Around the turn of the century, she began working as a sports journalist and press photographer for various London newspapers;[4] she lived an unconventional lifestyle for the period; smoking, wearing trousers, hunting, shooting, and fishing.

Tobercorran was the family house in Carnmoney, and was located on Glebe Road West, just north of Belfast where Bland and her father moved in with her aunt Sarah.

She studied the measurements of the monoplane during the first official aviation meeting held in Blackpool in 1909,[2] and added her own thoughts into the design of her plane, the Mayfly.

[7] Her late uncle, General William James Smythe, an astronomer and member of the Royal Society, provided a house with a workshop.

After some background reading on the Wright brothers, and becoming inspired by their achievements, Bland successfully built a flyable model biplane with a wing span of six feet.

[7] While perching on a canvas open-air seat, she manipulated controls to maintain the flight in balance after running forward about 30 feet and stayed in the air for a quarter of a mile.

[9][10] She continued experimenting with further flights, mostly around thirty feet (ten metres) in length, sometimes requiring examination of the ground to identify when the Mayfly had actually lifted off.

By April 1911 she was running a car dealership in Belfast, Ireland, but in 1911 she gave up the business to marry her cousin Charles Loftus Bland (born 21 October 1881).

[12] Bland was commemorated by an Ulster History Circle blue plaque at the family home in Carnmoney, County Antrim and Mayfly was presented to the Dublin Club.

[18] Zara Rutherford, the youngest woman to fly solo around the world (at age 19 in 2022), credited Lilian Bland as one of her sources of inspiration.