Case study
Private Energy Partners – Mallard Pass
A pre-construction record of every field boundary on a new 2,000-acre solar scheme, called Mallard Pass — flown in two days, located by the aircraft’s own telemetry, and delivered as six landowner reports and thirty-three field films.
- Client
- Private Energy Partners
- Sector
- Solar
- Location
- Rutland & Lincolnshire
- When
- August 2026
- What we flew
- 54 Fields, 2000 Acres
- What we delivered
- Hedgerow Schedule of Condition Report ready for Solar Panel installation
The brief
Private Energy Partners are bringing forward a solar scheme on the Rutland and Lincolnshire border: fifty-two fields, roughly two thousand acres, held across six separate landholdings. Before a scheme of that size moves into construction, the condition of every field boundary has to be fixed on the record as it stands.
Hedgerows are protected. They are also, reliably, the thing that gets argued about once machinery arrives on a site — a gap that was always there, a length of hedge that was thin before anyone laid a cable, a tree with dead limbs that nobody wants to have felled. What did this boundary look like before you started? is a question that is close to impossible to answer retrospectively and entirely straightforward to answer in advance.
A Schedule of Condition is that answer: a dated, evidenced description of each boundary at a fixed point in time. It protects the developer against claims for damage that predates them, and it protects the landowner by recording exactly what is being handed over.
The conventional way to produce one is to walk it. Across two thousand acres and six holdings that is weeks of work, much of it spent looking at a hedge from one side only, at eye level, through the hedge itself. Flying it takes two days, and shows both faces of every boundary, the margins either side, and the relationship between the boundary and whatever sits behind it — a substation, a railway line, a farmyard, a pond.
The difficulty is not the flying. It is that two days of flying produces ninety-three files named DJI_20260817192534_0051_D.MP4 and nothing whatsoever to say which field any of them shows.
Two days in the air, and everything that has to happen afterwards
Two survey visits, in July and August 2026, covering all six holdings: ninety-three flight runs, 107 minutes of 4K footage, and a set of georeferenced stills. The work after that divided into three parts.
What we did
Locating the footage
DJI aircraft write a positional stream into the video file alongside the picture. We pulled it out of all ninety-three clips and all twenty-four stills, which gives a per-second flight track for every run — where the aircraft was, which way it was pointing, how fast it was moving. One detail mattered more than it ought to: the two aircraft used store their coordinates in different units, one in degrees and one in radians. A run decoded on the wrong assumption lands several hundred miles away, quietly, without raising an error.
Tying it to the scheme plan
The client’s field plan carried no survey control points. Rather than guess at a fit, we registered the plan against the flight tracks themselves, then matched every mapped parcel to its numbered field by area and position, constrained by who owns what. Field identity is the one part of this record that rests on inference rather than direct observation, so every reference is issued as a proposal alongside a verification panel — the surveyor confirms it against the plan rather than taking it on trust, and the one field whose position could not be established from the footage is flagged as low confidence in the report itself.
Reading the boundaries
With every second of footage attributed to a field and a compass side, each boundary was described under three headings: condition summary; gaps, breaks and access points; notable features or defects. Descriptive only — no condition grade, no species identification, and no determination under the Hedgerow Regulations 1997. Those are judgements for a surveyor to make and sign, not for a process to manufacture.
From the job
The outcome
Six reports, thirty-three films, and four findings that changed the conversation
Thirty-three of the fifty-two scheduled fields carried footage and are recorded at field and boundary-section level. Nineteen do not: eighteen sit outside the PV case area and were never intended to be flown. One does, and is named in the delivery note as the gap it is, rather than quietly omitted.
Each landowner received their own report — scope, methodology, a landscape field register, findings and condition notes, and limitations — so no landholder is handed a document about their neighbour’s land.
That spread is itself the most useful thing in the record. The estate does not carry one kind of boundary, it carries four, and several boundaries change character along their own length. A single Good / Fair / Poor scale would flatten all of that — so the report says so, and recommends boundary type be recorded alongside any grade.
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