I didn't really know what would happen to me, but the Findhorners are all into strange coincidences, and I thought that I would let it find me; and pretty quickly, it did. I happened to be walking to the beach when I saw a van marked "Trees for Life". I read it aloud under my breath, and the van driver asked me if I'd said anything. Within a minute I had discovered that there was a chance to go out on a work-party the next day due to a cancellation. I signed myself down as a replacement and I was booked to spend a week working on a highland estate.

The Trees For Life (TFL) scheme aims to reforest the Scottish Highlands. Over the past century the forests have been cut down, especially during WWI when the timber was used in the trenches, and now the land is covered with moor. TFL have their headquarters at the Findhorn community, but officially they are separate organizations, and have separate finances. TFL owns a 4000 hectare estate (10000 acres) on the north side of Loch Ness called Dundreggan. I think they bought it in 2008 for £1.6 mill. Previously it was owned by a rich Italian who only used it for summer deer-hunting trips. It's a good location for them: being close to Inverness, volunteers can arrive on the train, and they are collected by minibus at midday on Saturday for a week of conservancy work on the estate. There are a variety of things on the estate, there is some forest but mostly it's moorland, and I expect it's going to take them centuries to reforest the moor.

One of the main problems they face is the deer that roam wild here. They usually eat the shoots of the young saplings, preventing them growing. This is the main reason for why the forest won't naturally regenerate on it's own. It would be fantastic to put a big deer fence around the entire estate, but this would be extremely expensive as deer fences are 2m high and quite tough. Shooting them all isn't an answer either as the neighbouring estates would object, although I think that it's just plain stupid to attempt reforestry when the deer are present. The natural forest seems to exist in some little locations, most notably along the sides of ravines, because the deer tend not to stray there. In this kind of area there is a profusion and diversity of adult trees: rowan, aspen, scots pine etc.

The estate manager, Steve, is an affable fellow who makes a genuine effort to teach people how and why the estate runs as it does. TFL seems to include educating the volunteers as part of its mission, and I learnt loads. On arrival, we went to the estate and Steve showed us a map of the land, and talked about the current situation and plan. He took us on a walk around outside and pointed out lots of interesting things: a colony of wood-ants whose south-facing mound was designed to catch sunlight, how to distinguish various species of tree, and crossing a stream. We climbed a small hill on the moorland to test our fitness I suspect, and viewed the land beneath.

After the introductory walk, we drove to our accommodation. TFL hire some holiday chalets six miles down the road, which some enterprising Scot erected to cash in on the summer traffic. I can't really see why people would want to come here for a holiday I'm afraid, but obviously they do. Food for the week is vegetarian, and we unloaded a week's supply of vegetables, fruit, pasta, spices, lentils, sugar and rice from the minibus into the chalet. Cooking for ten people is pretty difficult and it takes experience to judge the quantities correctly.

Preparing dinner in the chalet

Unfortunately it was I who had to prepare dinner the first night, and it was not one of my greatest successes: I haven't used a vegetable steamer before, and I didn't realize how slow they were compared to boiling. I produced a nice lentil and mushroom stew, but I realized afterwards I needed double the quantity of it. No-one touched my bowl of boiled parsnips, perhaps I should have mashed them. So overall, I felt a bit raw about my cooking, but it was a learning experience, and one of the things you learn on a week like this is how to cook for a party.

After dinner we went around the table introducing ourselves, as you do. We had a couple of unemployed people, a university lecturer, a childcare worker, a gardener, a sound engineer, a student of aeronautical engineering, a journalist, a retiree; a mixed bunch from various backgrounds and at different stages of their lives. Three people were Scottish, and everyone else was English. As for me, I was pleased to have a roof over my head. I was thinking that I would turn for home after this week because summer was fading fast in these northern climes, and I thought a month on the road was enough.

I guess I'm going to mention that the American girl in the party decided to assail me for wearing a Confederacy Flag on my hat. I have to laugh: she told me that it was the American equivalent to wearing a swastika! Oh dear! I'm not very politically correct at all am I?

On Sunday we went to work on the estate. Our task was to remove an old sheep's fence that had fallen into disrepair. It was difficult to say how old it was, but maybe fifty years. We were under strict orders to preserve the old oak fenceposts because they were a good home for moth larvae. For the most part, the fence was six horizontal wires stretched between posts, and it was for us to cut it into sections and roll it up. The wire was 5mm galvanized steel and, being old and corroded, it didn't roll up easily. It's really crazily dangerous to have a group of amateurs loose with wire-cutters in the forest, pulling bits of wire with sharp ends. I was pleased that we had a pair of experienced leaders: Rupert spends half his year working for the National Trust, and Howard is a gardener and teacher. Furthermore, we were given leather gloves and plastic spectacles.

