Appendix 1: Interview with Morgan Ravine, Reserve Manager at Lizard National Nature Reserve. 25

with that land and are often tasked with maintaining the current state of the habitat or improving it to favourable status.

What are your views on natural and cultural heritage, and the funding allocated to them?

“I’m unsure as to funding on cultural heritage personally as it’s not something I’ve dealt with yet as an NE employee. I’ve welcomed the increased NNR budgets this year in line with the governments Environment Bill and supposed greener ambitions… That has been very welcome but in my role I’m obviously a bit biased – more is needed for both cultural and natural heritage as going forward, looking after both is vital and will only help with increasing the public’s connection with the natural environment which is really what we should be trying to achieve.

Appendix 2: Interview with Sara Bowler and Lizzy Masterton from Goonhilly Village Green Project:

So, how did the Goonhilly Village Green project come about, what inspired you both to start it?

“Sara Bowler, (artist and Co-Director of Goonhilly Village Green) and I began working together on Goonhilly in 2006-7 when we developed what became a series of artist-led events called Happidrome (https://happidrome.wordpress.com). At that time, Natural England, who manage the National Nature Reserve on Goonhilly, had been tasked by Government to get more people exercising on their sites! So they were very open to public facing activities.

Beginning with the first event in 2007, Happidrome grew into a series of four between 2007-10, organised around slightly different models, some were open events, others more to do with artists testing new works in response to the site or representing work in a new context. All of them utilised the old RAF Drytree radar buildings, with the main space being the ‘Happidrome’ , the large radar receiver block. ‘Happidrome’ was what that building was called locally. I did a lot of historical research into the site and discovered that the name was in fact mis-applied; ‘Happidrome’ was a RAF nickname given to a different type of radar building which we think was in existence at RAF Treleaver down the road. However, we liked that that this fact had been colloquially blurred and redrawn through time and the name stuck. Goonhilly Village Green grew out of our experience of producing the Happidrome events and our continuing fascination with the site as we discovered more and more about it through our research and meeting people connected with the land.

The inspiration for Goonhilly Village Green came about through our connection with what is now the Goonhilly Heritage Society, a band of ex-British Telecom employees who had worked at Goonhilly Earth Station in the pioneering days of the early satellite experiments and wanted to share its technological, cultural and social history with others. The Earth Station back in the 1970s and 1980s was a real community within a community, with strong social bonds. On the site is what was the old sports field, where employees and their families used to gather for sports and social events. Amidst the rough heathland, it stands out as a perfect green sward, reminiscent of an archetypal village green. We thought how surreal and wonderful that was in this place which over 3000 years had pretty much resisted all attempts at human habitation. And so the idea of Goonhilly Village Green was born, a transient community which would only exist for a day, drawn to the locus of the Village Green (for security reasons, we weren’t able to use the BT field so our Village Green was an area of flat ground behind the Happidrome

which was prepared for us by Natural England). Although Goonhilly has no village, it did used to be common land, with the rights that that entails for common benefit. At some point, as these rights were no longer exercised by commoners, the commons was cancelled and right reverted to the landowner. The Village Green was a gentle exercise in bringing people back to that once common land.

What were your outcomes whilst doing it - were you there to inspire people into conservation of Goonhilly Downs, teach people about the downs or was it just merely for art?

“Initially, during Happidrome, we were just blown away by the surreal and sublime nature of the place and it’s potential as a site of artistic investigation. The more we found out about the site and its many human and non-human narratives, we realised what a unique location it was and that we wanted to share that with other people and find out about their understanding of Goonhilly. At the heart of Goonhilly Village Green was this generous and inclusive reading of place, based on the free sharing of knowledge. We realised that the scientist and academics conducting experiments there had a different ‘knowing’ of Goonhilly than someone walking their dog there every day, but that both experiences were equal parts of the narrative. In 2014 in preparation for the Pilot event, we were residents of the University of Exeter Environment and Sustainability Institute’s Creative Exchange programme which sought to bring about new creative collaborations between academics and artists. Our primary collaborator was Dr Caitlin Desilvey, now Director of Transdisciplinary Research at U of Exeter, whose research encompassing transitional places in a state of material change resonated strongly with Goonhilly.

There were two iterations of GVG, in 2015 and 2019. The first was a Pilot event which enabled us to test the format and begin to build relationships for the second event in 2019, which was more ambitious in terms of programming and included a Community Heritage Programme of talks, workshops and activities in the months leading up to the event. There were also 6 artists placed with local host organisations who produced new commissioned works. Both events had a two day format; the first day was a dedicated outdoor learning day on site for local primary school children, followed by a free public event the following day featuring artworks, talks, screenings, activities and performances. We collaborated with creative producers Field Notes to produce and deliver both events. Both events were funded by Arts Council England and in 2019 we also received funding from Heritage Lottery Fund, The Ernest Cook Trust, FEAST and the Elmgrant Trust, with support in kind from many local organisations and businesses. Fundraising was a huge and laborious task.

