Memoirs of NCC Scotland. Click on a photo for a popup window showing larger photo.

The Nature Conservancy went through various vicissitudes until 1973 when it was reformed, losing its science branch and most of its scientists, and becoming purely administrative. This was known for ever after as The Split', like an axe falling on an apple' as Morton Boyd put it. The new body was to be governed by a formal Council, more firmly under the control of the minister, with his recently retired Permanent Secretary, Sir David Serpell, in charge, as Chairman. Hence, it was renamed the Nature Conservancy Council, a backward step in my view because it meant that the Conservancy would henceforth be known by an acronym, the NCC. More officious. In the new structure, there were three 'country directors', for England, Scotland and Wales (Northern Ireland had a separate set-up), with a 'director-general' at the top. My country was, of course, Scotland, directed by an excitable chap called Morton Boyd, of whom more anon.

Within NCC Scotland there were four regions, divided as quadrants between North-east, North-west, South-east and South-west, each with its own regional office and Regional Officer to occupy it. My Regional Officer was none other than my interviewer, the shaggy-eyed Mike Matthew. I'd feared that he might be a bit of a fire-eater, but in fact, Mike was a quiet soul, resolutely unflashy, but one who knew his job and the North-east inside-out. He had originally been a 'warden-naturalist', but, with silent competence, he had risen to his present position by, I would guess, his early forties.

Under Mike, came his deputy, who traditionally took on all the jobs the Regional Officer didn't want to do, plus three 'assistants', known as Assistant Regional Officers or AROs. I was now one of those, at the civil service grade of 'Higher Scientific Officer' ('Higher' because I had three previous years of experience to draw on). In addition, we had some wardens who looked after the National Nature Reserves, and an estate agent: around a dozen of us all told. Together we covered a vast area including not only Grampian Region but Speyside, and Orkney and Shetland as well. The odd thing was that, wardens aside, none of us were Scots. What does that say about Scotland's educational system? Anyway, that's the NCC's North-east Scotland Region as it was in 1977, and I hope it's enough to be getting on with.

A few days later, I boarded the first of many train journeys to Aberdeen to meet my future boss, the deputy or DRO. His name was John Forster. A plumpish, balding chap in his late thirties, John was, unusually for the NCC, a public-school man - Sherborne and Oxford - who had married a Scottish wife and settled in a farmhouse in Finzean, by the Water of Feugh, just a few miles from Banchory. Equally unusually, he wasn't a biologist; I think his degree was in English. John had the hardest job in the region, for nominally under him were three independently-minded 'assistants'. With a doctorate from the Antarctic Survey, Mike Richardson was our man in faraway Shetland. Necessarily on his own, he was a natural organiser, and had built up an influential web of contacts locally. Mike performed well above his pay-grade. Dave Morris, who was based at Aviemore in Speyside, was a keen mountaineer, skier, and climber, and so very much in his element. He wasn't an obvious team player either, and might have been happier as a campaigner (many years later, he became one). That left me. It seemed to me that a certain amount of bolshiness was the North-eastern style. Fortunately, although relations were sometimes strained to begin with, John and I ended up as friends quite as much as colleagues. The trick, I discovered, is to make friends with your boss's wife.

I was probably quite lucky. John was English for a start. He was also hospitable, as well as thoughtful and conscientious, the sort of chap who makes himself useful locally and ends up as chair of the community council. He had travelled a bit in his youth, in Nepal and Afghanistan, which gave John a wider perspective on life. Though he couldn't deliver a speech to save his life, he was a useful background operative, organising meetings and conferences, co-ordinating evidence at public enquiries, things like that. He was more of an environmentalist really, interested in sustainability, free trade, clean air, that kind of stuff.

We began with a tour of the North-eastern lowlands in a noisy, rattletrap Land Rover, holding necessarily shouted conversations. Various problems had piled up before my appointment. One of them was about a place called the Moss of Rora; and I'll go into this a bit because it was a good example of what we were up against. This place was the largest surviving raised bog in the district of Buchan, a desolate, windswept plain of nondescript farms with boggy bits in-between (but with a fine rocky coast punctuated with pretty, out-of-work fishing villages). As the best bog, the Moss of Rora had been 'notified' as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The problem was this: the postwar landscape of Buchan had been transformed by the miracle of winter barley. The earlier scrappy mix of run-down farms and shooting estates was turning into a prosperous arable prairie in which the surviving fragments of wild, once of some small value for wild game and peat, were now useless and ripe for reclamation. As it stood, Rora Moss represented a square mile of nothing. But the elderly owner, lately enfranchised after the sale of the estate, had plans that would turn it into a nice little earner.

His plan was this. First, he would sell the peat rights to a company to mine and sell on to plant nurseries. Next, he proposed to allow the local authority to use the resulting hole for land-fill. And finally, once that hole had been filled in and smoothed over, he proposed to lease the ground to the Forestry Commission to plant trees, and not nice trees either, but horrible non-native lodgepole pines. The great thing was that it would involve him in very little work, just paperwork that his solicitor could do, and would probably bring in more money than he had ever seen in his long, hard life. Unfortunately, by the end of it, there wouldn't be much left of the SSSI.

I expect he explained all this to us, but I'm sorry to say I couldn't understand a word of it. The rural dialect of Buchan is one of the most extreme in Britain. It is barely even Scots. Known as the Buchan Claik, it is essentially a different language, with its own spelling and rules of grammar. So here was this Claik-speaking old boy dithering on about how he'd 'daunder furth an fath' and 'gyaun aneth an fither' until 'my darg were deen' - and the Moss of Rora looked as though an atom bomb had hit it. But John, I noticed, seemed to understand the chap's point of view. As a tenant farmer in Buchan, he'd drawn one of life's shortest straws, and now, at last, he'd smelt a chance to pay back his overdraft. And here were we, trying to stop him, but with very little to offer in return. I think, in the end, we gave him some money from our very limited coffers to preserve bits of the bog. But the point is that I realised there and then that nature conservation in the North-east, especially for an Englishman like me, looked like uphill work.

We also called in at the place where I would be working in a few weeks' time. It was a single-storey, modern centre for upland research situated just outside Banchory among birch trees. It was called the Hill of Brathens, and had been one of the field stations of the former Nature Conservancy, though it was now the separate Institute of Terrestrial Ecology. Its mouthful of a name resulted in many a comically mistaken address: The Institute of Terrible Ecology, Hole of Bothers, for instance. Because 'the Split' had happened relatively recently, relations between us were still quite close. I had already met some of the people who worked there when we had dropped in during the UCL Conservation Course tour.

The chap in charge was another old-stager, David Jenkins. Tense, slightly simian, and with deep-set glittering eyes, he had been an expert on wild pheasants and grouse until he was pushed aside by Adam Watson and became station head instead. David was quite a character, definitely marmite, but forceful, perceptive, and with a fierce kind of intelligence. I rather liked him. I do warm to these slightly eccentric types with a bit of style. Late in life, David self-published his scientific memoirs, in which he sadly recognised that it had been his mission 'to encourage other scientists more talented than himself'. But it was thanks entirely to him that the NCC retained an office at the Hill of Brathens. David believed it was important for the research and admin arms of the Nature Conservancy to remain in close contact. Unfortunately, four years after the Split, that was no longer a widely shared view. Stationed there, I would be a link-man as well as an Assistant Regional Officer, and expected to take an interest in the scientific work. But that was OK. Brathens was a stimulating place, among ecologists studying the ways of grouse, red deer, puffins, foxes, otters and Scots pine, as well as the vaguer-sounding 'range ecology'. And apart from the scientists, there were some animals, including a tame dog otter called Benjie and some unfriendly badgers.

Back at John's farmhouse, Dalsack, while his wife Sandra cooked our supper, I was introduced to my immediate predecessor, Robin Callander, who was wearing a kilt. Kilted Robin hadn't been in my job for long. He wasn't a team player either. He preferred to live a crofter's life in a remote corner of Feughside, working on radical theories about land ownership in Scotland. He informed me that I was inheriting an area of unjust occupation, still governed by a form of feudalism. He claimed to have discussed this with the Duke of Edinburgh. I didn't know it then, but Robin would be the publisher of my first book, even though I expect he found it short on wealth redistribution and other ideas for a better Scotland.

Another predecessor, Laughton Johnston, hadn't lasted long either. A Shetlander, he soon returned to his native islands to become a teacher, a writer and poet, in other words an all-round professional Shetlander. And the one before that had been John Forster himself. Given its recent, erratic history I began to wonder whether there was something wrong with my job.

