Exmoor does not look after itself.
Behind the sweeping moorland, the ancient oak woodlands, the red deer on the skyline and the wild ponies on the hill, there are people whose quiet, daily work makes it all possible. Charlotte Wray is one of them. As a Ranger with Exmoor National Park, she is part of the small team responsible for the stewardship of one of England's great wild places - out in all weathers, on foot and by Land Rover, fixing what needs fixing, protecting what needs protecting, and helping one of the country's most extraordinary landscapes stay that way.
She has been doing it for nearly eight years, and she still can't quite believe her luck.
It wasn't always this way. Before Exmoor, Charlotte spent her twenties as an editor of scientific journals for the Royal Society in London. At 27, she made what she cheerfully describes as a fairly significant career change - trading the desk for a Land Rover, the monitor for a muddy boot, and the city for the open moor. She hasn't looked back.
No two days the same
Ask Charlotte what a typical day looks like as an Exmoor Ranger, and she'll tell you straight: there isn't one.
One week she might be helping with the annual Exmoor pony roundup. The next, she's in a meeting with the National Trust about access issues, running a rockpooling session with schoolchildren, or driving across to Dartmoor to collect Pine Marten pens. The ranger role, she explains, is deeply reactive, plans exist to be dropped when something more urgent needs attention, whether that's a safety issue on a right of way or a pony that needs checking on.
The seasons shape the rhythm of it. Summer brings engagement work - pop-up events with the park's trailer, guided walks, seed collection for the meadows project. Autumn and winter mean path surveys, deer counts and the pony roundup that has become one of the highlights of her year. Through all of it, the Exmoor weather makes its presence felt.
"As a ranger you don't have a choice about whether to be out in the rain or snow — you just need to get things done."
With climate change making conditions increasingly unpredictable, Charlotte has taken to keeping what she calls a small wardrobe in the back of her Land Rover. As long as she's prepared, she says, the weather doesn't bother her. Some days she positively prefers being out in the rain - it makes coming home to the woodburner all the more rewarding.
What the moor demands of what you wear
Exmoor is not gentle on clothing. The national park sits in one of the wettest parts of England, its high moorland catching weather rolling in off the Bristol Channel with little to slow it down. A ranger covering the park on foot and by vehicle, in every season and every condition, needs kit that simply works - smart enough to represent the park at a public event, tough enough to survive a full day of physical work in horizontal rain.
The Exmoor ranger team now wear Woolf PureFleece® as part of their working kit - and its reception has taken on a life of its own.
"Every time one of us wears our Woolf fleece, someone comments on how nice it is - it's getting to be a bit of a running joke in the office."
Even Charlotte's seven-year-old son has put in a request for one.
The appeal, she says, goes beyond how it looks. The PureFleece® has kept her genuinely warmer through a chilly winter, without the clammy, overheated feeling that synthetic layers can bring. As a keen knitter who wears a lot of woollen jumpers in her own time, Charlotte came to merino with an instinctive appreciation for what natural fibres do that polyester simply doesn't.
"Definitely less sweaty, and I'm really enjoying being able to wear wool at work too."
Notably, she hasn't needed to wash it, a quality that matters practically in a role that doesn't always make laundry straightforward, and one that merino delivers through its natural resistance to odour rather than through chemical treatment.
Making a tangible difference
For all the variety and the fresh air, what drives Charlotte most is the sense that her work is genuinely moving the needle for Exmoor's wildlife.
The meadows project has been a particular highlight, improving the abundance of species-rich grassland across the landscape, with real benefits for pollinators that she can see season by season. But the project that has captured the imagination most is still unfolding.
In October 2025, nineteen Pine Martens were released on Exmoor, the culmination of years of careful planning, partnership work and patient logistics. For Charlotte and her colleagues, the work is now entering its most hopeful phase: monitoring the animals through radio tracking and trail cameras, watching and waiting for signs that the species is settling into its ancient home.
"We are continuing to monitor them in the hopes of seeing the first kits born in the Exmoor landscape in hundreds of years."
It is a sentence worth pausing on. Hundreds of years. The return of a native predator to one of England's great wild places, and a ranger team out on the moor quietly doing the work to make it happen.
That is, in the end, what stewardship looks like - patient, practical, unglamorous in its detail, and occasionally, thrillingly, transformative in its effect.
Charlotte Wray is a Ranger with Exmoor National Park, where she works across habitat management, rights of way, wildlife monitoring and public engagement. Find out more about Exmoor National Park at exmoor-nationalpark.gov.uk