Although the events were small (around 500 people on site throughout the day of the 2019 event, I think) we were absolutely astonished by people’s enthusiasm for the site. Some had never visited Goonhilly before, others not for many decades. I think it is fair to say that those who have a special interest in the site notwithstanding, Goonhilly is a place that general visitors generally traverse at speed, in keeping with its folk history as

a dangerous, desolate place of vagabonds and spirits. Our visitors ranged in age from under 1 to over 80. We had a number of student volunteers from Falmouth University. One of my favourite moments from the Pilot event was seeing the BT retirees absorbed in an experimental film about musique concrète in the Happidrome. Some of them had worked in the Earth Station for 40 years and did not know that the building existed, having never explored ‘beyond the wire’ during their working lives. A special and symbolic moment for the project was permission for the unlocking of the perimeter fence between the Earth Station and the Nature Reserve, allowing visitors to freely move between sites, which had not been possible since 1959.

Did you face any challenges whilst doing it there?

“There were many many challenges! We had to be mindful of the environmental sensitivity of the Nature Reserve, in terms of visitor access and numbers and timing of the events; for example we had to plan our events around the horseshoe bat nesting season. Risk assessment included items like ‘adders’ , which most events don’t have to contend with. Much of the Earth Station site we were allowed to access was in disrepair and had to be cordoned off. Accessibility for visitors was another consideration as much of the Nature Reserve is not wheelchair or buggy friendly, though Natural England have created some accessible paths over the years. The Nature Reserve is completely off grid, so for the screenings in the Happidrome we had to bring our own power supply, which in GVG 2019 was supplied by a local renewable energy battery company (for Happidrome 4, power was supplied by an experimental mobile renewable energy unit commissioned by us and designed by a University of Exeter student, who subsequently went on to produce them for the MoD) Visitor parking was also a difficulty and we did agonise about how best to get visitors to site in the absence of a reliable public bus service.

And do you have plans to do any future ones - or has the pandemic halted any future village greens?

“GVG 2015 was our Pilot event and a test for the main event in 2019. We have no plans to stage another Village Green event but we were so enthused by people’s desire for us to do so. I think there was an expectation that it would be an annual event but we have no desire to be festival organisers! The success of the events was that although they had a relaxed, festival like atmosphere, they were intimate and people had the space and time to explore at their own pace and for Goonhilly to work it’s magic; we were very careful not to over program the days for this reason and we were very mindful of the ecological sensitivity of the site with increased numbers of visitors. We hope the legacy of Goonhilly Village Green is that more people now know what a unique and special

place Goonhilly is, that they were inspired to continue to experience and enjoy it and to recognise its ecological and intangible heritage value. We have compiled our own learning on the project website in ‘The Goonhilly Chronicle’ section, for future researchers.

Sara and I do plan to revisit the Happidrome model, with the learning we now have from producing GVG but this is in very early planning and there won’t be any public facing activities in the short term.

I've noticed that during the project, the old WW2 station was opened up. Do you think it should always be opened to gain more attraction to Goonhilly Downs?

“The R-block is an attraction, of sorts, because of its size and the fact it is relatively intact. I think it sometimes gets broken into and used for raves! Over the years that we have worked with Natural England there have been a number of propositions for what it could be used for and if it could be ungated but I think all of them have come up against health and safety, cost and access issues, things we have have to address when we had used the building for events e.g escorting visitors by torchlight to prevent trip hazards, the list goes on! The main safety issue is the roof which I think is structurally unsound in part (in the area which is fenced off). It is an incredibly intriguing building, in part because it seems so alien and mysterious. I did once have the privilege to meet an ex-WAAF, aged 81, who was stationed in that building aged 18 and had a photographic memory of how it was all fitted out with the radar equipment and her working life there. So there is the story of human use and now its continuing non human story as the building is reclaimed by nature, the story of insects, bats, swallows, lichens, ferns. I don’t think that opening the building itself would bring more general public to the Downs unless there was a more definitive proposition for its use i.e some kind of visitor centre and that would destroy its essential mutability, which is what makes its so alluring now.

What do you think could be done to improve visitor attraction to Goonhilly Downs? If you even think there should be!..

“Goonhilly is never going to have mass appeal and that’s what makes it so special. It is too bleak for many, the weather is frequently harsh and the walking away from the main paths is hard going. There are also currently no visitor facilities (though I did see Natural England installing a new picnic bench by the car park recently). BT used to have a wonderfully cheesy Visitor Centre on the Earth Station which told the story of its telecommunications heritage and because the dishes physically dominate the Downs, that seemed to be the only story in town. What we wanted to do with Goonhilly Village Green was to tell some of the other stories of the Downs. In 2010, for Happidrome 4, Sara created a scale model of the Downs out of locally dug soil and vegetation onto which she added models of all the human activity she’d discovered during her research. It spanned several thousand years, from placing the Neolithic Drytree Standing Stone to