Actually there was nothing wrong with the job. Here I was, landed in the midst of a beautiful and interesting area, when newbies were traditionally given places no one else wanted. It seemed I was fortunate in my colleagues too. In my second week, Mike Matthew had sent me to Edinburgh headquarters to, as he put it, 'say hello'. There I met another regional officer very different to Mike who gave me quite a talking-to, ending with the ominous remark that "it'll take a year or two to drill the university out of you". This guy, I was fairly sure, hadn't been to university.

I also had a talk with the deputy head, Jim McCarthy. Well, he talked, I listened. Like a number of NCC Scottish staff at that time, his background was in forestry, in colonial Africa (he spoke Swahili). He tended to see the big-picture, estate-sized, and so talked about 'integration'. He thought I needed a briefing in 'the professional approach' to problems, whose overall aim, it seemed to me, was to avoid confrontation. When I queried whether it might sometimes be necessary to make a stand on behalf of the birds and the bees, he exclaimed, "goodness, you sound like General Custer!" But McCarthy had been a regional officer; he understood the reality. All the same, I returned to Inverness feeling relieved that these guys weren't my immediate superiors. I realised that the slightly bumbling way in which the North-east Region seemed to go about things was no bad thing. With my new colleagues, I reckoned, I should be able to bumble along quite nicely for a good while. Phew, what a piece of luck!

It was natural that the scientists I saw most of were the botanists. Gordon Miller was the very image of a keen-eyed, red-haired Scot, with the regulation beard, though in his case a well-trimmed one. He knew about mountain vegetation, and I remember we once had a pleasant day out at Caenlochan glen, clambering about among rare flora until we were chased away by a thunderstorm. Then there was David Welch, who, unusually for a professional scientist, enjoyed recording the wild plants of the North-east. He was very meticulous, and eventually published the first and only Flora of North Aberdeenshire, before moving on to the wild flowers of Kincardine. David was reluctant to use the NCC's plant records unchecked, because, he said, they were so inaccurate. The other notable thing about him was that he wore wooden clogs. There must have been a reason, but there it is.

Then there was Neil Bayfield, a good friend, noted for inventing a machine called the trample-ometer, a Monty Python-ish artificial foot that stomped up and down on a square of turf to model our effect on the environment. Neil's beard was curly and black. In his spare time, he was studying some predatory fly (an Empid), of the sort that presents some gruesome gift to its partner before jumping on its back and having its way. More importantly, Neil played the fiddle, and was at the centre of the institute's main and surprise social activity: Morris dancing. I'll come to that. He also wrote humorous verse, in the style of Edward Lear, and had once fiddled in a folk band called the Railway Pudding Hill Runners.

The scientists would congregate for seminars in the coffee room in which views would be exchanged. The views sometimes generated more heat than light. It could certainly get a bit fraught at times. There was a tradition that, before presenting a paper to a peer-reviewed journal, the scientist would run it past the bearpit of his colleagues. That way, any weaknesses could be highlighted - and, take it from me, there would be weaknesses, and they would indeed be bloody well highlighted. It was a bit like those business-plan interviews in The Apprentice. The Brathens guys were well up on statistics and data analysis, and could sniff out any weaknesses in a twinkling. I suppose these sessions aimed at stoking a feeling of scientific togetherness and common purpose. But there was a strong competitive element too; a gladiatorial contest, without the blood, but with dented egos at the end of it. Still, the victim would get his own back in the next session.

David Jenkins, the head, was having a difficult year. Shoved aside from other avenues of research, he had started to study otters. The immediate problem was that he couldn't catch any otters. The next problem was that he couldn't see them either, on account of troubled eyesight. After a painful operation, he recovered his vision in one eye, but in the meantime, he needed helpers. He was lent one from Aberdeen University. Her name was Maggie Makepeace, who has since abandoned zoology and become quite a well-known novelist. Alas, very soon, there was a major falling-out between the two. I forget the details, but it may not be entirely irrelevant that the Makepeace novels have titles like Travelling Hopefully and Out of Step, and which focus on 'communication and the lack of it', as well as controlling behaviour. Perhaps her time at Brathens was a catharsis. As for DJ, he too decided to say a word or two about it in his memoir, characteristically titled, Of Partridges and Peacocks...and of things about which I knew nothing. He recalled, and I quote, that after the falling-out, Maggie 'returned to the University Zoology Department where she was more-or-less happy in a routine laboratory job which aimed to find out whether faeces could be identified as from particular individual Otters...Unfortunately the work was inconclusive'. Touché!

His next assistant was Graham Burrows, who was my age, capable of fun, and who became my best mate in Banchory. He had recently completed a thesis on wood-ants, but was now thrown into the near-impossible task of trapping, tagging, and studying wild otters. He threw himself into life at Brathens and became very good at Morris dancing. Tall, bearded (of course), and an impersonator of the Incredible Hulk, Graham was in most respects refreshingly normal, with a healthy everyday interest in girls and beer. I was best man at his wedding, three years later. Always good to have a bestie.

David Jenkins made it clear that he expected me to join in too. This became a bit of a tug, for John Forster reminded me that this was by no means compulsory. But, when in Rome...So, I ran the Rothamsted light trap for moths. I did a few talks, on nature reserves and Sites of Special Scientific Interest, and once, I think, on the pollination of orchids, at which I was mercifully not heckled. I attended their open days and parties, and listened to tedious tales of science in the pub over pints of freezing-cold Scottish beer. So, I mucked in a bit.

What else did I do for science? With Neil Bayfield, I edited a satirical rag called Oecologia Gramporum, which took the piss out of solemn journals, like the Journal of Ecology. It ran, I think, to four numbers. Some of the others contributed limericks and funny drawings. It was fortunate that Neil was there to warn me off topics that were unsafe. Caretaker Charlie's hat, for instance. Like all caretakers, Brathens Charlie was an irascible character. He wore a revolting beanie indoors and out, and I thought it would be interesting to pen a speculative account of the wildlife inside it, possibly declaring it a site of special interest. Neil probably saved me from serious injury. He also considered it unwise to ask David Jenkins to pen a serious and (we hoped) pompous foreword. Neil's stuff was in any case better than mine. For example, he offered his colleagues free data: 'Cut out the numbers of your choice!'; 'Save the bother of calculations. Choose one of these already formulated standard errors!'. 'Join the dots for the graph you require!'. My stuff was more whimsical. 'Matthew MacMarmalade's Notebook', for instance, was based on the notes a certain warden-naturalist had made, with observations like 'Mole was observed'. Oecologia Gramporum was the forerunner for the satirical pieces I used to write for the NCC's own news magazine, Natural Selection. I can't help it. Anything to raise a smile among the enveloping seriousness. I doubt there is anything so serious that it can't be mocked.

The other Bayfield-Marren project was a Mummer's Play to go with the Morris dancing. I was not one of nature's dancers but I could be a playwright. Mummer's plays have traditional plots and verses that date back to the mists of time, but you can liven them up with topical references that everyone will get. We made a magnificent dragon, played by Graham Burrows, out of wire and papier mâché, with working jaws. I acted the presenter, wearing a traditional tall hat decorated with ribbons, while Neil played the Peruvian Knight ('Peruvian' because Peru had recently thrashed Scotland in the World Cup, so a topical reference, you see).

The other Morris-men took various roles, and all went well until we introduced a new character, Beelzebub, played by me in bin bags. Beelzebub has traditional lines such as, 'My arse is made of beaten brass/ No man can make me feel!' This displeased one of the Morris-men, a character with a beard so enormous it practically concealed his entire face. He thought Beelzebub's capering was spoiling the squeaky-clean image of the Banchory-Ternan Morris troupe and warned me to stop ("but he's a devil from Hell, for heaven's sake!"). I was willing to tweak the offending line, changing it, for instance, to "My chopper is made of beaten copper", but Mr Weird-beard wasn't having it, and got me and my play chucked out. I didn't mind really. A little bit of Morris dancing goes a long way. It's a bit girly if you ask me.

The Hill of Brathens was my office for just over a year until the dread day, on 3^rd April 1978, when my colleagues moved from Inverness to a new regional HQ at Rubislaw Terrace in Aberdeen. My fellow outposted AROs stayed where they were, but I was too close to Aberdeen to escape. I had to move too. I think it was a mistake, for being the link man did matter, and certainly David Jenkins thought so. But regional officers like to have their staff clustered about them, like chicks with Mother Hen. It was also the Civil Service way: to labour the metaphor, to pile all your eggs in one basket. And so, on the eve of my departure from Brathens, a cake was baked, and DJ made a speech, hardly mentioning me, but reminding all the beards that it was a milestone all the same, the breaking of a historic link. Science and conservation were drifting apart, and my going was a small symbol of that. Since then, that fissure has become a gulf. Government nature conservation today is hardly science-based at all. It is, rather, deeply administrative, and also tends to cow-tow to the latest wokery (And as for basic literacy, what is left when NCC Scotland's latest manifestation calls itself 'NatureScot'?). As for the Hill of Brathens, the station was eventually burned to the ground by animal-rights activists under the mistaken impression that cruel experiments were going-on there. It was rebuilt along the same lines but the lost long-term data and the excellent library, full of rare journals, were irreplaceable. Sometime after that, the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology itself was abolished. I helped to fight that, pulling in David Attenborough, and a tame MP, but the deck was rigged in advance. Permanence is an illusion. The passage of time informs us that what we take for stability are mere episodes. Adrift on its fathomless wastes, we do what we do, and the world moves on.

