because it's a confirmed hibernation roost for both lessors, graders and other species However, the problem with the castle is it's always been open to the public. So a lot of the space is like the ground floor rooms. There's three in particular that are used for a lot of events and they're open to the public. You've got the main staircase which the public can come in. The rest of the castle, however, is sort of staff only or the friends come into certain rooms. But there's also what I call the Barnall Tower, which is off limits to everybody apart from sort of the biodiversity team or we have to accompany them. It's mainly because of the fire escape. there's only a very tight spiral staircase so because of that the bats in that part of the building haven't been disturbed so even though the bats are throughout the building they use it all for foraging and they'll roost sort of throughout it they're concentrated a lot more in that sort of wing which is sort of shut off and then the cellars again because it's been locked and there's never been the public down there there hasn't been a precedent for people and staff to keep going down there so that's now been limited since we've come in and started doing a lot more with the bats that is just that goes down there for survey work because obviously you don't want to disturb them during hibernation there's

Steve Roe

[9:52]Lots of castles and manor houses across the uk is it that this one is particularly popular with bats or is it actually just because you guys have been surveying actually found all the bats

Megan Price

[10:01]I think it's a combination of both there's been sort of a long history of bat survey work on the whole park and also since 2014 we've had a concerted effort of surveying the bats and then with all the repair work as well we have to inform that however the park is 850 hectares of deer park you've got multiple habitats lots of standing deadwood so I think just in terms of habitat and also having this castle it's a really good sort of mix and because the castle is open and isn't fully used by the public it's just created the perfect sort of roost space habitats for the bats to thrive in

Steve Roe

[10:35]You mentioned you're doing various bits of survey work. You're obviously doing

[10:40]

Managing Bats and Public Engagement

Steve Roe

[10:38]all the roost surveys. You're doing your bat walks with the public. You've got stat detectors constantly monitoring. What's the long-term management plan? Is there one?

Megan Price

[10:47]Long-term management, I think, will sort of be to keep the bat species we've got and the roosts we've got. Obviously, whilst allowing the castles to be used more with the sort of public aspect of it. However, we just want to keep the bats here and also improve their roosts and improve numbers if we can. so any management of the park going forward it's all done with sort of biodiversity in mind so any management it has to enhance biodiversity which in turn will enhance it for bats

Steve Roe

[11:12]And in terms of the public bat walks you know people listening to this might be thinking oh i live nearby i'm interested you know where do they find out about the public bat walks and what sort of you know what months of the year do you run them

Megan Price

[11:22]You can find out about the bat walks on our facebook page which is mpt wildlife or um the margon park facebook page will also publicize them and their web page and we run them sort of we try to go my uh may june time because the nights aren't too long because obviously in the summer they tend to be quite late and then september uh end of august september october time you sort of run them because yeah it's a bit more family friendly and public friendly they don't tend to run and because the park is in patel but there's quite a lot of light pollution so it doesn't actually really ever get that darker so yeah you can you don't tend to need torches to walk around so on bat walks that kind of pushes the bat emergence time sometimes a bit later yeah

Beth

[12:07]It saves you from being here at like midnight wandering around looking for bats

Megan Price

[12:10]Which is like we do yeah

Steve Roe

[12:13]And you said the park's 850 hectares, which is obviously a very large area. What's in the wider landscape? Is it that the bats are sort of isolated here, or is there a wider landscape that they can, you know, move out and across and move between the two?

Megan Price

[12:26]There's quite good connectivity throughout the park, obviously. And then we've got, we're not too far from the coast, and Kent Fig and all the sand dunes. And then obviously we go, what are we back on to? We've got sort of Brin. And yeah, there's quite, if you look at aerials, there's very good connectivity to other habitats. And south wales is sort of made up of woodlands um plantation is quite a lot of it and then we've also got coal spoil tips and things so yeah there's a lot of connectivity throughout from the park to other habitat features finally

Steve Roe

[12:55]You you work for the council you occasionally have to do presumably derogation licenses to actually do the works the council have you guys as the biodiversity team which is fantastic how often are there any conflicts within the council you know how is it helpful being having that team within the council rather than necessarily getting in consultants to do that work for you is it easier to work together that way

