Can we have our NT working holidays back?
Dear Editor,
The Oldie magazines are full of adverts for glossy exotic and expensive holidays for folks on good pensions or those having adventure before dementia. Let them go and enjoy them.
Do I crave one of them?
No. I would like my National Trust residential volunteering weeks back, please, which have given me such pleasure - in varied company, task or location - over the last twelve years since sadly widowed. But they no longer exist, neither in England or Scotland (as Thistle camps) – the staff having been made redundant in Covid, and the infrastructure no doubt dismantled.
As we are perforce a dispersed and disparate crew, young, old, professionals and labourers alike, but all equal there, we have no means of rallying support for their reinstatement. I wrote to NT, aiming to get a letter in the members’ magazine, asking what exactly wasn’t working for them with these opportunities, but instead got a bland reply “we are looking at delivering this work in other ways”.
I am in all honesty now bereft for a worthwhile group conservation working holiday. They were all without exception well organised and managed at every level, with excellent and caring leaders.
The residential aspect in modest accommodation was part of the experience. I would like to ask if the NT specialists we worked alongside (archaeologists, site rangers, botanists, lepidopterists etc.) have the same means of delivering the work as they did when they had us as willing “rent a crowd”?
Is the decision purely economic? Do their sums add up anyway?! What about the charitable obligation to preserve heritage and promote biodiversity on their land. I really can’t believe that all the 1000s of work hours generated by this free labour wasn’t value for money.
I for one would pay an amount more if the NT subsidy is too much for them. Or they could be on a waged/unwaged basis?
Very few such opportunities exist; YHA has short volunteer working parties; RSPB has opportunities for wardens, I think. But my feeling is that unless you are attached to an institution of some kind you are out in the cold.
I would love to know how this gripe can be taken forward in a constructive way with the Trust, and to hear if other members (and NT Vols – no membership was required to participate in these) feel as I do.
Yours faithfully,
Judith Warrender (National Trust life member since mid-1970s)
Sheffield