For Argyll reported recently that Stuart Crawford, five years a volunteer in the ranger and conservation services at Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, had been made Volunteer of the Year in the UK National Parks Volunteer Awards.
We’ve just been down to the Park Headquarters in Balloch at the southern end of Loch Lomond to meet Stuart and learn about how the world of this sort of volunteering works – and what it’s like doing a job that has the run of this massive, magnificent and varied National Park – running from the Clyde coast of Cowal, through the old Argyll Forest, across Loch Lomond, on east across the Trossach hills and north to Tyndrum.
The Park HQ, a strikingly sinuous building in wood and stone, is not a visitor centre but a well and stoutly built operations HQ for administration and coordination. Its interior is open and robust, designed to host work, boots, wet clothes, groups gathering for work – and to let in the light.
This National Park encompasses Clyde sea lochs; a raft of freshwater lochs of rare beauty; the islands in Loch Lomond; hills from Munros downwards in ranges like the Arrochar Alps and the Trossachs; a long stretch of the West Highland Way and several other challenging long distance walking trails; rivers, glens; and gold – at Cononish near Tyndrum on the Park’s northern borders, for which mining permission was eventually and righty granted. The Park has a lot of autonomy – being its own planning authority.
As Scotland’s first National Park and one with such complex natural resources, long serving staff say it took ten years to work out what they were doing with it – and now, as is obvious in the wealth of innovation coming out of it – they are steaming ahead, sure-footed and loving it.
A man who loves the outdoors, Stuart Crawford got into volunteering as both a ranger and a conservation worker in the park after seeing some volunteers working with the permanent ranger staff in the park. He liked the look of that and started as a volunteer himself.
He brought to the job a respect of work for its own sake, alongside a love of the natural world. He may dedicate four days in some weeks and one in another to the Park – it’s up to each volunteer to book in on whatever days and for whatever jobs suit them. They work in pairs and if a particular job is, say, down at Benmore Gardens in Cowal in the south of the Park, or at Callander in the east, Glen Croe in the west or Inverarnan in the north, a Ranger Service vehicle will have been assigned to that job for them to use. Volunteers get their travel costs paid to the meeting places in the Park from which jobs start.
Two things in particular about this job give Stuart Crawford a profound sense of achievement:
- as a volunteer ranger, helping walkers and other visitors to the park and to the many events it runs, to feel that the Park is theirs and is there for them, free to explore;
- and as a conservation volunteer, repairing the paths, seeing the measureable extent of what his efforts have contributed by the end of each day.
He says that he has never met an unpleasant walker – that they love walking, they love being in this park and they relish its scenic beauty. Picking away at Stuart’s specialist insights, we discover that walkers in September tend to be from Germany and the Scandinavian countries, with Stuart surmising that this must fit in with the annual rhythms of those cultures.
If Stuart brought the will to work to his volunteering, along with his love of and curiosity about the natural world and his proactive assisting of people who come to this Park from all over the world, the job has given him new skills, abilities and knowledge.
He identifies two key areas where volunteers can witness their own growth in this work. The first is about getting comfortable in the natural world, not being fearful of it – becoming progressively at ease in going off the beaten track. The scale of the Park means constant penetration of new parts of it for every volunteer – and that sense of continually pushing out the boundaries of the known banishes the fears of the unknown. The positive impact of this personal development into many aspects of everyday life is very significant.
Stuart also points to the conscious growth in self confidence that comes from anticipating the needs of people in the Park, taking the initiative in engaging with them and offering information and suggestions.
Talking to Stuart and Craig Walker [above left, with Stuart at the Park HW], who is in charge of organising the shape and logistics of the volunteering element of the Park and who has worked there since it was two years old [it was created in July 2002], both see volunteering as providing a valuable transition between a world without work and the world of work.
Being either or both of a volunteer ranger or a conservation volunteer means that you work with other volunteers as well as meeting and helping other staff and users of the Park. This keeps sociability alive and rewarding – and the timekeeping, the team work, the task scheduling and completion all introduce and reinforce the disciplines of any job. This sort of organised but self-directed volunteering is a very worthwhile familiarisation for those who have not previously been able to find employment.