The Dinnet estate had been inherited by Marcus Humphrey, a youngish, energetic laird, currently the chair of finance on Grampian Regional Council, and later Deputy Lieutenant of the county. Since the grouse moor was no longer viable, and the birch woodland worthless, he needed to think about its future. The local council had weighed in with a plan to turn the place into a kind of park, with car parks and various Mickey-Mouse features. Not fancying that, Marcus approached the NCC instead. The resulting agreement was, as usual, very much on the laird's terms. One area was reserved for forestry (though why bit that had to be part of the nature reserve, God knows); another was reserved for grazing; while the core area, for which the estate had no particular plans, was called 'a strict reserve zone'. Which wasn't actually very 'strict' for it was open access and gamekeeping continued.

The formal 'declaration' of the Muir of Dinnet was an unusually high-profile event. We had bagged the Duke of Edinburgh to unveil our cairn. I was drafted in, faute de mieux, to write the text of a leaflet and commission illustrations, I also organised a display in the local tea-rooms, and, come the day, escorted guests to the Vat, dilating all the way about what a terrific place it was. There was much talk about a suitable gift for the Duke. I'm afraid my own suggestion, an address in verse beginning, 'Dinnet, Dinnet, Muir of Dinnet/ Lovely place for a NNR, innit?' got short shrift.

On the day, we all turned out in our best fig, the Scots wearing their kilts with little daggers tucked into their socks. The Duke, in tweeds, deployed from his Landrover, and Marcus Humphrey made a speech about how grateful we were that our royal guest had spared the time. Prince Philip replied to the effect that nature reserves were all very well, but polite persuasion and wise husbandry was much better in the long run. Then he pulled a string to part the curtains and reveal our little map. Marcus's little daughter ran up with our gift, a cromach I think it was, and then, overawed by the occasion, burst into tears. The Duke shook hands with the line-up: Marcus, Maitland Mackie, who was the Lord Lieutenant, our Chairman, Professor Holliday, and Charles Gimingham, another Professor. Apart from Marcus, none of them had had anything to do with it. The humbler sort, who had organised the event, and were actually responsible for the reserve, hung about in the rear. Prince Philip had evidently hoped to meet the temporary warden, lovely Rosaline from Belgium (we all fancied Rosaline). But, no, she was too humble, and so was I. The class system wakes up when the royals are involved, and we knew our place, which, as I say, was at the back. Our royal guest was then whisked off to the tea-rooms for a wee dram. I wasn't allowed to say anything about our little exhibition because, I was told, very solemnly, that no one under the rank of a bishop is allowed to witness the Queen's consort enjoying a drink. Back in our more fustian surroundings, some barn or other, we ate humble pie, and I'm afraid some of us got a bit pie-eyed. Well, I did.

It also fell to me to write a management plan for the Muir of Dinnet. These were formal working documents, stating our aims for the place, and how we would set about achieving them - works of fiction, quite often, since the plans assume we are in control of events, and we aren't. For example, confident plans for woodland reserves failed to take account of Dutch elm disease, the explosion in numbers of deer and grey squirrels, and, more recently, ash dieback. The more lasting part of a management plan was a detailed description of the place and its wildlife, which formed Part One. For Dinnet, I reckoned we could manage quite an extensive Part One. The result was my first lengthy publication after the recreation review fiasco: an inhouse, spiral-bound report of 120 pages titled Muir of Dinnet: Portrait of a National Nature Reserve (I got the idea of a 'portrait' from books by Guy Mountfort, 'Portrait of a Wilderness' and 'Portrait of a Desert'). It looks a crude thing now, with pages that were basically xeroxed A4 typed sheets. But it got reviewed in local newspapers, and was on sale in local bookshops at GBP2 a copy.

In a nerdish spirit of thoroughness, I had included great long lists of fungi, snails, water-fleas, water-beetles, moths; even microscopic creatures like rotifers. I'm fairly sure it's the only nature reserve portrait to have included a good whack of rotifers. There was also more history and archaeology than there strictly needed to be, including a detailed account of the Battle of Culblean, 1335 (we now think the battle was fought in a different place in a different way, but never mind). The equally detailed bird list caused trouble. It was compiled by the reserve's first full-time warden, and brought down the wrath of David Jenkins, who claimed that much of it was wrong, and blamed me for my gullibility. As for Morton Boyd, he contributed a foreword in his unique style:

'To be at one with nature is to know it in your own way...The seeing eye, the hearing ear, the fresh scents of the countryside, the feel of the rocks, or the pure burn water build in the mind a child-like sense of wonder even in the greatest of men'.

Greatest of men, eh? We used to laugh at Morton's effusions, but they were heartfelt and they were human, and I'd far rather read that kind of guff than the recitals of today, consisting of one weary cliché gummed to the next. All told, my 'Portrait' was a funny little thing, containing several unintentional jokes.

I made many visits to our reserve at St Cyrus, too, partly for management-purposes, but also because the summer warden that year was my old university friend Chris Johnson. He was living on-site in a caravan, with his wife Ali. When I first dropped by, I was diverted by a curious squeaking from the shower cubicle. What was that? It was a fledgling Barn Owl called Barny. A pair of owls were nesting in a quarry nearby, and this one, being the runt of the litter, would have starved to death if they had not rescued it. Chris, an experienced falconer, caught mice to feed it, and later had to give it flying lessons. Which was difficult because every time he stepped outside with Barny on his arm the other birds would kick up a tremendous fuss known as mobbing. It must be hell being an owl. In fact, the closer you get to the lives of any wild creature, the more you realise that nature is bloody horrible. With just the occasional treat, if, that is, you can count a mouse, or a feathery, five-second shag, as a treat.

That year, the NCC's budget was increased slightly, and suddenly there were resources for two more Assistant Regional Officers in our region. This was good news, as one of them would get Banff and Buchan, which I couldn't wait to get shot of. Chris applied for the job, and he jolly well should have got it, being as he had been an excellent summer warden at St Cyrus, and had also worked for us in the Cairngorms. But he apparently interviewed poorly, and the NCC pinned everything on the interview, rating proven experience as secondary. I was almost as upset as Chris, but there was damn all I could do about it. Still, good chaps will find a niche sooner or later, and Chris ended up as director of Wild Jordan, our man in the desert kingdom. I'd suggest that was a better outcome than ARO Banff and Buchan.

Another outcome was a day-long seminar to 'celebrate' the natural wonders of St Cyrus. It ended with a second 'portrait', published inhouse, The Natural History of St Cyrus. It was in the same spiral-bound format as Muir of Dinnet but this time with guest authors, including, for reasons of tact, a piece by the manager of the salmon-netting company. I contributed an introduction (remembering Morton's effort, I'd decided to do it myself), all the editing, and a chapter on wild flowers: 150 pages, all devoted to a narrow sliver of land beneath a cliff.

To complete the picture, the native pine forest of Glen Tanar, halfway up the Dee, was later 'declared' to be our seventh National Nature Reserve. As usual the land was privately owned, and reserve status made little difference in practice since the estate was already committed to its preservation, more or less along the right lines. It was really a formalisation of what was already there. And guess what? I organised a seminar! There was Morton again, very happy at this latest 'acquisition', and various scientists going on about pine trees, and there was I, co-ordinating the event, and persuading them all to write up their talk afterwards. I contributed a long chapter on the history of the glen, cribbed from a thesis. It was printed in the same knock-'em-out-cheap format as the previous two. And then, somehow, the entire batch was lost. I think a few copies did emerge eventually, but Glen Tanar never made the same splash as the other two. It's a shame, because there was some good stuff in it, among the dross. It was certainly the most closely studied native pinewood at that time.

At introspective moments, we sometimes asked ourselves what difference it would make if we weren't there. If the NCC didn't exist. Of course we were an institution with a role, going through the motions, commenting on this and that, reminding local councils what SSSIs were, and why they were important. Yet we weren't a very outgoing, confident organisation, not like the Forestry Commission or the various development agencies. Much of our work was internalised, with meetings at every level, and streams of memos going to and fro. In my case the latter were often about the Bedford Beagle van which was constantly breaking down and costing us a fortune at the garage. It was 'the system', churning along. You might assert (you might very well think) that our National Nature Reserves - those places Morton called 'The Jewels in our Crown' (The longer version was: 'The Jewels in our Crown from Caerlaverock to Muckle Flugga!') - were a façade, like the sets in Hollywood westerns, all appearance with nowt behind it. But they were as good as we could manage at the time, and they were better than nothing.

