Home Is Where the Heart Is
Maggie started working for Bunloit as a research assistant, back in the Spring of 2021. Having spent much of her childhood on the Bunloit hill, she reflects on what it means to be able return home and find work on a local rewilding project.
Not too long ago, my family moved away from the Bunloit area due to the nature of their work. Now, my work at Bunloit Rewilding has allowed me to come back.
Living and working here last summer - before heading back to working remotely while at university - I not only had the opportunity to take on a varied and meaningful role in my chosen field, but also to reengage with a place that has always been dearly important to me.
Most visitors to the Bunloit Estate can appreciate its natural beauty. Overlooking Loch Ness, the area is rich in biodiversity and simply serene to wander about. Growing up visiting my late grandparents’ home on Bunloit hill has meant I’ve had that pleasure longer than most. It has also made working for Bunloit Rewilding a little surreal – I spent the summer carrying out ecological surveys in the same woods where my grandparents would take me on walks as a child. In doing so, I was constantly reminded of them and all they taught me and kept thinking how neat it was to now be working on a nature project in the place where I first came to appreciate the natural world. As silly as it may seem, it felt like things had come full circle.
Me with my dad Martin and Grandpa Peter, climbing the hill above Bunloit (Meall Fuar-Mhonaidh), c. 2005
This summer I was also reminded of how lucky I was to live, albeit temporarily, in the place that I most wanted to. For over a century, the working age population share of rural Scottish communities has been on the decline. In and around tourist destinations like Drumnadrochit, incoming retirees and second homeowners may invite additional spending to the area, but they also impact the supply of affordable housing for locals. While there are a range of employment opportunities in such places, the price of housing in rural areas combined with the greater range of employment and other opportunities that urban areas can provide has led to more and more people moving away from the communities that they care about. Although the pandemic has normalised remote and flexible working and made it more appealing for people to live and work in rural locations, increased demand has also resulted in rural housing becoming even more unaffordable. I believe rewilding projects like Bunloit which provide in-situ rural employment have an important part to play in tackling this problem, and so far Bunloit has been true to its word in providing such opportunities, be it for those returning to the Highlands that they came from or welcoming them to the Highlands where they have always wanted to go.
My Grandpa was one of many people past and present who was drawn away from the community he cared about in pursuit of his livelihood. Glen Urquhart was where he was born, where he met my Grannie and where he spent his ‘retirement’. He loved it so dearly that he wrote two books about it (‘Glen Urquhart - Its Places, People, Neighbours And Its Shinty In The Last 100 Years And More’, ‘A Bridge to the Past: An Oral History of Families of Upper GlenUrquhart’), and maintained lifelong links with the community, particularly through the sport of shinty. All his life he played, cheered and coached for Glen Urquhart Shinty Club, where his own grandfather Alexander MacDonald, ‘Ali Ban’ had been a founding member. He also contributed to the Highland sport by establishing the Shinty Yearbook and spending a decade as a Camanachd Association VP, leaving me certain he valued rural communities and was determined to help keep them thriving.
Despite all this however, my Grandpa spent the majority of his life working in the city. After school, he switched crofting for agricultural studies at the University of Aberdeen. He remained there for four decades until he was a Professor of Animal Science and Husbandry with particular research interest in animal welfare – it was only after his retirement that he was able to return to the Glen permanently. My Grannie experienced similar displacement in reverse as a child, her father’s work for the Forestry Commission taking her from Ross-shire to the West Coast and back again, eventually arriving in Glen Urquhart as a teen where her father took up a post at Balnain.
Before this summer I knew parts of these stories, but spending time back in Glen Urquhart has reconnected me with so much more of the past than I knew before. Growing up in a small city with only my immediate family, it has been lovely to reunite with a whole community of people I have something in common with. My grandpa’s sister for example, welcomed me back warmly and proceeded to quadbike me around their hilltop farm. Along the way she pointed out her and her husband’s own ‘rewilding’ efforts in the form of painstakingly planted trees in sheltered areas, the benefits to nature their only incentive.
That brings me back to the job. Bunloit’s purpose of ‘Nature Recovery and Community Prosperity through Rewilding’ is to my mind a very good one, one which should benefit us all. Working at Bunloit I can see first-hand the benefits to nature. Community benefits may take a little while to filter through, but already there have been science classes for the local school, provision of tours for local groups, and facilitation of work experience for local young people, so it seems to me as if things are on track. As the team grows, more people are also benefiting from direct employment. I value my job at Bunloit not only for the meaningful happenings of the day to day, but because of the overall lifestyle which it has for the past summer allowed me to lead. I have begun to reintegrate into a community I have always wanted to be more a part of, and care deeply about making the project work for the people who surround it. I have faith that the project will do that in time and am constantly appreciative of the opportunity to be involved in it. I only wish my grandparents were around to see it too.
Maggie English