Megan Price

[13:17]Um yes sort of one of the main reasons like i came to work for the council it was a plus that i had the experience with margain park already in the bats and i have i'm licensed so i can get the sort of bat licenses if you bring consultants in because they haven't got the sort of long time frame that I've been in the history of how the bats use the building because it's so complicated they'd have to do either a lot of survey work leading up to something or it would be guesswork on getting things and I don't want to say we have a lot of guesswork in getting licenses however we sort of go worst case and we're able to make those assumptions because we've got such a long history of the bats in the park so yeah it is very helpful that we work for the council to be able to get the licenses and even when we don't have to get licenses there's a lot of things that happen in the park that could conflict with bats so but i work for the council i can get involved quite early in stages and then with filming and things it's not actually an issue because it can just sort of be tweaked to not affect the bats rather than them wanting to do something and i have to go and say well no actually you can't do that because it's an issue for the bats we just work together and there's always some sort of way that everybody can be happy really

Beth

[14:22]Beneficial to have those relationships with the teams that work here like the council teams and all other teams in the council to be able for meg to be able to kind of consult on anything that's happening and take action earlier on rather than be asked the question at a later date but it just means it's easier to work with and do it better for the bats that are here as well as you know make sure that it works like the fright night trail that's out there right now you know

Steve Roe

[14:43]Fantastic beth and meg thank you very much

Beth

[14:47]Thanks thanks and

Steve Roe

[14:49]My thanks to megan and beth for that chat links to various articles about the bats in the park can be found in the show notes to this episode my next interview was recorded at the national bat conference back in september dr bryany hughes had led a nature writing workshop and afterwards we had a chat about her work So it is day two of the National Black Conference and I've just been on a lovely

[15:16]

Nature Writing and Conservation

Steve Roe

[15:11]workshop outside with the Woodland Writers Studio with Dr Bryony Hughes. So Bryony, just introduce yourself and what you do for the day job.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[15:21]Amazing. Thank you so much for having me. So I am a lecturer in creative writing at Royal Holloway University and I spend my time writing eco-poetry and teaching students about the relationship between literature and the natural world. And recently I've been doing a lot of work on a range of interdisciplinary teams, investigating the role that poetry can play in conservation practice, whether it can promote engagement and whether it can shift opinion as well.

Steve Roe

[15:51]So we've only had a couple of artists on the podcast before and we've had people write bits about poetry or nature writing. Something we don't see very often, is it something that's becoming more common you're finding?

Dr Bryony Hughes

[16:03]I'm unsure about that. I think eco-poetry at the moment is definitely having a moment. People are really interested in shifting the way we write about the natural world, movement away from romantic considerations of landscapes, and thinking about aesthetic appreciation and instead engaging with them critically. Bats, however, slightly different story. At the moment, I know one of a person who's writing about bats. But yeah, essentially I feel like because bats are quite difficult for the general public to access, to encounter, there's less opportunity to write in response, there's less opportunity to know what bat behaviour is like and to kind of have that moment of creativity in response.

Steve Roe

[16:48]You're doing something at the moment called Is Poetry the Answer to Britain's Back Problem? And we all know that the battle lines have been drawn between Rachel Reeves and wildlife conservation organisations. Just tell us about what you're doing in terms of how poetry can be used as a tool to help promote positive stuff.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[17:05]Absolutely. I'm really interested in the idea that poetry, in the way that I teach it, involves a lot of embodiment and experimentation. And I've been using my way of interacting with landscapes as a strategy for promoting feelings of connectivity, and closeness with a species that the general public does not regularly encounter because they're not going outside at nighttime and looking upwards and they don't have their own detector so they're not hearing any of those frequencies.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[17:36]And what I found really, really interesting is that yes.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[17:41]The average person, including myself, cannot handle a bat. However, using writing to inhabit the rhythms and frequencies of the bats or wandering around a woodland, kind of inhabiting the, I don't know, the navigational patterns of bats allows me to feel connected through my body in a way that otherwise would not have been possible. So what I've been doing is partnering with a few different spaces. Most recently it was with Royal Parks where we've been doing an average bat walk with a twist. So heading out into Regent's Park was the last one, taking a whole group of people with us, including people who've been on a bat walk before and have never listened to eco-poetry, people who have never been on a bat walk nor thought about bats for a very long time but are interested in poetry, bringing them together um engaging in some of those creative writing strategies and then listening to the bats before eventually having a moment where i'll read from some of my work and rather than the attention turning towards me at that moment i'm really really keen to ask everybody to turn up their detectors as high as possible um so that i'm performing with the bats so every performance is different it feels to me like a collaboration i don't want to speak for the bats I'm happy for the bats to take over.

