Two months into our internship already! How time flies. After a brief period getting settled into our various regional offices (and a fascinating trip to Scarborough for the excellent REMEMARE conference for a few of us), all of us interns managed to come together for the first time in London for a week of training at The Crown Estate Offices. It was wonderful to meet everyone properly, and I look forward immeasurably to meeting up again in Cumbria for the halfway presentations next month!

Our week in London absolutely flew by. The staff at the Crown Estate were all incredibly friendly and welcoming, and we undertook a range of activities; from work-related tasks such as Excel training, mock marine development exercises, and attending the Shellfish Association of Great Britain’s annual conference (all the speakers we saw were brilliant, no-one “clammed-up” on stage (sorry)); to more social activities such as the superb annual TCE Quest, which took us on a treasure hunt around central London (particularly enjoyable for an amateur history buff such as myself!). It was great to get a peek behind the curtain at how an organization like The Crown Estate operates, and for those like me who come from the back of beyond, London truly does feel like another world!

Since then, those of us on the Welsh internships had an opportunity to visit The Crown Estate’s (almost) brand new office in Cardiff, which was a fantastic opportunity to get a more Welsh perspective on The Crown Estate’s activities. Across all our home regions, we’ve also been hard at work on our various projects and additional work for our respective Trust offices. To give just a few examples; down in the South East, Lydia and Daniel assessed Biodiversity Net Gain and performed Preliminary Ecological Assessments using locally collected mud samples, in addition to completing small fish surveys; up in the North East, Mona and George surveyed for birds and invertebrates at Horseshoe Point; over in the North West, Alice and Rupli performed surveys at Walney Offshore Windfarm, contributing to the ongoing monitoring of its Kittiwake colony; nearby in South Wales, Sophie and Arwen met stakeholders to obtain advice and permissions for the installation of Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers in a nearby marine energy test area; and finally, here in North Wales, Amy and myself headed out with Natural Resources Wales to perform an intertidal quadrat survey at the beautiful Traeth Lafan (under the shadow of an eclipse, no less!).

Looking back over the last two months, it’s truly incredible how much fantastic stuff we’ve managed to fit in. I’m certain the next four will be no less of an adventure!

Siôn D’Arcy