CASE STUDY

That responsibility spans almost 500 years of history and a modern operational environment made up of varied assets, teams and records. Charlie Exley, assistant agent for Burghley Estate, knows all too well the scale and variety involved.

“So, it’s a large, landed estate,” Charlie tells us. “Comprised of a main house and visitor enterprise with gardens, playground, grounds, as well as livestock enterprises with deer and sheep, large agricultural holdings that are tenanted out, grazing, forestry, commercial and residential property.” Put simply, Charlie says: “It’s massive.”

That scale, and the long list of assets to understand, maintain and record, means the estate’s operational picture is not a simple one. Beyond the main stately home and wider landscape are the more granular assets Charlie and the team manage day to day: “fencing, benches, bins, stone walls, trees, septic tanks—there’s everything you’d expect and more.”

For a team responsible for land, property and public access, accurate spatial data underpins safety, inspection, reporting and long-term estate management.

The challenge

As part of their move towards more reliable digital estate records, Charlie and the Burghley Estate team had recently opted into an ArcGIS environment, using ArcGIS Field Maps on mobile phones to capture and visualise information across the estate.

They had a clear operational need, as Charlie explains: “We have quite a high need for mapping and visualising data on the scale that we’re operating on. Our previous mapping software we just felt was old, clunky, unreliable and not really giving us what we wanted.”

But while Field Maps gave the estate a modern mobile GIS workflow, phone-based GPS was not accurate enough for some of the assets and inspections the team needed to manage.

“Essentially, we came to MGISS just to increase the accuracy of the data we were able to collect with ArcGIS Field Maps,” Charlie says. “We’d recently got set up with ArcGIS and using Field Maps on our phones, but when we had low signal, we were just struggling to get high levels of accuracy.”

For the team, the issue was particularly significant during tree surveys. In open space, a few metres of inaccuracy can be inconvenient. But under tree canopy, across rows of trees or publicly accessed areas, that uncertainty quickly becomes problematic.

“When we had low signal, we were just struggling to get high levels of accuracy,” Charlie explains. “When we were doing tree surveys, and you’ve got trees in a row of maybe a 10-metre line, but the points are 5 or 10 metres off, it’s not really helpful or usable data.”
For Charlie and his team, the data being captured was not simply a one-off exercise. In estates like Burghley, or other environmental and public settings, tree surveys and other inspections are revisited regularly, meaning accuracy and consistency matter over time and across different users.

“It’s necessary for reliable and usable data moving forward,” Charlie explains. “For these tree surveys, for instance, this is something that will be revisited each year on an annual basis. It’s just important to get those points as close to where they are in reality as possible, because it might not always be the same person doing it.”

That consistency is especially important for a live estate that includes public access, heritage assets, visitor facilities and operational infrastructure. Data collected in the field forms part of the estate’s records and informs reports presented to trustees. It also plays a significant role in safety.

“Largely, it’s just to form part of our records and understand what we’ve got and where we’ve got it,” Charlie elaborates. “It also forms part of reports that we present to trustees and a really large part of it is health and safety. A lot of the areas we’re capturing data in are publicly accessed areas. So, we need to always be aware of the condition of these trees and septic tanks and other such assets.”

Inaccurate or unreliable data can make that harder. For assets such as trees, septic tanks and buried services, knowing exactly where something is—and being able to trust that record later—supports safer decisions and better estate management.

“Any kind of failure on the asset,” Charlie continues, “like a tree branch falling, a septic tank lid caving in—there’s ultimately a risk, especially to the public. So that would be the main risk of not having this data, or not plotting it accurately.”

The solution

It was time for Charlie and the Burghley team to find a solution. “I just started looking around,” Charlie says, “spoke to some colleagues and people in similar industries and found the Skadi, and then found that you guys were the best retailers in the UK for it.”

The Skadi 100 GNSS receiver was selected to support high-accuracy data capture within Burghley’s existing ArcGIS Field Maps workflow. Rather than replacing the way the team wanted to work, the device strengthened it, giving users a more reliable way to capture field data where phone GPS alone was not accurate, consistent or reliable enough.

For Charlie, the move has been smooth. “We’ve already used it a fair bit,” he tells us. “Having gone through the setup with one of the MGISS team, I found it really, really straightforward and easy to use. It’s reliable and sturdy, so really, really happy with how that’s going.”

The interoperability between Skadi and ArcGIS Field Maps has also been a major benefit for the Burghley Estate team. Having already adopted ArcGIS, the device needed to fit cleanly into the workflow rather than adding complexity.

“It’s been seamless,” Charlie agrees. “It’s exactly the same as plotting on the phone, except it’s just way more accurate. So, I’ve found it really well integrated.”

For Burghley, this simplicity is key, so that the team can focus on the accuracy and reliability that was missing in their previous workflow. For tree surveys, annual inspections and asset records, precision supports the all-important confidence needed in the data being captured.
As Charlie says, “It’s for assets where we need that really high level of accuracy and reliability.”

The result

Although still relatively early in its deployment, the Skadi 100 is already improving much-needed reliability for Burghley’s field data.

“Confidence has increased as well,” Charlie explains. “You’re not plotting a point thinking, ‘is that where it should be?’ You just crack on, really.”

That confidence also creates practical time-saving benefits.

“It speeds the process up a lot,” Charlie says. “You’re not waiting for signals to connect and having to re-plot points if they’re not in the same place, or sometimes even manually dragging the point if you know it’s plotting in the wrong place. So yeah, definitely a time saver.”
While formal reports are still developing, the device is already supporting the future of estate management for Charlie and his team, especially when it comes to repeatable survey workflows.
“We’ve created a few maps, and it’s essentially a framework for surveys moving forward,” he tells us. “So annual inspections and that sort of thing.”

One of the most promising future uses is capturing new assets as they are installed. “The main other use which I think we’re really looking forward to exploiting is when we have new utilities and services installed,” Charlie explains. “So, when water mains or gas mains or fibre is being installed in real time, we can just walk behind and plot it exactly where it is. Then we know for future reference that that is a true record of where that’s been sited, which again just relates back to the importance of health and safety on site.”

This is where the value of accurate field capture becomes particularly clear. Instead of relying on uncertain records, memory or post-event interpretation, Burghley can capture asset information as it happens and bring it directly into the GIS environment.

For a historic estate operating as a modern, public-facing site, this creates a stronger foundation for maintenance, safety and long-term asset confidence, plus the knowledge that the data captured is ensuring a trusted, actionable workflow.

As Charlie concludes: “Having access and being able to use the Skadi has increased the accuracy of the data that we’re capturing exponentially.”

For MGISS, the Burghley Estate project demonstrates the role high-accuracy field capture can play in modern estate management. By pairing the Skadi 100 with ArcGIS Field Maps, Burghley is improving the accuracy of its asset records, reducing uncertainty in the field and building a more reliable spatial framework for future inspections, services and operational decisions.