Welcome to the BTCV Inverness blog!
I’ll start with introductions, I’m Sarah one of 4 Volunteer Officers at the Inverness office of BTCV (which confusingly is based in Munlochy, a tiny village just north of Inverness) and I’ll be filling you in on the kind of weird and wonderful things which we have been/will be getting up to.
The past few weeks have been packed to the brim with outdoor activities, ensuring that our pasty, sun-shy limbs got a good dose of fresh air and sunshine alongside a good muscle flex before the summer season proper kicks off.Mid-May, the Munlochy crew alongside other VOs from Stirling, Edinburgh and Aberdeen headed east to Troup Head, an RSPB reserve on a promontory near Gardenstown.
We’d been brought in to build a set of stone steps over a hill to prevent folk from slipping over the cliff edge on the tussocky grass slope as they try to get a peek at the Gannets and other Pteradactly style birds nesting round the way.The work itself was fairly full on. Rolling and heaving big lumps of granite upslope to make the steps but by the end of the week when they were all in, it was well worth all the sweat and mangled hands!No sooner had we scraped the mud off from Troup Head, we were off to the Glenlivet Estate on an action break. (For those of you not in the know, action breaks are conservation holidays which you pay to go on.
The majority of the work was building stiles, boardwalks, wooden steps and restoring old picnic benches and signposts in the stunning north Cairngorms. The weather stayed dry and sunny for most of the trip leaving us all looking more like we’d spent 10 days in the Mediterranean, not the highlands in May!