There are around 150 active volunteers in the Park each year. New entrants as volunteer rangers are given an induction course that runs from January to March, seeing them ready to roll with the start of the season in April. Consevation volunteers may start at any time as this work is year round.
Stuart himself particularly enjoys the events run by the Park – like the Clanscape days, designed to introduce visitors to the way people living in the Park area in earlier times would have lived and worked. There is a performative element in these days. The volunteer rangers dress in period costume and go about the business of domestic and crofting life, interacting with visitors, giving them information, showing them how it was and watching them gain new insights from the experience.
The volunteer rangers also help with the planning of each of these days and with the advance preparation and setting up of them. It occurred to us that the volunteers who are fully engaged and energetic about this will inevitably acquire some very useful understanding of event management. That is a fully transferable skill and these days events of all kinds are an increasing part of life at work, in communities and in the ever-present world of fundraising.
Asked about his personal special places in the Park, Stuart names Puck’s Glen in Cowal; part of the West Highland Way on east Loch Lomond around Inversnaid; and Loch Achray, immediately south east of the southern end of Loch Katrine. He feels that these places have a sense of mystery about them alongside their natural and unmanicured beauty.
Some of the permanent rangers say Stuart knows more places in the Park than they do and he enjoys the experience of constantly bringing more and more of it within his personal knowledge.
We suggested that that sort of knowledge was the ideal basis for a thriller – which amused him. The possibilities are endless.
All of the volunteers will have their own knowledge, their own affinities with different parts of this varied Park, their own ‘special places’. Trudie from the Communications team at the Park, who joined us for a while, talked about a friend of hers whose favourite place is ‘Craig’s Pool’, up in the hills above Glen Fruin, somewhere he has been to regularly since childhood and which is simply welded into his life.
We wondered aloud what would happen if the Park had a competition amongst the volunteers to write short stories based somewhere in the Park. It would be fascinating to see the range of ideas and narratives that would emerge from this creative challenge to take the experience of volunteering in the Park into a different sphere.
In talking about working in the Park, Craig Walker suddenly said ‘It breaks a Ranger’s heart to see the damage a lot of campers can do in the Park’. They break trees for firewood. They light fires indiscriminately. They leave rubbish and various wastes. Hearing a seasoned senior ranger describe discovering these abuses as ‘heartbreaking’ underlined the visceral commitment to the job and to the Park of those who work actively in it and with it.
Part of what the rangers do is hand out – free – strong waste bags with handles, to make it easy for users of the Park to take their debris away with them. There are bye-laws which control wild camping in the Park and these are being continually tightened where the users of the Park do not respect them.
Stuart Crawford is obviously driven by a desire to do what he does as successfully as possible and to bring to it professional discipline, attention to detail and imagination.
This volunteering is a sort of total immersion experience for Stuart. It involves his life with his fellow volunteers; his engagement with the permanent staff at the Park; the time he spends in and around the glorious secret nooks and crannies of this astonishingly varied area of natural beauty and tranquillity – and the knowledge that by his own contribution, he is helping to keep it in good order and to develop it for the pleasure and education of those who use it.
Craig Walker says that staff keep an eye out and where they see volunteers with a specific interest, they do what they can to develop that interest and to extend what the volunteer may do. Stuart will have been ‘spotted’ early on – and, boy, was that a good spotting.
He has not been named the UK National Parks’ Volunteer of the Year for nothing. Working dispersed across such a huge area, no one else may often know just what he has made possible for someone else in the Park or for the Park itself – but he knows. That is the value to him of what he does. He is fully aware of this and is self-motivated to live this way and by these values.
Anyone interested in volunteering as a ranger or conservation worker at the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park should get in touch with the Park:
- through the Volunteering pages of its website here;
- or by phoning Volunteer Adviser, Craig Walker direct on: 01389 722113
