Services
Five things, and they overlap. People come to us for one and usually need two.
01 / 05
Getting people to turn up, say what they actually think, and having it written down in a form that stands up afterwards.
Engagement has a poor reputation because most of it is poor. A notice in a village hall, an evening in February, eleven people, nine of whom came about something else. Then a report saying the community was consulted.
The people who know a place are rarely the ones at the meeting. They are out on it, or at work, or they gave up after the last three consultations changed nothing. Reaching them means going where they already are and asking in a way that does not feel like a form.
We work in Welsh and English throughout. Across much of Wales that is not a courtesy. It is the difference between a polite answer and a useful one.
Walk-and-talk sessions, because people say more moving than sitting. Drop-ins at marts, shows and shops, which is how you reach farmers and older residents who would never fill in anything. Community and town council meetings, attended properly rather than presented at. Schools and youth groups when the brief needs younger voices, which it usually does and rarely gets. And an online option with a map people can click, for anyone who would rather do it at eleven at night.
Range matters more than numbers. Forty responses covering the graziers, the dog walkers, the school run and someone who uses a wheelchair will tell you more than four hundred from one postcode.
Major development in Wales has to go through statutory pre-application consultation before an application is submitted. That comes from the Planning (Wales) Act 2015 and the 2016 amendment to the Development Management Procedure Order, and it catches schemes of ten or more dwellings, sites of half a hectare or more, buildings of 1,000 square metres or more, and sites over a hectare. Community and town councils, ward members and specialist consultees all have to be consulted, and the application has to arrive with a report showing what came back and how it changed the scheme.
We are not planning consultants and will not pretend to be. Your agent handles the legal machinery. We do the part that usually goes thin: getting a real response out of a community instead of four objections from the same three addresses, and giving you something defensible to put in the consultation report.
Worth saying plainly, because it decides whether you want us. We run it straight. If the feedback is hostile you get it as it came. A consultation report written like a press release is worth nothing at committee, and everybody in the room can tell.
Local authorities in Wales have to map, consult on and periodically resubmit Active Travel Network Maps, and to keep a Rights of Way Improvement Plan alongside them. Both need the same raw material: local knowledge about where people walk now, what stops them, and which desire line has been ignored for twenty years.
This is where the engagement and the survey work meet, and it is the thing we are best placed to do. We can gather it in the community, then go and walk the routes people named to check whether they are usable, and hand the whole lot back mapped rather than as a list of comments somebody else has to interpret.
A written report setting out the method, who was reached, who was not and why that matters, what was said, and what we would do about it. Mapped wherever the feedback is spatial. Quotes attributed by group rather than by name, unless the person is happy to be named.
Written to go into a planning submission, a funding bid, a committee paper or a Well-being of Future Generations involvement record without being rewritten first.
02 / 05
Walking routes checked on the ground and written up the same way every time.
Somebody has to walk it. That's the whole basis of this: a route is surveyed by walking it, in the direction people will use it, noting what's there rather than what the definitive map says should be there.
What comes back is a consistent record. Distance and ascent from GPS rather than estimate. Surface and terrain. Every stile, gate, footbridge and road crossing. Parking, including how many cars it realistically holds and whether you'll annoy a farmer. Public transport if there is any. Livestock and dog notes. Photographs at the points where people get lost.
You also get the bad news, which is often the useful part. A defects list of blocked paths, missing waymarks, collapsed stiles and unsafe crossings, referenced and photographed, in a form your rights of way officer can act on.
03 / 05
Desk research and fieldwork, written plainly, with the sources named.
Archive work, published archaeology, the historic environment record, old mapping, and then going and looking at the thing. Written up for people who are interested rather than for a committee that already knows.
Every piece carries its sources. Where the evidence is thin we say the evidence is thin, and where a well-loved local story doesn't survive contact with the record we say that as well, politely. It's a slower way of working and it produces material you can defend when somebody challenges it.
Output can be articles, interpretation panel copy, leaflet and trail text, a sourced research file for your own use, or a set of pages that slot into a website you already have.
04 / 05
Static sites that load fast, work offline, and don't need a monthly subscription to stay alive.
A lot of small Welsh organisations are paying somewhere between forty and a hundred pounds a month for a website that was built once, has never been updated, and breaks when a plugin expires. We build the other kind.
Static sites: pages built in advance and served as plain files. Nothing to hack, nothing to update, hosting that's usually free at the volumes a community organisation actually gets. They load on a two-bar connection and they can be made to work with no connection at all, installed to a phone like an app.
Bilingual is built in rather than bolted on, with Welsh and English as equal versions, proper language tagging so search engines serve the right one, and a translation workflow your own translator can use without touching any code. Built to WCAG 2.2 AA, which public bodies increasingly have to ask for.
You get the source files. If you stop working with us, the site keeps running and someone else can pick it up.
05 / 05
Group walks in the Powys hills, led by a qualified Mountain Leader.
Led walks for groups, from a flat two miles beside a lake to a full day on Bannau Brycheiniog. The point is usually confidence rather than distance. Most people who say they don't walk mean they don't know where to start, aren't sure what to wear, and don't fancy finding out in front of strangers.
We run open group walks and we run them to order: community walking programmes, staff days, volunteer thank-yous, walks built around a heritage theme so the history and the ground arrive together.
Risk assessments, weather calls and route choices are ours. If conditions say no, we say no, which is occasionally unpopular and always right.
Sectors
Three broad groups. The work overlaps more than you would expect, and mostly it is the paperwork at the end that differs.
County councils, and specifically their rights of way, active travel and countryside teams. Town and community councils. National park and National Landscape staff. Natural Resources Wales. Health boards running social prescribing and green prescription schemes.
Also any body with a duty under the Well-being of Future Generations Act that needs involvement evidenced rather than asserted.
Housing and commercial developers, and the planning agents acting for them. Renewable energy and grid projects, which rural Wales gets a great many of and which need real consultation rather than an exhibition in a portacabin nobody visits.
Estates and land managers. Farm diversification schemes. Tourism operators who want walks from their own door that do not send guests half a mile down a B road.
Charities and trusts. Community groups, sports clubs and town partnerships. Lottery and Welsh Government funded projects that need a delivery partner named in the bid.
We are used to working to a funder's reporting requirements, and to still being there at the evaluation stage rather than having moved on.
An email describing the problem. A conversation, usually on the phone, where we work out whether there's a piece of work in it and whether we're the right people. A written proposal with a price and a date, so you know what you're committing to. Then the work, with something to look at partway through rather than a silence followed by a reveal.
We're not the cheapest and we're not the biggest. What we are is finished on time and honest about what we found, including when what we found is inconvenient.
There is no rate card, because a two-mile riverside circuit and a fifteen-mile upland horseshoe are not the same job even though both are one walk. Tell us the scale and we will give you a fixed price rather than a day rate that drifts.
We are used to working to a funder's reporting requirements. If you are mid-application and need a delivery partner named in the bid, talk to us before you submit rather than after.
Working with us
Most of our work starts with someone describing a problem rather than a project. A community that has stopped answering consultations. A path nobody can find. A leaflet ten years out of date. A stretch of ground people do not feel confident going onto. Start there and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.