We had a pair of irish waterhounds with us for much of the day, but the best thing was the weather. It didn't rain, and it was warm. The midge didn't appear on site either, which was great.

A paragraph about the scottish midge: these are tiny flies approx 2mm long that swarm in large clouds and enjoy landing on your skin. They are a major nuisance, and if you're outside you'll soon find yourself in the centre of a large swarm of them, and if you ignore them they will bite you. They are probably wholly responsible for halving the number of tourists that come to rural Scotland in the summer. They are more tenacious than mosquitoes, and seem to have a far greater tolerance of insect repellants like deet. They seem to feed all day every day, and probably the only way to beat them is to wear a fine net over your head, and this diminishes your visibility which is not good when you have sharp wires to deal with. The Forestry Commission issue Avon's "Skin so Soft" moisturizing cream which they seem to dislike. The weather sometimes helps: they are so small that a breeze will disperse them, and rain restricts them too. It's vaguely amusing that you come to welcome the rainy / windy days in Scotland because they save you from the midge.

The midge are instantly recognizable by their flying pattern: they are incapable of flying in a straight line and always fly in erratic circles. They are mostly black with speckled wings. A brisk walk will often leave the midge behind, but not always, and I've been walking through valleys where the midge were thick in the air everywhere and they were not going to be left behind, so it's always wise to have a midge net when out on the highlands. As a general rule, they congregate around streams and rivers and anything like forests where the air is still.

Another useful fact is that Vodaphone seem to offer the best connectivity in rural areas.

This, then was my experience of the highlands: I was actively involved in estate management and I think that's a good introduction to it. I was immersed and involved, I was in the forest doing stuff and I was with a bunch of interesting and quite sociable people: surely a better way to learn than driving past on the road.

The workgroup having lunch on the Dundreggan estate, some wearing a midge-net.

Removing the wires was a fun enough task: the fence was so old that the wires had fallen off the fence-posts and lay in the ground, sometimes under a centimetre of soil, and overgrown by heather, bracken, moss and even trees. I was pulling the wires up out of the ground as I walked the line of the fence. Someone else would cut them into manageable strips, and others would wind them into neat bundles and put them into a sack.

The ecosystem is pretty apparent here, and I discovered interesting slugs, fungi, spiders and so forth which were cool. I don't spend much time outdoors, and this was a bit of compensation. I didn't get bitten much and no ticks crawled up my leg under my trousers like they usually do. However I got one severe bite which made my forearm swell up for a few days. I've no idea what caused it; perhaps it was a spider. Wood-ants don't inject poison, and I would have noticed a bee, wasp or horse-fly. It was unusual. I took some anti-histamines to reduce the swelling and waited for it to pass.

One day of the week is allocated holiday. On Tuesday I walked up some of the hills on the estate. It's roughly 6km x 7km in size, and contains some good hills which offer the experience of Highland hillwalking. I've written hills because they are ~600m in altitude, but to me they are mountains, and I climbed mountains. The task of climbing the Dundreggan peaks is greater than the altitude indicates due to the lack of tourist-paths. I was tramping across heather and moor to reach the top, and that is hard work. The first peak, Beinn Bhreac was marked by a pile of rocks at 511m. The clouds were at that height and I found myself looking horizontally along the bottom of them. The next peak was higher and covered by cloud, but the weather improved so I climbed it: Carn Dubh. From 588m the view was everything you can get in the Highlands. It was great. It was cold and windy up there in the mountains, and I was surprised the cold penetrated my warm coat and best jersey. Camping up there, even in August, would be a crazy idea. The wind would get under my flysheet and penetrate my tent, and I would freeze!

View south from Carn Dubh (588m)

The moody highlands at Dundreggan

It took a couple of hours to descend to the wood, and it seemed tropically warm, humid and still. On the way I passed through a reasonably flat area of moor which was waterlogged: the peat earth preventing drainage. It struck me as incredible that this vast area of moorland was once all forest, but they chopped it down when it suited them and did nothing to repair the damage.

