‘I can’t recommend Jo highly enough! She is enthusiastic, creative, original and with a great sense of humour. The Threave Bat Reserve would not have been as successful as it is without the quality of her input.’
Lindsay Mackinlay, NTS Nature Conservation Adviser
The brief for this project was to provide a layer of interpretation across Threave Garden and Estate to interpret and promote it’s new role as Scotland’s first Bat Reserve. The star of the project, an exhibition trailer known as ‘the Batmobile’ has become a real hit, and is always busy with families and kids.
The project’s aims were to share the conservation work that the NTS countryside team carry out, and to bust some of the common myths about bats. There were quite a few challenges here, firstly in that there was no fixed space where we could mount an exhibition. And this sparked Jo’s idea for a batmobile!
Bats are notoriously difficult to see, and for conservation purposes the client didn’t want to make their roosts known so we chose solutions that give people fun and rewarding learning experiences in spite of this.
I also felt that this was a great opportunity to try and connect with less typical NTS audiences i.e. young people, so the design brief was always to be bold and colourful and draw from popular culture. The project has been added to over the years but the basic elements ended up as follows:
The batmobile – a mobile exhibition trailer which can be places at different parts of the site and gets taken out to community and wildlife events. It includes ambient sound and interactivity through push button recordings to hear the songs or sounds of different bats.
A glow in the dark bat trail – a leaflet (with dispensers) and waymarked trails pointing out some typical bat habitats and what to listen out for (visitors can also hire bat detectors from the visitor centre).
Bat sculptures – realistic models of bats, and stones inscribed with bat shapes and translations of the word bat in different languages were placed in some key sites around the garden to provide a bit of additional interest and things to look for.
The bat house – this final element (2016) was a layer of interpretation sharing with visitors some of the signs to look out for within your own house.
Working with Lindsay Mackinlay and the team at Threave
Design by Steve Kirkpatrick, formerly Weesleekit
Sculptures by Old School Fabrications
Trailer purchased from Towmaster
Production by Elevation Design