Look, I was never a mover or a shaker. Not much of a team-player either, to be honest. And never a manager. But I think I can claim to be a recorder. Recording is what naturalists do, what we are best at. By the time I had finished with them, my National Nature Reserves were the best documented in Scotland. My region had the forbearance to let me to take the idea and run with it. It was a tolerant region, looking back. We were allowed a little time to fly our kites.

What about the longer-term? Are these places in better nick now than they were back then, nearly fifty years ago? Well, two of mine, Morrone Birkwood and Dinnet Oakwood, have since been stripped of their NNR status. The former has grown taller and shadier, and the march of the Cairngorms on the northern horizon is no longer snow-capped in the spring, as it used to be. The lovely alpine feeling it once had is disappearing. The Muir of Dinnet has been transformed by natural processes from open moorland to woodland, one big birchwood in fact. Which most people might regard as an improvement, but it was a scarce and diverse form of moorland, while the birch woodland is commonplace. And the wild geese that used to winter there in their thousands have buggered off. So, I guess it's a no. Glen Tanar has received praise as an enlightened estate (it doesn't persecute raptors) but suffers from fires caused by idiots with disposable barbecues. That's the risk you run when you invite people to disport among dry heather and resin-oozing pines. On the other hand, all these places are still there, some with facilities which were absent then. Let's call it a draw.

All told, my work on nature reserves is among the happiest memories of my time up north. I loved them all (apart from Dinnet Oakwood) and I still miss them, I really do. Boo hoo.

There were around 80 SSSIs on my beat, arranged in folders or 'schedules', one for each district - Kincardine and Deeside (which held the majority), Gordon, Banff and Buchan, and Aberdeen City (all these districts, set up in 1973, were abolished in 1996). They had colourful names like the Coyles of Muick, the Craigs of Succoth, and the Den of Finella. A few were famous - dark Lochnagar, of course, and Ballochbuie pine forest, and Fowlsheugh, the seabird city on the Kincardine coast. Most weren't. The sites that took up most of our time were those standing in the way of development. There were several around Aberdeen, the expanding city of North Sea oil, and none was more threatened than Scotstown Moor, the last lowland heath near the City.

Quite early on, I wrote an internal report about this sad place. As was my wont, it was informal but impassioned, and titled 'Scotstown Moor: A Tale of Woe in Three Angry Chapters'. The twentieth century had not been kind to this damp, heathery place of butterfly orchids, Sphagnum moss and pretty dragonflies. Land improvements had whittled away the heath until there were only about six acres left. A former tenant, a Major Adam of Perwinnes, had lately come into possession, and he was understandably eager to sell the land to builders, or to a golf club, or both. I was just as keen to prevent that from happening, and, for once, the local authority concurred, seeing the place as a necessary 'green wedge' in the City outskirts. Scotstown Moor got me into trouble, first with the Major, who complained about my 'intransigent' attitude ('just doin' me job, Sir'), and the planning department which had seen my Tale of Woe and didn't take kindly to its criticisms. We did manage to save the site from housing development, but were unable to prevent a link road crossing the site, nor the mysterious appearance of an overflowing skip and other vandalism. The moor's biodiversity gradually bled away. Eventually what was left was purchased by the City as a joke Local Nature Reserve. But, later, that same Council earmarked the place as a long-term camp for 'travellers', apparently without consulting anybody. I guess, if I were writing about it now, there would be a couple more 'angry chapters'.

I remember one of many meetings, in November 1978, when, frankly, Scotstown Moor did not appear to advantage. For one thing, a rotting mattress lay half-in, half-out of the bog-pool, and a litter of plastic sacks strewed the bank. A posse of District Councillors debouched from their limousines, and I was asked to explain the interest of this unprepossessing place. A cold wind was blowing and one sensed their impatience to return. I also noticed how their eyes glazed over as I went on about the species-rich heathland, and, look, look, do you see here the winter-dried remains of the black bog-rush, a key species! Bog-rush, or was that bog-brush? Nobody cared. So they went back to their nice warm offices. And then earmarked it as a camp for the travelling community.

It was Scotstown Moor, as much as anything, that became the germ, the catalyst as it were, for my first book, The Natural History of Aberdeen. Urban ecology was coming into vogue just then. The NCC had commissioned 'Bunny' Teagle to survey the unexpected wildlife lurking in the 'endless village' of Birmingham, and his report had been given generous airtime - thanks in part to a rare spider that had made its unlikely home under the arches of Spaghetti Junction. George Barker had lately become the NCC's first urban wildlife adviser. Aberdeen, it seemed to me, was the perfect model for a study of wildlife within the city. For Aberdeen was in many ways a city apart, not only in its far northern location and distance, but also in its setting, at the mouth of two rivers, the Don and the Dee, a metropolis of granite facing the grey North Sea.

The book came about in this way. As I mentioned three chapters ago (were you paying attention?), my predecessor, Robin Callander, had turned to publishing; he edited a magazine about his local community called The History of Birse. We met up from time to time and talked about projects. One was about Aberdeen, a portrait of the wildlife co-existing with the richest, most rapidly developing, city in Scotland. It seemed attainable after due research - and, I thought, since I was stuck in this place, I might as well try and make the most of it. Mike Matthew was willing to allow me time off to write it, but only so long as the NCC kept half the royalties. There was a way around that; Robin split the royalties in two, into a public account, and a private donation. The NCC took only the income from the former, but no one noticed, and no one cared anyway; Mike was just doing things by the book.

I researched it at odd moments, meeting experts on the wildlife, birds above all, and with the people who ran the parks and public spaces, most notably David Welch, the man who helped the city win Britain in Bloom year after year. His secret, he told me (while begging not to be quoted), was the realisation that red roses make the perfect match for Aberdeen's sparkling grey granite. His rose budget was virtually open-ended; he had recently planted another 20,000 rose bushes on a custom-built mound in Duthie Park. The complaint of the birders was that the City's famous parks were still managed the old-fashioned way with short-clipped grass, formal beds, and nowhere for a bird to hide, or nest. Aberdeen, I was learning, might be the super-city of the north, but it tended to lag behind the times in other ways. For instance, Tullos Hill, the windy, heather-covered hills at the City's southern boundary, had become a landfill site, leaking toxic waste, amid a perpetual blizzard of bin-bags. It was this Mordor-like scene that welcomed the visitor on the coast road as he neared the you hoped for as you neared the offshore oil capital of Europe.

I had hoped for an enthusiastic foreword by Wynne-Edwards, he who had lent his name to our Aberdeen office, and whose photographic portrait glowered over our meetings. But, having dutifully read the manuscript, he declined. I had been critical of the city authority, he pointed out, and he thought that was a bit unfair. Isolated as it is, cold, lonely, and smelling of fish, people get very fond of Aberdeen and resent any criticism. If you feel that strongly about it, suggested W-E, you should stand for the Council yourself. On a more positive note, the City's sense of esprit de corps gave my first book a more rapturous reception than anything I have written since. I was interviewed on television (both channels!) and radio, reviewed in local papers (including profiles!) and Aberdeen's Leopard magazine. The bookshops, including the biggest one, Watt & Grant on Union Street, made it the basis of their window displays that week. I even appeared on Radio Aberdeen's equivalent of Desert Island Discs.

A Natural History of Aberdeen is not, in fact, a very good book. It was published by 'the People's Press', and the production was amateurish; the font is faint and the lines cramped, the map is rubbish, and the design laughable. It seems to me now to lack a sense of the granite city, and there's a strange reluctance to use quotations or mention names, apart from a few long-dead naturalists. And it hardly mentions the impact of offshore oil development at all. Very rum. At the time, of course, I was immoderately proud of it. A published author! Had my regional colleagues written any books? No, they hadn't! I might be only a humble 'assistant', but when it came to penmanship, young Peter was king!

My diary of that time might give the impression that I did pretty much as I liked: a sort of freelance naturalist on a civil-service salary. I think that's a false impression, unfortunately. I was certainly given generous latitude to follow my interests, in a way impossible in busier regions. I was able to do a lot of extra-curricular stuff, and to roam my domain, limping from place to place in the battered Beagle. But everyday work is boring to record, and I probably didn't bother to mention the long hours at my metal table in the garret, transferring dross from in-tray to out-tray, day after day. Or indeed, the other times, the banter with the typists, the discussions over coffee in our little library, or the lunchtime pints in Aberdonian bars with my amiable new colleague, Steve North - known as 'Stan', because he came from Yorkshire. By the time my first book was published, in 1982, I was already thinking of myself as not a civil-service assitant so much as a naturalist in the north, the wildlife guy, with a growing public profile, and a consequentially casual attitude to routine work. By allowing me to write that book, did Mike Matthew realise he might be fostering a cuckoo in his nest?

