Summer Holidays Fly By......

Pond Dipping

With a great many people enjoying their school summer holidays by making a visit to Holkham, our education team here have been busy presenting an array of fun and informative educational activities around the estate & on occasion enjoying a spot of time off after our busy summer term!

There has been a series of Discovery Days held in our fantastic Walled Gardens, with young visitors trying their hands at mini-beast hunting, designing pine cone creatures, making bug houses, biodegradable plant pots & simple birdfeeders, planting beans, sowing seeds & special highlight dissecting owl pellets. Our pond dipping in the lake has once again been very popular with visitors catching an array of wildlife in their nets – the highlight have been baby fish, damsel fly larvae, dragonfly larvae, water boatmen, cased caddis fly larvae and even a water scorpion! Special thanks to our volunteers Gail, Linda & Rose for helping us throughout the summer.

Trailer Tours

Our fabulous new Trailer Tours have proved very popular and the 32-seat trailer, towed by the 7^th Earl’s wonderful old Massey Ferguson 135, has been filled with happy visitors who have enjoyed seeing parts of the estate that are not normally seen by the public. We’ve been sharing their knowledge of the heritage and traditions of Holkham’s farming history, as well the modern, eco-friendly and conservation minded methods of farming today. Visitors on the tours also get an insight into the forestry management here and the farming company’s forward thinking diversification, which now includes the solar farm and the biomass anaerobic digester up at Egmere. A huge vote of thanks must go to our dedicated volunteer tractor drivers, Richard and Mike.

Our Adult Education has continued with our monthly Walking Women group & Guided Walk of the National Nature Reserve both popular. August is an exciting month for us as we also explore the creatures of the night on Bat Walks within the Parkland. Despite some drizzle (you can’t help the British weather!) we’ve managed to see & hear (using bat detectors) Soprano Pipistrelles above our head which has been a magnificent experience for all. Thanks to Keith & Sonya from Norfolk Barbastelle Study Group for their help with leading these.

Behind the scenes we’ve been busy working on developing our Secondary School Programme & our new Exhibition Field to Fork which is opening in April 2106. There’s never a ‘quiet time’ in our job just a different focus to our work!

Sue Penlington Education Officer

Bountiful Butterflies



Peacock butterfly



Seemingly like a lifetime ago, earlier last week the hot, sunny conditions were perfect butterfly and dragonfly weather for Will’s Guided Walk of the National Nature Reserve on Tuesday. The bramble and hemp agrimony flowers proved to be too hard to resist for the dozens of butterflies that were observed, and the dragonflies were out in numbers, skimming the lagoons hunting for food. The group were really were spoilt managing to see: White Admiral, Grayling, Dark Green Fritillary, Comma, Small Copper, Ringlet, Gatekeeper, Peacock, Meadow Brown, Large White and Small White butterflies; d Common Blue and Banded Demoiselle damselflies; Ruddy Darter, Four Spotted Chaser and Black Tailed Skimmer dragonflies.

Our next Guided Walk will leave from Lady Anne’s Drive at 10.00am on Tuesday 18^th August, click here for more information.



Holkham’s Miniature Walled Garden at Holkham Country Fair

The butterfly theme continued on our stall at the biannual Holkham Country Fair as we had a number of activities for our younger visitors including for the really young ones counting the number of butterflies we had hidden in the Holkham Landscape display. How many can you see in the picture above? It was a great opportunity to talk to visitors about the work of the Education Team and also promote the exciting Walled Garden project ‘Beyond the Walls’ which the team will be increasingly involved in in the future.

Across the age ranges!



Spoonbills

As Holkham’s National Nature Reserve has the only breeding colony of Spoonbills in the UK Will and Sue collaborated with our neighbours/colleagues at Cley Norfolk Wildlife Trust (NWT) to present a Spoonbill Workshop for adults in the fabulous new, HLF funded Simon Aspinall Education Centre. A detailed lecture on the ecology, habitats and breeding behaviour of Holkham’s fantastic Spoonbills, complete with ornithological activities and quizzes was followed by a close encounter with the birds, which fly down from Holkham to feed on the scrapes at Cley. The weather was stunning, and delegates were lucky enough to spend time watching 11 Spoonbills, including a number of recently fledged‘teaspoons’.

Woodland Art

On Monday we welcomed 100 eager pupils from Docking Primary School, who enjoyed a fun-filled day of pond dipping, woodland exploring, mini-beast hunting and a deer walk. The rain held off for most of the day and the children enjoyed some excellent views of Fallow Deer bucks and fawns, as well as finding all sorts of mini-beasts, including ladybird larvae, centipedes and woodlice. They also captured an array of awesome aquatic creatures and enjoyed watching the Barnacle Geese and their cute little goslings.

Tuesday was another day filled with learning and lots of fun, as we welcomed 129 Nursery and Reception pupils from Sheringham Community Primary School and Nursery. It was brilliant to have so many parents and carers join them for Woodland Art adventures, a tour of the Hall, pond dipping and games in the Adventure Play Area. The woodland creatures they made were absolutely brilliant and the pond dipping nets were full of fish fry, freshwater hoglice and alderfly nymphs. An action packed day ended with well-deserved ice-creams, before they headed back to school on their coaches, exhausted and happy.

