Flashback, 25 years, to evenings spent, with friends, in this modern landscape faux, watching birdlife, but mainly immersed in nature past. Twice bitten and thrice shy of mosquitoes but determined to experience this amazing nature at peak season.
And what a season spring is in this magical bed of reeds, from the eerie drumming of the courting snipe to the booming bittern and the darting hobby. Such treats of nature.
A nature, though passed, conserved today as remembrance of an earlier work of man.

Flash, more distantly, back a century. Rothschild's vision encompassed no less than 284 sites he deemed "worthy of preservation". A taunt that taught generations of thought.

But no. Go earlier still, to sporting eras when elite yachts competed on England's largest lake, a mere 3 miles north.

So began the demise of the last deep area of our greatest fen, as eels slithered way to poplar stands and fishermen cuckolded mermaids for peat. Their souls they sold for celery.

But Sirens called, across dark time, for nature to restore a precious waterlife. And, somehow, inspired by rich naturalists, poor naturalists, a pond, a bee, a dream. You, and me. And those to come.

We will re-make the great fen.

On the site of an old farmstead and at the heart of the new nature reserve, Charles Rothschild built a bungalow on stilts and used it as a base for his field trips out on the fen. His activities included moth trapping at night and local people were not quite sure what to make of the visitors from London who went out into the fen at night with lanterns. You can still visit the bungalow today.

The ancient wild fens once stretched for miles across a huge part of East Anglia, but more than 99% of the habitat disappeared when the land was drained for agriculture. Now one of only four remaining fragments of the ancient fens, Woodwalton Fen would not exist today if it were not for Charles Rothschild, a successful banker, wildlife enthusiast and "father of modern conservation".
Becoming very concerned with the rapid disappearance of British wildlife and habitats as a result of industrialisation, he saw that in order to protect wildlife species and their habitats, nature reserves would need to be established. Rothschild bought Woodwalton Fen in 1910 to ensure that at least one part of the ancient fens would not disappear forever.
Building on the work done by Rothschild and his colleagues, Natural England, the government's adviser on nature conservation (previously the Nature Conservancy Council, then English Nature) designated the first National Nature Reserves in 1953, and in 1954 Woodwalton Fen was designated as a National Nature Reserve. These are some of the best sites in the country for wildlife and geology.

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?

Introduction

Bridgwater Bay forms part of the Seven Estuary. At least three glacial cycles have influenced the area gouging-out channels as the ice sheets expanded, depositing glacial till as they retreated, with meltwater eroding the deposited sediments. Its origins lie in the infilling of the basin with sediment during the Holocene Marine transgression, which ended 4000 to 5,000 years ago. Bridgwater Bay NNR includes the estuary of the River Parrett, Steart Flats and the realignment site, whilst the Site of Special Scientific Interest extends southwards to include floodplain grazing marsh and northwards to include Berrow Flats. At the coastal margin there are a series of habitats, notably coastal shingle ridges and saltmarsh (Figure 01).

By 1822 this narrow neck (causeway) had been breached and Stert Point became an island. (Figure 03).

Situated east of the Stert peninsular, the island only survived for about 70 years and on the BGS 1:63,360 scale map of 1834 it had eroded and reappeared as Fenning Island.

Change between 1902 and 2023

The Bristol Channel has one of the largest tidal ranges in the world, second only to the Bay of Fundy in Canada. Because of this, high tides are brief. However, when there are storms, these can effect major changes in the coastal habitats at or near High Water. Figures 04 and 05 provide a general picture of the overall change in the configuration of the coast. These are based on OS maps published 1902, BGS surveys 1969-70, published 1980, BGS 1:50000 published 1980 and Google Earth 2023. See below for the map series used.

Stolford to Wall Common

Wall Common to Fenning Island

Although much narrower the shingle shore continues along the Steart peninsular to Fenning Island (still named as an island on modern OS maps). This has also eroded along the north shore of the Steart Peninsula. Channels have become realigned with tides moving sand and/or mud to cover saltmarsh. Against this background human activities have modified the natural functioning of the coast. Coast protection, notably associated with the construction of sea walls to protect Hinkley Power Stations, introduced species and grazing management are the most significant.

