Life on Vera island is far from murder for rangers
Reporter LAST week’s episode of Vera saw the detective donning her trusty raincoat to head to a remote Northumberland island, where a young conservation officer had washed up dead on the beach.
Although the name may have been fictional, the setting of ‘Ternstone Island’ looked pretty familiar to those who’ve traded the 9-5 to work on the very real Farne Islands.
The remote archipelago, off the coast of Northumberland, is protected by the National Trust as a home for seals and seabirds, and it’s the Farne Islands rangers who care for the landscape, and its visitors, for nine months of the year.
We sat down with ranger Sarah Lawrence after she’d watched the episode, to see what she and her colleagues thought.
The whole team really enjoyed it – some of us were here last summer when the film crew were around the islands, so it was great to see how the filming translated on to TV – and comparing our own daily lives to those of the fictional rangers!
Like many people watching in the area, we had great fun trying to piece together all the locations shown around ‘Ternstone Island’ ... The Farnes’ Longstone Island and lighthouse featured several times, as well as the fantastic cliffs of Staple Island, lined with thousands of guillemots.
There was definitely some artistic license, but many of the elements shown are similar to our daily lives on the islands.
The programme showed a ranger researching Arctic terns, and a lot of our time during the summer months is spent monitoring our thousands of nesting seabirds.
In real life, we are surrounded by many more birds than rangers on the programme, and since we only get to shower once a The 2017 ranger team on moving day returning to the Islands for the season