It was shortly after this unexpected encounter that I nearly touched the void. There is a gully on Ben Avon, a nasty, stony, slippery one, that falls between cliffs, and I was eager to check it out because a rare saxifrage grows there. Its location had been a secret, not so much because of any risk to the plant but to the foolhardy person looking for it. As I found out when some rock gave way, and down that gully I slithered, at gathering speed. I eventually slid to a halt just as a nasty drop opened up which would have bounced me a thousand feet or so before dumping what was left in the defile of Strathavon, food for the nearest eagle or raven. I was shaking so much that my picture of the wretched saxifrage came out all blurry. But, it's funny, such things don't bother you for long, not when you are young and think yourself immortal, and soon I was on my way again, marching along, whistling a happy tune. One result of botanical scrambling is that you lose your natural fear of heights, and start thinking you are Chris Bonington. Which might end badly.

Generally speaking, you don't need to risk your life for plants. Most of our alpines grow on nice sheltered ledges that accumulate snow to protect them from the worst of the winter frosts and winds. In many cases you can walk right up to them without climbing. Even the Blue-Sow-thistle, noted for growing on 'vertiginous heights' that even the deer and sheep can't reach, is fairly easy to reach if you don't look down. I have clambered up to all of its locations, and later wrote a paper about the plant for the prestige journal, Watsonia. The sad thing about the poor old sow-thistle is that it isn't really a mountain plant at all. It simply got stranded up there because its usual haunts down there in the glen had been eaten out by deer. In its weedy way, the Blue Sow-thistle embodies the plight of wildlife in the Highlands, with the number one problem being overgrazing. The deer and sheep are eating the life out of the place. [There are a few exceptions now. At the Mar Lodge estate, which was on my patch, and also at Craig Meagaidh in the central Highlands, there have been successful attempts to cull the deer to more sustainable numbers - but to do so, we first needed to buy the land. The Red Deer Commission, set up in 1959, are useless].

My keenness to find plants was noted and, at Charles Gimingham's earnest request, I took over as official recorder for South Aberdeenshire, 'vice-county' no. 92. Aberdeenshire has never had an individual flora, a compilation of the region's plants. Botanically it is one of the least well-explored parts of Britain, even compared with the far north or the western isles. Much of it is remote, and also pretty dull. You could, for instance, spend a whole day tramping to the top of Mount Keen and see bugger all of interest apart from a few sedges and an infinity of heather. Charles Gimingham (a world expert on heather, as it happens) had been the token recorder for years, and he was only too pleased to hand over the series of record cards housed in a green tin box. I'm afraid I wasn't much of a recorder either; it becomes very boring, identifying and ticking all the plants in each 10 by 10-kilometre square. Takes a certain kind of enthusiast, which, when push comes to shove, I wasn't. And Aberdeenshire still doesn't have a Flora.

In pursuit of plants, I attended a few courses at Kindrogan Field Centre in neighbouring Perthshire, which the NCC obligingly paid for. There was one on lichens, run by a wheezing, dyspeptic Frank Brightman, author of The Oxford Book on Flowerless Plants. There was another on mosses and liverworts, by the centre's head, Brian Brookes, and a third one on fungi, run by Roy Watling. On the last, Heather Angel joined in, teaching us how to photograph the mushies in natural light with the help of tin foil, a sheet, and a torch. These were all fun, although most of my fellow coursees seemed reluctant to go to the pub afterwards, wishing, presumably, to extract the very last pennyworth of their investment. Despite this, I never did become very knowledgeable about mosses or lichens, which all look the same to me, though I can see why people are fascinated by them. Even otherwise normal people, sometimes. As for the mushies, I knew them pretty well already. But it made a nice free holiday.

I also recorded (and, per confessionum, killed and mounted) moths, which you mainly catch with a light trap. My great friend in this line was Mark Young, a zoologist at Aberdeen University. Mark was my tutor in the more arcane ways of catching and studying moths, such as 'sallowing' - an early spring activity where you clamber up a tree, and then shake or jump on the branches to send the moths tumbling down onto a sheet laid out for your inspection. There was also 'dusking' where you kick about in the long grass with a net, catching the sleepy little things as they are disturbed from their rightful rest. And, best of all, there was 'treacling' when you paint a sticky concoction of Fowler's Black, beer and rancid bananas onto a tree trunk and return later with a red torch (moths can't see red) - for moths, the equivalent of a night out at the pub. None of these methods were needed for my favourite moth, the Kentish Glory, so named because it is confined to the eastern Highlands of Scotland. It is indeed glorious, a moth with a tartan pattern and a body as warm and furry as a guardsman's bearskin. Better still, it has the grace to fly by day, with a fast, tumbling flight across the heather. Unfortunately, the subtle beauty of moths seemed to leave my NCC colleagues cold. Just bat food, innit? That was why I so appreciated Mark, who was also chair of the local wildlife trust. Enthusiasms are sweetest when shared.

My best mothy find was the Chocolate-tip, pale, stripey grey, and with what looks like a square of Cadbury's on each wing. Old Chocky was unknown to Scotland before I discovered him. Later we found its caterpillar, which makes a little tent out of a folded aspen leaf and creeps out of it at night. So that was all good.

I also became interested in dragonflies, encouraged by meeting the top Odonata guy, Cyril Hammond. He showed me the impressive artwork for his new book, which for some years was the classic handbook on these lovely insects. "Go on, show your knowledge", he implored, expecting me to identify each untitled plate. I became a co-founder of the British Dragonfly Society and the North-east's first dragonfly recorder. Actually, there weren't many species to record so far north, but I did make one notable discovery. Mark Young had found a larva in Loch Kinord which he suspected to be that of the rare Northern Damselfly, Coenagrion hastulatum. Next summer, I spent some time wading among the sedge lawns of that loch, and there, sure enough, was the rare damselfly, and lots of them too. It turned out to be quite common in ponds in the Dinnet area, perhaps more so than in any other part of Britain. And so I was the first person to see and recognise that beautiful insect in Deeside in over ten thousand years. Which was also good.

One of the ways we could specialise was to bag a habitat. John Forster, for instance, was our lead on native pine woods. With my interest in dragonflies, I chose freshwater. Apart from offshore islands, the North-east is the region of Britain with the smallest biodiversity. We had the fewest butterflies, the fewest grasshoppers, the fewest bats (just three species), the fewest freshwater fish; but we made up for that in scarce northern species and being the centre for Britain's sub-arctic flora and fauna. The freshwater flora, though, was the exception. The clearest of our cold lakes, those with a non-agricultural catchment, such as Loch Kinord, were fantastically rich in what botanists call the macrophytes; submerged water-weeds. It might well have been the primordial flora, the one that had existed elsewhere before we polluted everything. Encouraged by a visit from our freshwater specialists, Chris Newbold and Margaret Palmer, I spent some of the best moments of my last years in a borrowed boat, using a weed-drag, or even actually swimming. I had become used to wild, cold-water ducking and diving. I'd swum with salmon in the Dee, and skinny-dipped in the burns. I'd nosed my way along through the dark, peat-stained waters of Highland lochs. But the best experience of all was skin-diving with flippers and snorkel in cold, gin-clear water, enjoying the sensual flicker of weed round your legs or the silvery flash of a fish, here and gone in a shimmer. In a good loch, you swim through a jungle of weed, almost like a coastal kelp forest but much more delicate and tramslucent. It's lovely down there, on a warm summer day in the Highlands, and what you find is often a discovery. No one else is doing it. You're alone in the icy element, among nature, and (like sex, I suppose), the feeling's beyond words.

I researched the book in the library of Marischal College, that wondrous building of Aberdeen-Gothic, and in the process became an ex-officio member of the university and regular user of the senior common room. I looked up primary sources, wherever possible, which meant I needed to learn and decipher Old Scots. For a year, I was steeped in the historical literature of the Scottish North-east. I think Grampian Battlefields was a pretty decent piece of historical investigation, but it was a devil to get published. David Stevenson, a historian at the university specialising in the Civil Wars, did his best to help. My first would-be publisher went bankrupt, and it was only through David's good offices that the book was eventually re-edited and brought out, very handsomely, by Aberdeen University Press, then owned by the dreaded Robert Maxwell. As 'an exercise in historical reasoning and historical imagination', my battles book was runner-up for the Saltire Prize, Scotland's national book award. Its promoters were nonplussed to discover that its author was an Englishman, and, by then, no longer resident in Scotland. Various pundits said nice things about it. In terms of its lifetime in print, twenty years or more, Grampian Battlefields could be said to be one of my more successful books. When Maxwell's empire collapsed, the title was bought by Mercat Press in Edinburgh, with a new jacket depicting showing some Scots sweating and heaving at a reenactment of the Battle of Bannockburn - a battle I didn't cover.