For a general introduction see State of the Severn Estuary Report at: https://severnestuarypartnership.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/SOSER.pdf.

References:

British Energy Estuarine & Marine Studies (BEEMS) 2008. Hinkley Point Intertidal Review of Biological & Physical Information. ABPmer Technical Report Series 07/08 No. 016, EDF Energy.

Heyworth, A, and Kidson, C, 1982 Sea-level changes in southwest England and Wales. Proc Geol Assoc 93, 91-111.

Kendall, O.D., 1938. The Coast of Somerset (1). Proceedings of the Bristol Naturalists' Society, 4/8, pp 186-208.

Kidson, C and Heyworth, A, 1973 The Flandrian sea-level rise in the Bristol Channel. Proc Ussher Soc 2, 265-84.

Whittaker, A. and Green, G. W. 1983. Geology of the country around Weston-super-Mare. Memoir Geological Survey of Great Britain, Sheet 279 with parts of 263 and 295.

Long, A. J., Dix, J. K., Kirby, R., Lloyd Jones, D., Roberts, D.H., Croudace, I. W., Cundy, A. B., Roberts, A. & Shennan, I., 2002. The Holocene and Recent evolution of Bridgwater Bay and the Somerset Levels. Report to West Somerset District Council.

Confessions of a contract worker: Sue Everett

1978-79: NCC South Region, Foxhold House, Near Newbury

1982-85: NCC Huntingdon/Peterborough (East Midlands Region and Chief Scientist's Team)

1985-88: NCC - Chief Scientist's Team - based at Foxhold House again

As a geography graduate, my ecology knowledge was pretty basic but this job and the subsequent contracts I was employed to do meant that I rubbed shoulders with people who were good birders, botanists and ecologists. I was hungry for knowledge and became an ecological parasite! At university, one of my lecturers was Professor David Shimwell, an internationally renowned botanist. The module he presented (Landscape Ecology and Management) was a great introduction to conservation and SSSIs, including tensions over upland land-use management (grouse v sheep) and the shocking reality of the impact of industrial pollution on the nearby Peak District. The mother of my then partner (Jim) lived in what used to be a ‘mill' village called Ramsbottom. She told me that before the Clean Air Act (1956), the tops of the surrounding hills could only be seen for the two weeks' August holiday when the mills were shut down. No wonder Sphagnum had become extinct.

The dark peak on the edge of Bury and Rochdale was a pretty bleak place, with mile upon mile of degraded and eroded peat - some gullies were well over three metres deep and many more metres wide. I recall one walk beside an old quarry filled with old tyres. In 1976, there were fires and the peat smouldered for months. There was still industrial pollution too. The transparent paper factory in Bury stank out the town and spewed sulphurous fumes across the area. A salutary welcome to ecological Armageddon. Incidentally, 42 years later, I made contact with Jim (now a retired blacksmith and still living up north) and last year he drew a design for a stork nesting tower for a project being developed on a local Dorset farm where I had been working.

Unfortunately, David Shimwell's attendance rate for lectures was only 70%, so a lot of work for that course had to be self-researched. Much time was spent in the university library that was well-stocked with interesting literature, which I devoured. The module on soil science would prove equally useful to my future career and introduced me to the ecology of the New Forest (my undergraduate thesis was on the subject of heathland burning and ecology); a major project of the course was carrying out detailed soil surveys and mapping of the area. For a week in the summer of 1977, we braved the spam and rice at the local youth hostel in Burley, digging soil pits and describing what we found while desperately searching out fish and chip shops in Ringwood. That was also my first introduction to Colin and Jenni Tubbs who ran the NCC Lyndhurst office. 
From university, I started my career as an Assistant Scientific Officer at the Central Water Planning and Water Data Unit then based in Reading. At that time, water voles were so plentiful they would scurry out of the way as I walked on the footbridge across the river. How times change. Infamously, the CWPU was the first quango that Maggie Thatcher scrapped in 1979. During the late 1970s, I also became a volunteer with the Berkshire Conservation Volunteers which proved invaluable in both learning and progressing a career in ecology and countryside management. BEC, unlike most conservation volunteer groups nowadays, was all young people in their 20s and the beginning of ‘networking', as well as getting hands-on experience with many different aspects of practical conservation, whether scrub bashing on heathlands (in one instance, I had to point out to volunteers that it was unnecessary to bash dwarf gorse), erecting state-of-the art, stock-proof fencing on downland, and straining posts into chalk rubble. Being involved with BEC indirectly led to my first NCC contract, and eventually a Field Officer job with the Gloucestershire Trust for Nature Conservation. Nowadays, it seems the conservation volunteers demographic is still baby boomers - i.e. those twenty-somethings who are now retired. Where are all the young people?

