Big Ears

First off, apologies for my tardy upkeep of my blip reading and commenting of late. A combination of temporary personal distractions and poor wi-fi coverage whilst away in Bristol, as well as the recent gremlins in blipfoto's own server, has put me days behind. I will try to catch up, but it may take a little time. Bear with.

This is my Friday afternoon photo taken on a slightly circuitous route back home after an afternoon site visit with building and demolition contractors over in Swettenham.

It is a photograph of Sir Bernard Lovell's iconic Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope of 1957, and which is still going strong. The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics is the research centre of the University of Manchester and operates MERLIN, the UK's national radio astronomy facility. I first went there with school in 1970, and today's visit was only the second time since then (unforgivable really).

The link with this and my architectural site for a new-build house is two-fold: firstly it falls within the facilities 6-mile Consultation Zone. This means all the new walls facing the telescope, as well as the roof, will have to have radio frequency screening in-built as a planning condition (I even asked the lady on reception at the Discovery Centre today if I could use my iPhone to photograph the telescope, and she said I had to switch it first to flightsafe mode); second is that there is a requirement as part of the build to demolish parts of an old house, whilst simultaneously rehousing a existing 'maternity roost' colony of 14 common Brown Long-Eared Bats within in a new custom-built extension.

This second link is of course perhaps a tenuous connection, although it does seem an interesting one to make, given Bat navigation through echolocation and (probably) the use of the earths magnetic field as well.

We know it is 14 bats precisely, because we paid some ecology experts to sit outside at dawn and dusk over several nights in the summer, and count them all out, and then count them all back. The extra work involved in their new 'bat cave' has already delayed work by a year, and is likely to add in the region of at least £25,000 to the overall build budget. That is currently £1,785 per bat. God bless the little critters, hope they appreciate all this effort and expense.