My involvement with local radio came about early on after Chris Lowell, who worked for the BBC, interviewed me at the opening of the Muir of Dinnet reserve. One thing led to another, and very soon I was writing my own scripts for ten-minute readings on Radio Aberdeen. The studio, at Beechgrove Terrace, was just round the corner from us, and many was the day when I would toddle round. Some of the readings were merely factual, about local wildlife, but others veered towards satire, or as much satire as the listeners of Aberdeen might reasonably be expected to cope with. I once involved the regional officer, Mike Matthew, in a piece about notifying nature reserves in outer space. He played up well, with some of his own ideas about how to notify comets. But the problem with doing satire in Aberdeen was that the pieces were presented po-faced, as if I meant every word. There were anxious letters about another such piece in which I advocated replacing all the trees in the parks with plastic ones. By no means everyone thought that was a great idea. Chris Lowell sent some of the better pieces to BBC's magazine, The Listener, in which they were published together with a cartoon by Larry. There were spin-offs too: various brains-trusts, in which I appeared with other pundits, including Dick Balharry and Adam Watson. When I was the guest on the local version of Desert Island Discs, I chose sentimental ballads about Scotland's wonderful wild lands, and a bagpipe tune, the Floors o'th' Forest, not because I liked them, but because it seemed appropriate.

My pieces for local newspapers began after the publication of A Natural History of Aberdeen. The first was a short series, in the city's Evening Express, on habitats within the city, including the City's lost loch. Next up was another short set on wild flowers, each ending with what was intended to be an unexpected twist, and then a more 'gothic' series on mushrooms with headings (not mine) like 'Horror of the creeping slime' and 'A witch in fairy mantle'. After that I think I moved from ecology to memorial stones, a spin-off from my battlefield research, which included a 'Grave of a corpulent king' and 'End of the line for Macbeth'. One of the last sets was simply titled 'Nature', but not nice nature. It was about the horrible things that live in your carpet and under your bed, and in the bathroom, the sort of things you probably wouldn't want to conserve. Actually the paper would probably have accepted any old crap, but I did my best to be entertaining, and they sometimes sent out a professional photographer, or hired a cartoonist for the more far-out stuff. Journalism and the BBC scripts represented a nice little income supplement. I was rather proud of the fact that I earned as much as my boss, though I never managed to save very much.

Then there were talks. After a couple of sticky ones about My Job (yawn), I realised what many of us appear not to have done, and that was that it is about entertainment at least as much as education. The naked truth doesn't always sing well on its own. You need to use your personality to give truth a bit of a spin: make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em think. A good speaker should have the audience in the palm of their hand. Dick Balharry could hold a room by dint of his large presence and animal stories. I tried to use wit, or what passed for it, anything to make them like me. When it works, speaking can be a tonic. The easy laughter of an audience is a lovely thing. You can surf that sound. Of course, there is the concomitant danger that you might just as easily make an arse of yourself - or, even more dangerously, anger your paymasters. But when it goes well, the uplift is giddying. You understand then why people take to the stage. I am rather modest and shy by nature, except after a few pints, and so this suppressed inner showman took me by surprise. I suppose it made me a bit cocky. I began to think of myself as a local celeb.

The downside of any success is that you are in demand. After the publication of Aberdeen, every local society, big or small, wanted me as a speaker, and, as an NCC official, I felt I couldn't charge, or at least not much. I should have. Some of the venues were a waste of time. Perhaps the worst was an invitation to speak to the Aberdeen Soroptimists, a sisterhood of businesswomen. It sounded impressive, but what I didn't know was that there were only about five of them, and that their ancient projector would cook my trannies. The best were the AGMs where I was guest speaker. The gust of applause at the end of one show I did for the Scottish Wildlife Trust - a journey down the River Dee, I think it was - damn near knocked me off the rostrum. They loved me! Yes, up there in the North-east, among the growing number of people who liked nature, I felt like the star of the show. Not a jobsworth, not a blank-faced functionary, but the nature guy. But, of course, all this was extra-curricular, and subsidiary. I was still an ARO in the NCC, and, yes, as you may be thinking, you could be riding for a fall, If so, you're not wrong.

I played no part in this process. For one thing, Morton Boyd liked to keep his Scottish 'team' more or less sealed off from events down south. There was no comparable pressure for change in Scotland, where the voluntary sector was weak to invisible. Hence, when the Act became law, and each of us was given a copy, the realisation of what it would mean suddenly hit us. It was a shock. We had to make this thing work! My copy was inscribed by John Forster: 'read, mark, learn'. Yes, we learned, protection for SSSIs had indeed been improved, to the extent that we had to be consulted over 'potentially damaging operations'. Legally-binding agreements could be made over their future - though whether there would be a budget to pay for them was another matter. But the difficulty was that, before an SSSI received the benefit of the new law, each and every one of them had to be renotified. And that was our job, my job. In some counties it took ten years.

'Renotification' became the core of our work, and bloody tedious it was. Identifying a place of sufficient interest, drawing a line round it, and describing the interest was the easy bit. More time-consuming were the meetings with owners, tenants and estate factors, who naturally wanted to know exactly how all this would affect them, and weren't necessarily pleased when told. Many were perturbed by our lists of 'potentially damaging operations' (PDOs - we even had anagrams for those), some of which were normal practice on farms and estates. Development lobbies viewed it as land sterilisation. Some interpreted it as backdoor nationalisation, or, at the very least, an attack on the hallowed rights of farmers and landowners to work the land as they thought fit. Our reply was that they farmed with the help of public money, and so it was right that the public had some say in what they did with it. The Government seemed to imagine that the process would be nice n' smooth, with an amiable give-and-take on both sides. Were they really that naïve? It wasn't like that. Of course it wasn't.

The effect of the Act was to immerse us in a quagmire of red-tape for years on end. Renotification absorbed our energies, and became close to being an end in itself. To ensure that the process was legally watertight, we were obliged to make heavy weather of it. Each renotification went through about thirteen different stages, before being finally approved (or not) at director level. It also involved the sideways step of negotiating formal agreements if the owners insisted, as was their right. Government might have envisaged SSSIs as odd corners that could be set aside, but some of mine were estate-sized. The worst cases of all were commons, where the commoners, as well as landowners, had rights, including how many animals they could graze (which was generally far too many for the good of the habitat). I, for one, soon began to feel less like the nature guy and more like a bureaucrat. Or some poor sod on a production line with every day threatening to look like the day before.

We weren't given any special training. Earlier, I had been on a few official exercises. One was the standard 'management' course, at Cardington, in which we had to go through all kinds of cringe-making group routines. Another was a course at an agricultural college where the farming industry was explained, and we were told how excellent it was. Nature conservation, they insisted, must fit into the excellent existing system. Derek Ratcliffe believed the purpose of such things was to emphasise our place in the rural peck-order - right down there at the bottom.

The one thing the NCC did do was to commission a leaflet designed to explain the Act to landowners. The notification process was outlined with the help of cartoons. These showed a smirking, curly-haired, bespectacled creep presenting documents to a stereotyped Farmer Giles. Young Creepy offers the baffled hayseed long lists of stuff, before nailing a notice to a tree. And of course, this smug twat was meant to be a typical ARO, that is, you and me. God, we felt so ashamed.

Bill Adams described renotifying SSSIs as 'walking to the moon'. There were around 1,200 of them in Scotland, split between just 22 of us. I decided to start with some new sites worthy of SSSI status. The candidates had built up over the years. There was Eslie Moss, whose irate owner threatened to take me to court for trespassing. There was Quithel Wood, by the Dee, where this time the anger erupted from a local councillor who had decided to make a name for himself as a scourge of bureaucracy. And then there was the old railway line at St Cyrus. Since Beecham had closed the line, it had developed into a veritable rock garden of wild flowers, including rarities like Yellow Vetch, Maiden Pink and Nottingham Catchfly. Unfortunately the owner, who had bought the line for a penny and a handshake, first stripped it bare, with the help of her sheep, and then used it as landfill. When I called by with my papers, she entertained me to tea and scones, which seemed like a jolly good start. But her view was that "you can't stop me, can you?" Oh, come, come, dear lady. Swallowing my second scone (very good these; the Scots know about scones), I looked up and then read out the penalty clauses for knowingly damaging an SSSI. The riot act! Shortly afterwards, I was shown the door. We gradually learned to be more diplomatic. The trick was to do the easy cases first and leave the hard ones till last. Hopefully they would fall to someone else. Unfortunately, time wasn't always on our side, and quite a few SSSIs were destroyed before they could be notified.

