The brochure sounded wonderful. Escape to the most dramatic scenery in the
Southern Uplands, it said, where spectacular cataracts tumble hundreds of
feet into glacial lochs and (according to Walter Scott) “eagles scream from
isle to shore; Down all the rocks the torrents roar”. Volunteering for a
week’s conservation work on a Thistle Camp with the National Trust for
Scotland, it said, made a terrific holiday.
If only I had read the brochure properly. It’s not as though there weren’t
clues. Little things like having an antitetanus injection, bringing your own
aspirin and packing a pillowcase. Oh, and a torch.
So here I am, 700ft above sea level among the hulking Moffat Hills, swathed
from head to toe in soaking waterproofs, buffeted by gale-force winds and
bitten to the bone by the dreaded Scottish midges (squadrons of the buggers).
I’m also exhausted after a two-mile hike up a 30-degree incline with a 10lb
pack and a heavy shovel, being told by Jamie Davies, a frighteningly fit
Royal Marine on secondment, just what he thinks of my attempts to repair
this mountain footpath.
Brochure be damned. So far — and this was only the first day — it had been
hell. There are 11 of us “civilians”: two 18-year-old private-schoolgirls
from Surrey; two students; an electrical engineer who works on North Sea oil
rigs; an architect from Hackney; a weaver from Biggar; a Barclays banker; a
double-bass player from the Irish National Symphony Orchestra; and her
brother, a gardener. Six women and five men. Artisans, artists and office
workers. Definitely no Asbos.
Davies, our leader, dispenses instructions. We are to take 20lb rocks out of
the rushing burn, lug them 30yd across boggy, stony, heathery terrain, while
trying to avoid a bootful of water (not easy) or a twisted ankle (less easy
still), then pile them up to buttress the crumbling paths against the tramp
of hiking boots. This looked like very bad news for my back.
No hikers today, though — not in this weather. Just a bunch of feral goats,
gazing down on us with looks of understandable amazement.
Altogether, we undergo seven hours of brutal slog, part chain gang, part boot
camp, after which we withdraw our broken bodies to be cossetted back to life
at our digs. Well, after a fashion. Our home for the week is a forbidding
minister’s residence on the edge of a spooky forest by the River Tweed.
Above the doorway window, it is announced with grim pride that the building
was constructed in 1898 — without, it seems, much alteration since (heating
would have been nice).
The cookhouse and recreation hall are in a disused junior school next door,
and the idea is that we take turns to cook, shop and wash up. Rotas are
organised. Thank God I’m paired with Jo, who can actually cook. Full of
first-night famishment, we fall on her chilli with rice. I like to think I
laid the table nicely.
Decoration in the junior school is a bit spartan: a floor-to-ceiling Ordnance
Survey map and a ping-pong table at the far end. I have never played
five-a-side table tennis before, but you need quick reflexes. It is all
rather like being at a teenage sleepover.
We get to talking, and it turns out that most of us were seduced by the
National Trust brochure. Thistle Camps are set in the wildest parts of
Scotland, and there were lovely pictures of puffins on St Kilda; shots of
the moody majesty of the Cairngorms and the manicured beauty of Balmacara.
No wonder hundreds of people now pay to join the Trust’s 50-odd full-time
rangers on 37 courses every year, building footpaths or lugging rocks,
shearing sheep or raising barns, weaving willow or counting bats. All the
volunteers in the propaganda shots seemed happy, smiling and content.
AFTER THREE days of hard graft, a Trust ranger, Dan, takes pity on us. We will
have a rest from the heavy-duty rock-humping and go on a nice botanical
survey. Goody! A little casual plant identification, perhaps, then home for
a nice cup of tea.
That, unfortunately, isn’t quite what Dan has in mind. With his collie,
Riddle, bounding ahead, we trudge up the 2,696ft of White Coomb looking for
something called alpine foxtail, apparently a rare species of grass. Can you
imagine standing at the top of a wind-blasted mountain after an
oxygen-draining climb in the middle of a boggy wilderness on what feels like
the roof of Britain hunting for... grass?