One thing I learnt is that it is very easy to loose stuff in the wood: you put down a pair of gloves and you think you know where they are, but later it's immensely difficult to find them. I had, actually, left a pair of gloves in the wood the day before and one of my reasons for returning was to retrieve them. I managed to do this after a lot of wandering around on the wrong paths through the bracken and going too far and so forth. Luckily I knew that I had left them by a small stream, so I followed several small streams up the hill until I found the right one and retrieved my gloves. I was delighted! However later that day I managed to make the same mistake, and this time I left my hat by a stream. I had to change my descent in order to find that as well. I will be more careful in future.

I also had a success in the kitchen that day: I prepared some baked apples stuffed with dates and cinnamon which were fantastic, so I was pleased to be getting the knack of cooking for ten people.

On Wednesday, we moved to the tree plantation on the west of the estate. There are 300 hectares of commercially planted trees here, adjoining some wood belonging to the Forestry Commission. Each hectare supports ~2500 trees (50 x 50). The most prevalent species in the plantation is the sitka spruce, the mainstay of british commercial forestry, providing large quantities of cheap wood for pulp and chipboard. It's not a native species, coming from Alaska, and thus TFL basically wants to chop them all down and be rid of them as soon as possible before they spread. To do this, I think they'll need to use commercial techniques and machinery, as small teams of volunteers will not make much impression on 300 hectares. There is a thing called a "masher" which will deal with them, and I think that is the general plan for much of the plantation. However, it's not quite that simple, as it is a common technique to plant sitkas next to lodgepole pines, as they tend to perform better together than they do apart. In particular, the heather tends to strip the soil of nitrogen, and lodgepoles tend to replace it.

On 100 hectares of the plantation it seems that the sitkas were planted next to scots pines instead of lodgepoles as an experiment, and TFL wants to keep this native species. They've developed a technique of removing a ring of bark from the trunk of the sitka which kills the tree in-situ, and the dead tree remains standing providing some wind-shadow for the scots pine, as well as providing a home for wildlife.

There are areas of the plantation which are appropriate for attention from a small team of volunteers like ours. We concentrated on a little area containing a deer-hide that we could usefully clear to allow an easier shot at the deer. The deer-hide is a little tin hut on a hill where a man can hide with a rifle and shoot the deer. So we spent a couple of days sawing down everything except the native species of conifer: the scot's pine.

Felling lodgepole pines

The workload on this week of volunteering was slight. I mean, we'd get to the site around 1000, have several breaks and leave at 1630. I am used to working longer days than that. The last day, Friday was very easy as we were planting some bluebell bulbs underneath an oak tree of a few centuries age. The soil underneath the oak was better than usual as a consequence of all the oak leaves that had fallen and rotted there over the years. Bluebell bulbs need to be ~2 inches deep, so we made some holes and pushed them in. In the spring they will sprout early, before the tree has leaves, and will look fantastic I expect.

On Friday afternoon there was the obligatory cleaning and packing. In the evening everyone, including Steve, met up in our chalet for the last meal. There was plenty of wine and whisky and everyone got quite drunk. Afterwards we all went down to the pub in Invermoriston and stayed there being drunken idiots until 0200. I got into a discussion with the resident academic about whether her university was better than mine. She dared to impugn my university, which seemed to me to be strange, especially as she was just like the people who taught me. We made good in the morning. She's a nice lady in spite of her ferocious attacks on my Confederacy Flag and my university.

Steve came and spoke to me about the week: he seemed to think that I was really deep and intellectual or something, which I don't. I think some of the other guys had been a bit dubious about some things, but, well, I've been from one side of this planet to the other, and I told him that I had no complaints about the week. That seemed to cheer him up. I also got involved in the arm-wrestling tournament which occurred sometime after midnight, but I think they let me win. They're a funny bunch of guys, and overall the week was a success. Oh, and I tried some 1978 single malt whisky at the bar that night, and I formed the opinion that I prefer it younger when it has more bite to it.

Walking back, we passed a well in Invermoriston call St Columba's well. People throw coins in the well, so the water tastes like Nikel. Isn't it amazing the ability of humans to poison things that are there for their own benefit? I spent the week drinking from highland streams because the water tastes so much better than the chlorinated water coming out of the tap. The week had educated me, and made me realize that city life is a rather horrible thing.

On Saturday we swapped email addresses and went our separate ways. Some people went down to Fort William so as to attempt a climb of Ben Nevis. I returned to Findhorn where I found my car, as I had left it, and I had to decide what my plans were. I managed to connect to the internet, and found a rather good email. Before leaving a month earlier I had sent my CV into a company I wanted to work for, and I thought they were ignoring me. Actually they had invited me to an interview. I'd spent enough time on the road, and I was thinking that I should really finish this trip and go back to my career (haha).