Steve Roe

[19:07]Just tell us about your stand here then because you've got a typewriter and you're asking people to type things tell us about this.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[19:12]Yes so my typewriter is my tool for my field work so when I'm writing in response to the bats I will take it up, to the hillside that I tend to work with which is Box Hill in Surrey or I will take it into a woodland and as I'm listening to the bats I try to write poems live, tapping away at the keys in the same rhythms. So I've brought it along today to invite different people who have attended the conference to contribute their own personal experiences, anecdotes, moments of joy with BATS so that I can then create a new collaborative poem that celebrates the community in this space and also BATS as well.

Steve Roe

[20:01]Fantastic. And we've now got an excerpt to play where we've got a recording of one of these BAT walks you've done with your performance. So just introduce that for us.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[20:09]This is a recording taken from a collaborative event that I ran with Cambridge Botanic Garden. I'm reading from my book Speculative Frequencies whilst the Pippastrells are doing their thing and joining in with the performance.

[20:23]

Conclusion and Next Episode

Steve Roe

[20:21]Brilliant. Dr Bryony Hughes, thank you very much.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[20:23]Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Steve Roe

[20:26]Thank you to Bryony for taking the time to speak with me. Next time we'll be taking the podcast Out on the Water with the Bedford-Trabac Group for the final episode of this series. But for now, what better way to leave you with Bryony's piece that she's just introduced. Happy listening.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[20:44]We are multiple. Multiform. Multilateral. Multilevel. Multiferious. We are. Multimedia or we are multi-layered, multi-level, we multi-coloured, we multi-axial, we multi-species, multi-faceted, we are we. Let's begin with a brow. Muzzle terraformed into loose cavities, adjust the receiver and omits signals through the mouth and nostrils, perpendicular, bifunctional, detecting. The moth aches tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, tab.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[21:42]An ancient lineage. This language crowding in the upper tooth row, in the wing, the relative shortness of the forearm. Thread-like, the living bat. Milk-toothed antiquity, lumens of tiny skeletons cave-hunting or haunting. Bats teeth and their meaning. To get the fang. The outermost incisor is often the first to disappear, feed on nectar and deposit the bite, inwards, of strangers and other correspondences, to act as comb, lapping up honey, croup brushings, velvet furred.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[22:37]Breeding habits and young of back. Dormant through winter, lick the wing, wait and emit isolation calls, pulses to be said at night, well furred and eyes open. There will be disproportionate feet, ears will lop over each muzzle, squeak and erupt an ultrasonic pitch. An inky crash, Warm objects, frequent sniffing, clamber, feed.

Megan Price

[23:02]Wean.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[23:09]Where bats hide. The companies of crows and bats pass, troubled by daylight hours, postures and social relation. This is a commotion. I see an outline. Seed strings and a narrow entrance dislodged into a swift cluster Of toes wrapped bodies into a bat-made shelter Fronds of palm and shifting location Notice a house Bats Scramble and squeak behind closed blinds Brick chimney under shingle Unless caverns are dissolved out of limestone onto mouse and chamber, What bat lives by? Juice smeared their light from twigs to reject or devour the distasteful house flies british observers april nights discordant songs late flyers tall grasses parallel clests masticated fragments general lines sub-family soft pulp pineapples villages and independents.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[24:29]Social habits of that. Picture this, a group of small pipistrelles hanging in a tight formation from the ceiling of a shaded porch. The colony begins to stir into din and cluster, from feeding grounds to wall or branch, a study of movement, of migratory performance, and succeeding summers. Complete a survey then, return to the same spot, return to the same spot, return to the same spot, return to the same spot, return to the same spot.

[25:20]

The Poetry of Bats

Dr Bryony Hughes

[25:20]Sound see. Then consider an ion. Three-dimensional forward perception. Uncommon disruption. I can feel it all, exclamation and impossibility. I can taste sound, touch extremities. I see harmonies, in detail, think back.

Dr Bryony Hughes

[25:57]Wings in the dark or hollow-faced broadside membrane. She's as large as a grey squirrel, a mouse, a kitten. Question the cavity of the shoulder blade. Eocene deposits of upper incisor, lower canine back edge, keen or swallowed. Wool of bat into implication and absence of hair and charms banking on a turn showing tail curled under and mouth open. The enemies of bats. Bats have few enemies. Thank you.