Have you ever sat in a 'hide' peering through a slit in the timber wall, looking at some far away bird?

People whispering around you with expensive telescopes, chattering about a sub-species of a bird you've never heard of? Did you feel uncomfortable and reluctant to ask questions in case you made a mistake? Did you leave before you intended to, feeling a little out of place?

In 2012, Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust received a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and started work on designing and building a different kind of place to watch wildlife.

A place where the wildlife comes to you, not the other way around. A place where you are encouraged to ask questions, not be silent. A place where you can bring the whole family to learn and engage with the natural world around you like you never have before. We called this place - the 360 Observatory.

We built it for children and for old people. We built it for both teachers and pupils. We built it for the community to come and volunteer and help us communicate with visitors. We also built it for those expert ornithologists with their expensive binoculars. The 360 Observatory was built, quite specifically, for Everybody.

In the heart of the Dyfi Valley in Mid Wales - the 360 Observatory

Since opening during Easter last year on our Cors Dyfi reserve, almost 50,000 people have visited the 360 Observatory which, at its closest point, is less than 200 metres away from the osprey nest.

On Wednesday we learned that the 360 Observatory had been shortlisted to the Finals of the 2015 National Lottery Awards out of 620 other projects. The winner of the seven shortlisted projects will be decided by a public vote. This is where you come in!

Would you mind voting for us and sharing this blog with your friends? Voting is open until July 29th.

Voting is so simple and is open worldwide. You either ring a 360 Observatory-specific voting number (calls cost a maximum of 5p and once connected you hang up, no need to leave any details etc), or online.

With your help we'll get there. If we win, we receive a £2,000 cash prize which will all go towards our 360 Observatory Wheelchair Lift Fund. We currently have around 60% of the £25,000 we need and hope to build the lift in September or October this year.

When we built the 360 Observatory we managed to get wheelchair users all the way there safely through the wet bogland and swamp on 550m of super-wide boardwalk on stilts made out of recycled materials. We have no electricity however, so installing a lift to the top level was impossible. This will change in just a few weeks.

Reaching for the top..

Here is the video we made for our 2015 National Lottery Awards - we hope you like it.

(Special thanks to our volunteers Vicky and Nigel for the additional GoPro time-lapse and aerial photography - amazing!)