 Will Clennell Education Coordinator

More than just a great day out......

Peterhouse Primary School making scaled 3D maps of Holkham Estate

As our visitors are enjoying their end of term visits we are also enjoying seeing some of the brilliant follow up work that they do back at school. Highlights include Peterhouse Primary making 3D models of Holkham Estate, George White Junior School making a film about their visit & writing blog posts, Northrepps Primary School posting on their blog & tweeting about their visit & some wonderful photos from Gaywood Primary School. Art, Design Technology, English and ICT have all been used in the classroom which is great to see as during the visits we also cover Geography, History, Science, Maths and much more.


We really enjoy seeing your work & photos of your visits so please email is some photos or send us a link to you blog and/or website via either education@holkham.co.uk or via Twitter @Holkham .

Key Stages Four and Five

Wildflower Meadow

Recently we have been delighted to welcome pupils and staff from Gresham’s School for two field study trips on the Holkham Estate. Twenty-eight A Level Biology pupils enjoyed a full day of field study, recording data on both the National Nature Reserve and the estate farmland. Our Education Coordinator, Will, led them on their field work around the sand dunes system and the grazing marshes. Here they observed succession of habitats and the conservation focussed management of the marshes, as well as the diversity of species and the importance of species-specific breeding sites. After a spot of lunch by the estate lake the keen biologists were shown areas of farmland that have been designated for Higher Level Stewardship, with borders and whole meadows of wildflowers being grown to attract pollinators. Transects of the different areas were taken and data recorded using the Simpsons Diversity Index. Later in the afternoon buffer zones and hedgerows were studied, demonstrating the importance that is given to conservation minded approach to farming here at Holkham.



Holkham Bay

43 GCSE geographers also visited us, this time to our National Nature Reserve and were given a talk on sand dunes management and conservation. The psammosere process of succession was investigated and huge amounts of data relating to species diversity, soil pH, inclination (slopes) and wind strength were recorded across the area of embryonic, yellow and grey dunes. It was great to see the pupils at work in what is such a fantastic environment for studying the geography of Norfolk.

We hope to welcome educational visits from many more secondary schools in the future. For more information on our secondary school and higher education programmes please contact us.

Open Farm Sunday

Open Farm Sunday

We were once again blessed with great weather for our annual event Open Farm Sunday. The event is part of a national campaign to educate people about farming and where our food comes from. Highlights of our event were the display of our machinery, sheep shearing, pedal tractors for our younger visitors and tours of our arable fields in our new trailer.

 

Trailer tours

The trailer is pulled by the late 7^th Earl’s first tractor he brought when he returned from South Africa to look after Holkham Estate in 1973. Compared to modern machines and old ploughs you can definitely see how farming has evolved and become a lot more technical.

 

We are very excited to offer our visiting schools the option of taking a trailer tour to learn more about where our food comes from and the crops which Holkham Farming Company grows.

Half Term Fun

Family fun

Tuesday saw glorious weather at Holkham and the park was very busy with visitors, a great many of whom came to learn the art of Pond Dipping from Michaela and Will. Eager young naturalists were soon kitted out with micro-mesh dipping nets, specimen trays, magna-jars and identification keys. After a quick lesson in pond dipping techniques, trays were soon being filled with an array of marvellous aquatic creatures and the children got down to work identifying what they had captured.

In the top layer of water there were thousands of water fleas, a sprinkling of water mites and good numbers of crazy little whirligig beetles. Our visitors were also astonished by the speed and paddling power of the lesser water boatmen.

The middle and bottom layers of the lake held the real monsters of the deep! Lots of blood-sucking leeches were found, amongst them some absolute whoppers. After seeing these, Will decided against going for a lunchtime paddle! Freshwater hoglice, mayfly, alder fly and damselfly nymphs were successfully identified and we also found lots of their casings, which they shed when they move onto the next stage of their lifecycles. One of the most popular critters was the caddis fly larvae, which had built their own little tunnel casing to live safely in while they grew into their winged form and hatch out of the water’s surface. They looked like little remote controlled sticks, creeping around the bottom of the trays.

Our brand new ‘Bug hotel’

Our first Walled Garden Discovery Day continued along the invertebrate theme as younger visitors helped us build the spectacular bug hotel as pictured above. They also went on a minibeast hunt & found lots of invertebrates lurking in the soil & underneath pieces of dead wood including woodlice, worms, ants, centipedes, millipedes and the gardeners’ worst nightmare….slugs!! Our visitors were also very green fingered & made their own plant pots out of newspaper before planting sunflower seeds to watch grow at home.

It was fantastic to see so many visitors enjoying the Hall, Walled Garden, woodland play area, cycle hire, lake activitites and exploring the parkland and beach over the half term. Now we are busy preparing for our busiest school term ever. Fingers crossed the sun shines for us!