There were a few that I didn't intend to deal with at all. One involved the stately home of Marcus Humphrey of Dinnet. The NCC geologist expected me to notify the house, for Christ's sake, or at least the grounds on which it stood. It was, apparently, situated on a fine example of an 'outwash apron', a natural terrace formed by glacial meltwater. No way, hosay, we needed Marcus's co-operation on more important things. Another was a stretch of heather moorland near Ballater called Cairn Leuchan. There were heather moors stretching from end to end of my patch, and, what, I asked our uplands specialist, was so special about this one? Ah, he said, it was a very good example. It was a natural heather moor, while most of the other heather moors were managed grouse moors and so were, in his view, less natural. But THIS IS A GROUSE MOOR TOO! His hackles rose. He was, after all, senior to me. JFDI: "Just do it". It seemed to me then, and since, that NCC's scientists had a much easier ride (and better promotion prospects) than Assistant Regional Officers. Did I do it? Course not.

One of the oddest cases was Ballochbuie, the pine forest on Balmoral estate, owned by the Queen in person, not as an estate of the Crown. Our meeting with the estate factor, Martin Leslie, was chilly. He harboured grave doubts about whether the Act applied to the estate, and invoked Crown immunity. And then he told us he was busy and invited us to leave. He was right. After my time, Ballochbuie had to be 'denotified', and is no longer an SSSI (although even Leslie could not prevent its declaration under the European Habitats Directive as a Special Area). I was once given access to Ballochbuie, a privilege granted to few. The forest has some pretty bridges, and figures carved out of granite, but also hideous bulldozed tracks and bonkers schemes to encourage regeneration. Also plenty of deer fences for the unfortunate capercaillie and black grouse to crash into. Oh, and a sauna! I hadn't realised that the monarch was still above the law. I thought all that had been sorted out at the time of Magna Carta.

If renotifying my sites was bad enough, it was worse for some of my colleagues. Peter Reynolds, who was new to the NCC when he was outposted as our man in Orkney, faced what was a virtual a revolt by local farmers, hoping to reclaim the moors for agriculture, and was burned in effigy for his pains. That job should never have been given to someone inexperienced, but we were thinly stretched, and no one else was available. Peter became so disillusioned that he left the organisation after a few years. As for my Yorkshire friend Steve 'Stan' North, our man in Buchan and Banff, we shared an acute sense of embarrassment when visiting farmers with our sheaves of papers, taken from a briefcase. As Stan might have put it, "it were sae bloody nanglin', I felt an arse". Especially when the man got "right radge wi' me". 'Radge' is northern for 'angry', and there were cases where the local ARO had to be accompanied by a police officer after being threatened with violent eviction. There was at least one site where I was told the man would be waiting for me with a shotgun. It worked: I didn't renotify that one either. In other ways it was a bit easier for me because we did hire a young chap to deal with the paperwork. "Ee, you're a right jammy bugger", said Stan.

In his posthumous memoirs, our 'Director Scotland', Morton Boyd, claimed that the Act lost us 'hearts and minds' north of the border. I wouldn't put it quite like that. Before 1981 hardly anybody had ever heard of us. No hearts, no minds. Afterwards, it was different, and we managed to get up a lot of corporate noses. The NCC was ill-prepared for a more public role. And under-funded too. The Act made us enemies in Scotland. Improved protection of SSSIs brought us into conflict with existing dedication schemes for forestry, and with moorland reclamation and other farming improvements, especially in 'less favoured areas'. In the Cairngorms, our resistance to further roads, and the expansion of ski-ing into unspoiled corries, irritated the Highlands and Islands Development Board and the tourism lobby. The Scottish establishment is smaller and tighter than the English. We weren't popular in the Scottish Office, nor in the departments either. It all blew up later in the 1980s after the NCC's attempts to safeguard 'the flow country' of the far north from mass forestry. Even our supposed allies, notably the RSPB, were critical because they thought we were proceeding too slowly and too cautiously. Yes, it was getting lonely in NCC Scotland. We might think of ourselves as environmental saints, avant la letter, but all the same, as we were coming to realise, no one loved us.

My second board, at GB headquarters in Belgrave Square, two years later (so, it wasn't next year, Morton), was even worse. The first one had at least been fair. At the second, I felt that they were out to get me. They dissed my whole career. My involvement in National Nature Reserves was held against me. My extra-curricular stuff didn't impress them a jot ("you shouldn't have the time!"). My anecdotes were held to reveal a lack of seriousness. It became clear that I was being tested for suitability in a career of team-building and immersion in small-print. Pressed into a corner, I admitted that I wasn't turned on by that prospect, at which I fancy I heard an exhalation of breath. Gotcha! I watched them scribbling notes, probably something pretty unpleasant. Mene, mene tekel upharsin. 'You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting'. Hey, promo-boy, if you want to get on, try losing your personality! No, we don't want your kind here.

I emerged feeling an urgent need for a long, cleansing shower. But within the hour I had a date in London with Yvie, and so f**k them. When I returned to the North-east (safe again!) I decided to f**k them some more by writing a sarcastic appeal against my expected failure. And, a little later, I f**ked them again by penning a satirical account of my interview for our staff magazine, Natural Selection. I thought, if I'm going to burn my bridges, I'll do it publicly. Of course, it wasn't wise. But I'd been humiliated, and the best way to cauterise that feeling of rejection was to make fun of them. And the result? A letter from Establishments to my Regional Officer containing the words, 'ought not to be an ARO' but 'placed in some other role suited to his talents'. So much for my performance reviews, and so much for Mike Matthew's authority. "Watch out", warned Mike.

There was more head-shaking from Morton. "You antagonise them". Well, Morton, I felt they'd antagonised me. "What happens to you at interviews?" Well, there was a certain amount of irony here, because Morton was about to f**k up too. It turned out that passing the promotion board was something of a poisoned chalice. Even if you did, you weren't promoted right away. You were merely given a 'ticket' for whenever a suitable post became vacant. And, the chances were that it would mean you'd have to move, probably to somewhere like Bolton or Grantham. As Morton was about to demonstrate, that move could be compulsory, even if you preferred to remain where you were, at your present grade. This compulsion was new, and it hit our region like a thunderclap. Dave Morris was told that he had to move from his comfortable nest in Speyside to Kinlochewe, wherever the hell that is. Mike Richardson had to move from Shetland, where he had been so effective, for a stint at headquarters 'for the good of your career'. And, a little later, my friend and boss, John Forster, was informed he had to move too, simply because he had a ticket. The union took up their cases, and I'm told that Morton broke down, blubbing, realising his staff didn't love him anymore. Surprise, surprise, there's not a word about any of this in 'The Song of the Sandpiper'.

The result? Evidently not what Morton, or the 'Estabs' team behind him, had expected. In the end, most of us left the organisation. Dave Morris became head of the Ramblers in Scotland, free to campaign at last. Mike Richardson went on to head the Antarctic Survey. John Forster's wife, born and bred in the North-east, refused to budge, and so John was forced to leave too. He became careers adviser at Aberdeen University. The same thing happened to my next boss, Dick Hornby, and for the same reason. In his case promotion entailed a move to some ghastly job in the NCC's new headquarters in Peterborough. He wasn't keen, and his wife was even less keen. Dick ended up as a consultant ecologist in Abu Dhabi. John told me he felt rather proud that nearly all his staff had found new, and arguably better, careers. But many of us would have stayed, had we only retained the freedom to make our own decisions. It dawned on me that this was a new kind of NCC; no longer so amiable and bumbling, but more hard-nosed, and, in my view, a great deal more stupid. As it grew bigger and more bureaucratic, the NCC no longer seemed so much like a union of like-minds. We felt more like pawns in a game played by people we didn't respect. The Golden Age, it was pretty clear, was over.

One sign of change was the new intake of Assistant Regional Officers. I remember the names of most of those who were in post when I joined. Some, like Peter Wormell and Sandy MacLennan, became good friends. Though personal style and circumstance differed, we shared a basic similarity of outlook. We met once or twice a year in Edinburgh, and in the evenings in the pub there was plenty to talk about: common experience, stories and anecdotes, personalities, laughter (especially about the personalities): the interest and amusement of life. It was a relaxed gathering of peers. But the new lot that joined us after the 1981 Act, were different. The pub talk - those that still came to the pub - became more exclusively work-orientated. They seemed to take themselves and their duties very seriously. More professional, you might say. Yes, come the 1980s, it was full steam ahead on HMS Culture-change. Management was the name of the game now. Instead of product we were stuck with process. The old mavericks were being upstaged by the new jobsworths. John Forster explained my lack of progress like this: "You're different, you see. They want people who are the same".

