Misspent youth – mud, fires, rock breaking and billhooks, and yes – more mud; an introduction to the practicalities of conservation. The Conservation Corps: the early years – 1965-67;
This was a body established by the Council for Nature (an umbrella body that included the likes of the RSPB and predecessor of the WWF) back in 1959, with a view to mobilising volunteers to undertake some of the physically demanding elements of conservation (vegetation clearing, scrub/tree felling, path building and maintenance, fencing, bridge construction, water management, habitat revival), alongside exposure to some of the underlying science of conservation.
My introduction to the Corps was in 1965 when one of our more forward-looking biology teachers at Dulwich College, Brian Jones, arranged for small groups of College students to join organised Conservation Corps field days in and around the home counties. Early visits were to Headley Heath (scrub clearance) and Juniper Hall (removal of dogwood to increase habitat for rare orchids), both proximate to Box Hill, Surrey in southeast England – very welcome Saturday afternoons away from school.
I quickly got more involved with this, and took to getting a parental pass (I was at the time a boarder at Dulwich) to join weekend camps. Thus, I was able to join a number of weekend work groups at Michelham Priory, near Hailsham, East Sussex, where we undertook the building of a concrete sluice to allow “natural” clearing of sediment from the moat around the Priory. Work included construction of a temporary coffer dam (using sand/mud bags), excavation of the channel bed, digging of foundations, preparation of shuttering, and then mixing and pouring of concrete. On one occasion this had me attending normal Saturday morning school classes, playing afternoon hockey away at Hurstpierpoint College, West Sussex and, after the regulation sausage, beans and chips after-match repast, getting on the road to hitchhike to Michelham. Sorry to say I don’t think we’d be allowed to do that now.
I became a regular after-school visitor to the Conservation Corps office at Queen’s Gate Kensington, and later at London Zoo in Regent’s Park. Arising from this I was invited to help with the setup of one of the Corps’ residential camps in the summer holiday of 1966 at Hayley Wood, just to the west of Cambridge – helping erect the regulation marquee (complete with field-based gas cookers, washing machines, and drying room), a line of ex-army six-man ridge tents, shower tents and toilets. [This wasn’t camping as I’d known it in the Scouts; even at Michelham our tents were erected inside a barn, we had oil radiators running the length of the tents, and we got to fill our own paliasses with fresh straw to sleep on).] At Hayley Wood our task was to open up glades within the forest to encourage grass and scrub formation for the deer to feed on – which might reduce the extent to which they pillaged the sown fields around the wood. And a happy time was had by all and sundry – and as the youngest volunteer on site (and a reclusive boarder) I got to catch up on some social education on our not infrequent visits to the highlife of Cambridge town, sampling their many hostelries, and developing my punting skills (available as a very discrete transporter of lovebirds around the town’s waterways).
It was around this time that a group of Conservation Corps regulars, including myself, put our signatures to a letter to the Guardian in support of the Soil Association’s campaign to protect hedgerows. This campaign followed shortly after the UK publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but was recognition that hedgerows formed important protected corridors for the movement of wildlife, provided necessary cover for a wide range of songbirds, and also, given that crops could not be easily harvested close up to hedges, the buffer strips adjacent to hedges could provide an important reservoir for a wide range of plants and insects. As the youngest of the signatories it was I who recorded an interview for BBC Radio’s World at One – but then unfortunately the piece was squeezed from the running schedule and didn’t get to air.
The following Easter holiday saw me working on one of Britain’s very few quaking bogs, located on the southern edges of the Lake District just north of Grange-over-Sands – now part of the Roudsea Wood and Mosses Designated Special Area of Conservation (SAC). The work was two-fold – the first was removing encroaching birch and conifers from the floating vegetation mass that tops off the quaking bog (jump up and down on the mass and it ripples – though generally the floating mass is a meter or more deep; of note, there are nearby examples where bogs are all but fully covered over, but find a hole and you can sink right down into the bog!!!); the second was assisting with deer management at Roudsea Wood by helping (as beaters) with the annual deer count. As I remember it, we had in our midst’s a sea shanty aficionado with a fine voice, a good memory, and a small squeeze-box – he kept us entertained on our visits to the one or two local hostelries, but also during our rest periods.
