Part Big Brother, part chain-gang... my Highland fling
AWEEKEND cutting the rhododendrons sounded pleasantly r el axing. Golden eagles drift past the 1,020m-high peak of Buachaille Etive Mor in the Scottish Highlands, all is idyllic — until my reverie is interrupted.
‘Here, take these,’ Jon Downie orders, handing me saws and picks, an armoury more like instruments of war than tools for a day of gentle gardening. ‘Welcome to the Highlands, laddie.’ I am on a Thistle Camp working holiday organised by The National Trust for Scotland. They team up in groups of 12, of all ages, sexes and backgrounds to labour in the wilds, mending mountain paths, hacking overgrown vegetation and fencing.
Jon, our leader and a chemistry graduate from St Andrews, explains that rhododendrons grow to great heights in the nutrient- rich soil, crowding out native species such as hazel and denying r ed squirrels food.
My week cost only £ 65 (¤ 75) with all meals, transport and l odging provided, but we have to cook, wash up, sleep in spartan bunks in a youth hostel and chop firewood. It’s part Big Brother House, part chain gang, but it saves the Trust £200,000 a year. And it’s great fun.
One morning we awake to an almost Mediterranean sky and pile into a van for the drive into heathered hills where the Campbells massacred the MacDonalds more than 300 years ago.
For eight hours we clear campsites. I find a gas tank, a portable solar shower and one of the girls discovers an empty whiskey bottle. Inside is a curled-up shrew. He must have climbed inside, got drunk and stuck.
Our disparate band forms a close camaraderie. Gordon, a retired bank executive, calls us the dirty dozen. We do get mucky and he has a habit of jumping half-naked into the freezing rivers to impress shop girl Rhona. Alan, ex-army, gets us all up at dawn with his cheerful reveille. Wendy, who counsels pregnant schoolgirls, and Sheila, a retired teacher, are calmer. Lee, who plays keyboards in a pop group, practi ses his Kaiser Chiefs impression in the showers.
On our last day, ranger Scott Macrombie l eads us into a hidden glen of unparalleled beauty and tells me he often finds stone cherubs up here. ‘ People love these mountains so much they put up memorials. We remove them or the glen would look like a cemetery.’
Thistle Camps are addictive and all volunteers have a passion to see one of the UK’s last great wildernesses while helping preserve its heritage. Few of us would ever go to these magnificent faraway places normally.
I wouldn’t have made it without The National Trust of Scotland. And they are remote. One day, student Claire’s mother rang; she wanted to send her a fax.
‘A fax?’ Claire declared incredulously. ‘We’ve hardly got electricity.’
National Trust for Scotland Thistle Camp holidays, 00 44 844 493 2590, thistlecamps.org.uk, March-November