Like many embarking on a conservation career, my early 20s was a sharp learning curve littered with short contracts. In fact, I never had a ‘proper' job until the Nature Conservation Bureau was set up in 1988, although in 1985 I turned down a job offer as ARO in Glasgow - a decision which I did not regret. It was while working at CWPU that I was introduced to Dick Hornby and, at the tail end of 1978, ended up working on a contract to help write the development plan for NCC's South region under Dick and Peter Schofield, based at the Newbury office. Lots of us were employed on contract around that time and some are still close friends - they include John Waters, Anita (now Exton), Caroline Peachey (now Steel), Michel and Heather Hughes, and Joanna Martin (now Robertson) who was then ARO for Buckinghamshire. Michel, originally a social worker but already a good self-taught field ecologist with a penchant for snails, progressed a career in conservation, including periods as a voluntary warden for RSPB, eventually becoming Devon Wildlife Trust's Conservation Officer, then heading up their environmental consultancy before becoming self-employed.

John Waters went on to mortgage his flat and buy a film camera. He has had an illustrious career in wildlife filming, including for the BBC's Natural History Unit alongside David Attenborough. Sarah (née Vernon) spent some time working at Ynys Las and then for the Field Studies Council, then met and married Jeremy Thomas. She became a lecturer at Kingston Malward College before retiring - she and Jeremy lived next door to Martin Warren and Dee Stephens while their children grew up. Anita married Adrian Exton (we all originally met when BEC-ing), then went on to work for the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers and Wiltshire County Council. We still meet from time to time as they live in north Dorset.

Dick Hornby and his wife Anne became good friends - they eventually moved to Abu Dhabi but are now back in the Newbury area. At the time, John Bacon and Paul Toynton were also based at Foxhold and we are still in touch, more often via the ‘Nibblers' forum than in person though. Paul was then warden of Aston Rowant NNR; he subsequently went on to manage Martin Down NNR, then got a job in charge of overseeing conservation on Salisbury Plain. His knowledge of grassland management and conservation is phenomenal. Chief Warden then was Robbie, a delightful man, who is now in his late 90s and lives in Swanage. The late Bob Gibbons was also part of the South Region Team, working as Hampshire ARO. Lastly, Paul Goriup, my former partner, was another contractor, working on botanical surveys of UK rivers under the guidance of the late Nigel Holmes, whom we would meet again when moving to Cambridgeshire. In the early 1980s, Paul was hands-on with the first phase of the Great Bustard reintroduction to Salisbury Plain working for the Great Bustard Trust, then moved to Cambridge as a project officer for the International Council for Bird Preservation (now Birdlife International) before we set up the Nature Conservation Bureau in 1988. Paul still works in international conservation, and has extensive international experience in Europe and Eurasia; he was also one of the original members of the Knepp Wildland Steering Group (among other things). 

Foxhold House was pretty packed with people as NCC's Geological Conservation Review Team was also based there, headed by George Black (who did not mingle). Among his minions was Keith Duff, who eventually ended up as English Nature's Chief Scientist. In the Foxhold days, I have it on good authority that he used to staple up the hems of his jeans. But then I guess a lot of blokes did that at the time. Nowadays, they probably do away with hems altogether, the ripped look being in and all that.

