Eco Trips for Tree Huggers
Repairing an invisible wall called "ha ha" and helping to save Ashdown Forest, the home of Winnie the Pooh, are among the tasks allotted to volunteers on a British Trust for Conservation Volunteers natural break working holiday.
Food is provided, as is accommodation which often involves crashing on a village hall floor. Wimps can pay extra cash to stay in a catered hotel.
Weekend stays are possible and may consist of converting an air raid shelter into a bat flat. Week long breaks start at £32. Weekends £15.
Similar work is overseen by the Scottish Conservation Projects Trust. [ email ] Everybody is expected to help with the cooking, cleaning and washing up as well as dyking and walling. Though the action breaks, as they are called, are located in remote areas they are usually reasonably near to a pub.
The National Trust for Scotland (ph: 0181 243 9470) run Thistle Camps. They cost between £37 for seven days and £82 for 21 days, and are set in places such as Killiecrankie and Fair Isle, near the Shetlands.
Try the National Trust (PO Box 84, Cirencester GL7 1ZP) too. They have a variety of working holidays on their land, ranging from archaeology to working with the disabled.
More unusual is selling flowers or newspapers dressed in Victorian garb. The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust (ph: 01952 433522) requires demonstrators and street animators to dress up and be live exhibits.
In return for a free lunch volunteers are expected to display the lost social and industrial skills of the last century. Site maintenance and helping to make and repair the costumes are other tasks available.
Continuing the industrial theme, the Waterway Recovery Group needs assistance in restoring the fallen glory of Britain's canals - once the arteries of commerce. £35 is expected for a week long stay, covering three meals a day.
The conservation holidays can teach basic skills such as bricklaying and the operation of simple plant and equipment. You may get to play around with a dumper truck too. Accommodation is in basic youth hostel style digs.
Religious people in a cathedral get down on their knees to pray. Working Travellers get down there to scrub the floor. Cathedral Camps oversee week long programmes set up to entice volunteers into the restoration and maintenance of cathedrals and large churches.
Tasks include sanding down woodwork, weeding the graveyard, window cleaning and the much wanted glamour job of escorting bin liners full of dead pigeons and their droppings off the premises.
Those interested in living birds may like to join the voluntary wardening scheme run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds [ email ]
The oldest Railway Company in the world needs help to keep running. The Ffestiniog Railway, from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Porthmadog, requires its engines cleaned, trains guarded, tickets sold, the track maintained and the garden weeded.
Several visits to the railway are required until boyhood train driving dreams can be fulfilled.
Aspiring train drivers should also check out the Welshpool and Llanfair Light Railway (ph: 01938 810861), an eight-mile tourist steam railway in rural mid Wales, or the Great Western Society (ph: 01235 817200) at the Didcot Railway Centre.
Tree hugging is open to everybody; age is unimportant but volunteers should be fit and prepared to rough it. Send a stamped addressed envelope when requesting more info by mail. Overseas volunteers with a good grasp of English are accepted most places.
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