Perhaps I exaggerate a little. Those at the front line were still committed, and often very knowledgeable, naturalists. We retained old stars like Colin Tubbs and Martin George and George Peterken. Let's just put it this way. In the 1970s, to join the NCC was to win the wildlife lottery; it was the best job in nature conservation. And, by 1990, it wasn't. There were more and better alternatives in the voluntary sector. Moreover, observers were noticing that the NCC and its successor bodies had become more regimented, more internalised, and that they talked baffling gobbledegook. Barrie Goldsmith, my old tutor at UCL, had taken his students to NCC's Northminster House in Peterborough, to learn about the work. They came away, in Barrie's word, 'uninspired'. "That's not a place I'd ever want to work in", they agreed. And that was another thing: the workplace. When I joined, many of us were based in nice places in the country, like Blackhall in the Lake District or Attingham Park near Shrewsbury. Our GB HQ was at the very grand Belgrave Square, SW.1., among the embassies. By the Nineties, all these nice places were gone, and instead we worked in modern offices in the middle of cities. And different kinds of people were in charge. The characters and people of real, and personal, achievement, the Morton Boyds and Norman Moores of this world, were gone and often replaced by characters from business backgrounds who spent their time devising 'vision statements'. I think I preferred Morton's 'voice in the mountains'.

So, by 1983, there were certainly portents. From Aberdeen, where news was often slow to arrive, and felt like a long way away, we were caught up in our own world within a world. We were still a small region where everybody knew one another well. Apart from poor Peter Reynolds, nobody wanted to move. But even in Aberdeen, you could sense change coming, that inhouse future of memos, management and meetings. There was a question I was asking myself with increasing insistency. Yes, the North-east was comfortable, but there was a world outside. As The Clash sang around this time on their album Combat Rock- Should I stay or should I go?

Three things happened, one after the other, that helped to make up my mind. The first came after I had accompanied my brother in a small aircraft, flying across the snowy Cairngorms to our office in Aviemore. Since we were having a regional meeting the next day, I invited an attractive intern who I fancied to accompany us back, a free flight. I would put her up in my flat overnight and we could then drive to Aberdeen together. Cunning plan, what? Anyway, to cut a long story short, she set fire to my flat. It wasn't intentional. She just wanted a nice warm fire, and the chimney of the wood stove, unused to such heat, began to glow red hot. And then, in its haste, the fire engine knocked down the gate. Once they had finished hosing it down, my flat was in the hell of a mess. Girls, eh? One of my colleagues wrote up the episode for the staff magazine, Natural Selection (with a walk-on part for Dave Morris as 'Mr Angry'), helping to set the seal on my reputation as an eccentric.

The second thing also involved a girl, none other than Scarlet Annie, the very same young lady that my brother stole from me at my house-warming party the previous year. Annie liked to drop round sometimes for drinks and music, and on this occasion, she told me she would like to try some magic mushrooms. Well, I found some - "ooh, they're like popcorn!" - but disappointingly, they didn't seem to have much of an effect. She needed to nip next door to the pub to buy some fags or something, and she was gone a long time. Eventually, and in a foul mood, I traced her to the bar, and there she was, stoned out of her mind, surrounded by many young chaps. Pushing my way through, I'm afraid I had words with one of those chaps, with the result that he hit me in the eye. What a sad end to our evening! I began to think that, at 32, I was getting a bit old for this kind of thing.

Episode three followed a week or two later. There was a new magazine called Ecos, founded by a group of eco-zealots to discuss environmental topics of the day. One of the founders was an old acquaintance, Charlie Pye-Smith. He'd asked me for a light-hearted piece, for Ecos seemed to be short of those, and I decided to pen a satirical account about what a bloody chore it was, notifying SSSIs to uncomprehending farm tenants in the Highlands. Unfortunately, I'd noted that, among the many difficulties, was the sad fact that you couldn't understand a single word they said. This was true, but not tactful, and especially not coming from an Englishman in Scotland. I thought it pretty unlikely that any tenant or crofter would read Ecos. Unfortunately for me, someone else did, a journalist called Jim Hunter. I knew him slightly; he had written a nice review of A Natural History of Aberdeen, and since then I had fed him a few stories. But he evidently decided that my little miscalculation was the best story of the lot, for it ended up in The Scotsman newspaper, with adverse comments. And if that wasn't bad enough, I was verbally assailed at a joint NCC-ITE seminar by the grouse man, Adam Watson, who had also taken offence at my light-hearted piece. That took me by surprise. There was no warning, and in situations like this you need to think quickly; a spirited reply in public might make a bad situation even worse. So, instead I had a word with him afterwards. I made it clear what I thought of him, not that he cared.

There was a party afterwards at John Forster's farmhouse. Watson wasn't there, not being a social man. There was much sympathy for me, and some disparagement of Watson. The station head, David Jenkins, proposed to have a word with his errant colleague the next day, but I told him not to bother.

What hurt most about the Hunter/Watson attack was that it looked as though my imminent move to Berkshire - England's equivalent of Devil's Island, Watson had suggested - was punishment for writing the Ecos piece. It wasn't. And it wasn't going to be Berkshire either. Peter Schofield told me that a new situation had arisen. Oxfordshire was now available. Its ARO, Joanna Martin, was moving to Lincoln on a promotion ticket. Peter told me that Oxfordshire was a much better county than Berkshire, and one more suited to my experience. There were of course snags. One was that I would be based at the regional office, a good twenty miles away from the nearest Oxfordshire road-sign. The job would clearly involve a lot of travel to and fro. And the county had well over 100 SSSIs to renotify. A very tedious future was staring me in the face, as it did to many AROs across the land.

Mike Matthew thought I must be mad. "No accounting for taste", he wrote on my leaving card. They all thought the same. Perhaps it was mad, but restlessness, a black eye, and now Adam Watson had made up my mind. It seemed to me that if I didn't move now, I might be stuck in the North-east for another seven years - and doing what? More of the same, with, at most, maybe another book, probably on the natural history of the Dee. A fresh scene seemed preferable, and besides, that scene was rural England, and I was English. And surely nowhere (thought I) is more English than Oxfordshire, home of the dreaming spires, the willow-margined Thames, the verdant meads, the hanging woods, the Lewis Carroll landscapes. It was the very essence of what I had missed all those years. Seven years' absence does make the heart fonder you know.

There was also the transfer windfall, though I nearly cocked it up. The exact financial terms of a move depended on whether or not you are a 'householder'. That assessment, it seemed, rested on whether I owned the kitchen cooker, and, like an ass, I said I didn't, no. In that one word I nearly signed away about five thousand quid. Fortunately my landlord, David Levie, was a lawyer. He knew what to do, and produced an affidavit to say the cooker was in fact mine, and so was everything else in the flat. So, I got the deal. Phew! I handed over the job to my replacement, one Phil Rothwell. He was one of the new kinds of ARO: young, sober, serious, and bearded. Though perhaps tact wasn't his strongest suit. I was told that the first thing he said to Dick Balharry was, "Peter tells me you can be a complete pain in the arse!" [Rothwell, predicably, climbed some way up the greasy pole. In the 1990s, one saw him occasionally on the television news, informing us that the Environment Agency, for which he now worked, was amazing, helping to avoid floods, and making sure the water was always nice and pure].

The last week went past in a blur. I had many farewells to make when, usually, out came the whisky bottle. The office had had a whip-around, and a generous one too. Unfortunately they blew most of it on a stripper. I was in the hotel bar with my colleagues all around, and in she came, pointing at me. Yes, lucky man, it's you! Who me? (oh shit, not me!) Well, what a lovely surprise, oof, don't wiggle, love, I've just had a skinful of beer. Later on, there was a presentation in the meeting room, with the face of Wynne-Edwards still glowering from the wall, flanked by my mounted pictures of the Dee, the Cairngorms, the ancient pines. It went on a bit. Afterwards John and I had a few more pints, and someone gave me a lift home to Aboyne, slumped in the back like a sack of apples.

It was now the end of April, the sudden spring of Deeside, all the sweeter for being late. The riverbank smelt deliciously lemony, from the resin bursting from birch buds. Pine cones crackled and popped in the sudden heat. Salmon were leaping. Lizards rustled through the grass. Won't be seeing much of you guys where I'm going, I thought. The sky was streaked with mare's tails, presaging a storm I wouldn't be there to see. Why am I doing this? Why am I leaving this beautiful place? Fate, it seemed to me, creeps up on you, like Old Father Time. All of a sudden it has you in its grip. You obey its injunctions, passively. You float into the future, just like that fag packet I now saw on the river, drifting along to its destiny. Could I pretend to myself that being based in Berkshire, responsible for Oxfordshire, meant coming home at last? Or was it all just a dream?