I didn’t feel like looking at the ground, anyway. From up here, you can almost
see from one side of the country to the other — from the Cheviots to the
Solway Firth, and south to the Lake District. It is breathtaking.
When you stand in this awesome landscape, the legends written into its history
are easy to believe. Just to the west is Hart Fell, where Merlin supposedly
turned himself into a female deer to outrun his enemies. It was among these
hills, too, that the local author John Buchan set The 39 Steps, his hero,
Richard Hannay, fleeing across the heather with communist agents on his
heels. IT DIDN’T always rain. One day, we had glorious sunshine and the
velvet hills blazed with purple heather. We could see peregrine falcons
circling in the powder-blue sky. And we could actually take our anoraks off.
Warm? Positively tropical.
And subtly, I found I was beginning to enjoy myself. In my days as a showbiz
reporter, I interviewed the movie star Robert Mitchum about his time on a
chain gang. He said that although the cons were strangers, thrown together,
with no previous interest in spreading tarmac across country roads in
Alabama, an odd bond united them — created, perhaps, by physical adversity.
Now I understood where Bob was coming from. None of us had ever rebuilt
mountain tracks before, but we derived the most enormous pride from this
exhausting task. We took photos of each other posing proudly with shovels in
front of our handiwork, as though we were Picasso with a just-finished Blue
Period. And at the end of the week, we all vowed to return on the same day
next year to see how our paths had fared.
I have one image burnt into my memory that pulls it all together — when Jeff
the gardener, on a narrow ledge 300ft up the path to Loch Skeen, suffered an
epileptic fit. He could easily have fallen to his death. The loving way he
was calmed by his sister, Jennie, and the rescue operation that swung into
action to get him down the mountain, with teams of us acting as temporary
medicos, was heart-stopping. By now, he was a brother to us all, and we
would have died ourselves to get him down safely. We had bonded.
Yes, we were soaked to the skin, eaten by midges and often exhausted, but
being thrown together at random with such a disparate and lovely gang, being
tested physically and mentally, almost drowning in the beauty of Scotland —
and all in the knowledge we were building something, be it ever so humble,
that contributes to the heritage of our island — was incredibly stimulating.
I have rarely felt so alive.
Rod Gilchrist’s break in Dumfriesshire cost £65. This year’s
footpath-building week in Dumfriesshire runs from August 4 to 11. For more
details, call 0131 243 9360 or visit www.thistlecamps.org.uk.
Holidays run from March to October
Dirty weekend?
MUCK IN FOR THE NATIONAL TRUST
You can do your bit for the National Trust in England, Wales and Northern
Ireland, too: there’s a choice of 450 holidays, with many themed to match
your pastime or peccadillo: wildlife fans can track butterflies on the north
Devon cliffs; the more green of finger can help with planting at the
magnificent Ickworth House, in Suffolk; and watersportsmen get the chance to
canoe and sail in Chichester harbour between hand-dirtying stints on the
Slindon Estate. Prices start at £65; call 01793 817400 or visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk
.
COUNTRYSIDE CRAFTS
BTCV claims to mobilise Britain’s biggest army of ever-ready conservation
volunteers, fixing up scores of breaks in nature reserves and national parks
across the country. Most are of the wall-building and hedge-laying variety,
but you could sign up to rehouse otters on a holt-building weekend in
Weardale (£75) or learn the ancient art of willow-working in Cheshire (£90).
Nobody will mind if the skills are then applied to your garden. BTCV offers
holidays abroad in 15 countries, too, from Albania to New Zealand. Call
01302 388883 or visit www.btcv.org
.
BIRD BREAKS
A week spent as a volunteer warden with the RSPB is about lending your bonce
as well as your brawn. Depending on your birding brain, you could be leading
guided walks for fellow enthusiasts, monitoring nest boxes or surveying
endangered species. There’s likely to be some full-on hedge-laying, too,
naturally.
There are 38 reserves across the country to choose from, with free digs and
fairly flexible dates (usually Saturday to Saturday, although some reserves
require a longer minimum stay). Call 01767 680551 or visit www.rspb.org.uk.