Later that year I hitched up the A1 from Peterborough through Edinburgh and Inverness to Kinlochewe, entry-point to the Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve, the first such reserve in the UK. Here we were based in a croft just along from the Beinn Eighe Warden’s House. Our task here was to upgrade, or in some cases build from scratch, part of the footpath forming the main visitor route through the lower mountain slopes closest to the car parks. This mainly involved moving and setting rocks – working with pick-axes and crow bars, spades and shovels. We were very quickly introduced to the Highland midge, which caused us huge discomfort. Our solution was to make a plea to the warden’s wife to let us have some of her old nylon stockings – which she was happy to provide. From that point on visitors making their way along the signposted path would inevitably come across the slightly intimidating scene of a pick-axe gang of stocking covered young men and women – and in some cases it was necessary to remove stockings and quietly escort worried walkers across our work-site. During this two-week work camp I managed to get to the top of Beinn Eighe, and also wandered off to explore some of the glaciated hanging valleys and get a birds-eye view of the red deer on their upper grazings. We were also introduced to the wonders of the Highland Ceilidh in the wonderful location of Torridon village hall. And in amongst this we also “rescued” a geology student who had been walking the lines over the mountain mapping the rock structures as a university research project – with the one drawback that he had been living on jam sandwiches for the duration of his work; for two weeks at the time we bumped into him. We were able to convince him that jam sandwiches did not constitute a balanced or in any way healthy diet, and were able to offer him a wider meal selection – though I don’t think he was particularly partial to green veg.
Then off to university – where conserving rather took a backseat. But all-in-all, a great introduction to the practicalities of conservation and wildlife management, building up a range of skills – including knowledge of the distinctions between a billhook, slasher and scythe – and a very enjoyable introduction to beer drinking.
I did go on to use some of these skills in an expedition trekking through the highland forests of Guyana in the footsteps of David Attenborough in pursuit of oilbird caves, machete in hand [see attached photo – Aug 1970, just emerged from two days and night in large oilbird cave; photo credit Jonathan Player]. And on graduation I was off to the southern Sahara as a VSO Fisheries Superintendent – where some of that experience in building mill races and “monk” water control devices came in handy.
On return to the UK I did briefly re-acquaint myself with The Conservation Corps in the early seventies, after it had been reorganised and rebranded as the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers (BTCV). Here I spent a pleasant week, once again deep in mud, helping build a complex of vegetated islands in a waterfowl reserve somewhere near St Andrews. Whilst a most enjoyable break and welcome opportunity to swap report writing for some shovel-work, both I and probably the BTCV had moved on, and some of the rough and ready character of the “old days” had gone.
But I do nonetheless carry one momentum from that trip. On the Saturday of that work camp we took a trip into the university town of St Andrews – where I found my way into a jumble sale (still a frequent leisure activity of mine). And there I found a 2nd edition copy of the English version of Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom (the version by Edward Blyth et al, published by William S. Orr and Co. in 1840). Of no enormous consequence I do nonetheless prize this rather bedraggled and disintegrating tome. I had previously studied and gained an Honours degree in Zoology from Bristol University, where there was a distinct focus on the more classical approaches to the subject and the core role of taxonomy. Whilst Cuvier was renowned for developing, extending and challenging some of the thinking about evolution and the divisions of the animal kingdom, the thing that continues to entertain me is the (small) number of animals, some illustrated in the book, that were described based on third- and fourth-hand reports from afar. Whilst it is now possible to identify what animals formed the subject of the descriptions, the details and some drawings can be comically wrong – and very entertaining. Today we get to see so many photos and film records of animals, as well as maybe dried and otherwise preserved specimens, but way back it was travellers’ tales and descriptions of animals and their behaviours, much based on hearsay and rumour, that informed naturalists and their early efforts to categorise the animal kingdom.
Soon after that Easter break in the Kingdom of Fife I was back in the tropics again, working on development projects in fishing, and getting fish to market, in various backwaters of the world – in a literal as well as metaphorical sense. With work in some ninety countries around the globe under my belt I am still conserving, but less with pick-axe and saw, instead more focused on building and strengthening natural resource management systems that work. And the Conservation Corps played an important part in helping to develop those skills.
Crick Carleton – December 2023