Most 49-ers will remember the Dark Times of 1979 when NCC's budget got eviscerated after Maggie Thatcher became Prime Minister. I remember writing to my MP about it and then got interviewed by Peter Schofield (Regional Officer) because the MP had contacted him and dobbed me in! Confidentiality between elected members and constituents was not a thing at that time obviously. NCC contracts (even use of the pool cars) came to a juddering halt, but other short contracts followed with the wildlife trust, including orchid wardening and working on a habitat survey of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, the latter under a Manpower Services Commission initiative, which was a type of apprenticeship and enabled many of us to gain a foothold in the sector. It would be great to have something like that again to help young ecologists just out of university. Graham Bellamy headed up the wildlife trust survey team - he was still writing up his PhD on grayling but did eventually finish it. Graham ended up working for NCC (or was it English Nature?) as an NNR warden/site manager in Bedfordshire.

After a couple of years working for the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust as a Field Officer, I reluctantly relocated to Cambridgeshire as Paul's job was there. I was already aware the county was a wildlife desert and it didn't disappoint. My first contract was for the NCC East Midlands Region working under Jenny Heap, surveying and writing citations for notifying SSSIs under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act. That job was based at Godwin House in Huntingdon. It was a huge privilege to work with or alongside so many amazing ecologists, including those in the Chief Scientist's team and Derek Ratcliffe himself. The cosy and informal places at Foxhold and Godwin House where we met for tea and lunch breaks (boil the kettle, make toast, heat up your pot noodle in the microwave) made for sociability, creating friendships and mentoring at their best. The eventual move to Northminster House changed those demographics substantially, although there was a staff restaurant of sorts and a bar (and we know who propped that up!) Now, in 2024, I cannot begin to grasp the effects of hot-desking and the move to largely online meetings on both inexperienced and experienced agency staff. It can't be good for forging those important friendships, team working, mentoring or mental wellbeing.

As a touch typist, I was unique (other than George Peterken, who also had a typewriter that he used in his office) typing my own reports and cutting out the typing pool. For those who may be in the post-boomer generation categories and will not have a clue what a typing pool is (generation X etc), the usual way of doing things was to talk into a dictation machine (if you were a senior manager), or write your report and letters out by hand. These would then be put into a buff envelope, picked up by an office assistant and sent to the typing pool before being returned several days later in another buff envelope, along with the typed script. Computers have no doubt at least doubled the efficiency of letter and report writing, compared to the old ways of using a typist employed to do nothing else. The woman who headed up the typing pool at Northminster House was Marina Palmer, who was a fire-eater in her spare time. Typing was a proper job then, employing lots of people (nearly all women) and I did a lot of it as holiday jobs before I embarked on my conservation career - even working on secret stuff for a military contractor. One temporary placement was working on Project X which involved typing out complex equations. I later found out this was for building nuclear weapons. Hope I didn't get them wrong!

More lifelong friends were made while working at Godwin House, including Mark July, Rosemary Parslow, Jon Spencer and Sarah Fowler - the latter whom I now consider part of my extended family. We have seen each other through many of life's ups and downs, weddings, births, divorces and deaths. Andy Clements and Jeanette Plumridge were also based there. Andy was also on contract and, with Steve Berry's support, we pushed for changes to conditions for people like us employed on short-term contracts. At the time, contractors would be given a weekend gap between contracts, then re-employed, with no benefits such as a pension, which permanent employees had, even if we had been on contracts for over two years. At the time, there was a shortage of field staff in some areas to survey land for SSSI notification and we were sent for short trips to Lincolnshire and Dumfries/Galloway to help with the surveys. Being of short stature, and Andy being over six foot, keeping up with him was quite a challenge when striding up the side of adder-strewn hillsides! Andy went on to head up the BTO. For the Lincolnshire coast surveys, I buddied up with Rosemary. These were the days of relying on aerial photographs. The ones in our possession did not show the military installation and the red-and-white striped rockets pointing out to sea! Mark July and I became firm friends, even doing stuff for a local group called the Huntingdon Greens. We also wrote a paper together on woodland management in ECOS. 

By the early 1980s, I had become quite political with a small ‘p', having become involved in the British Association of Nature Conservationists and subsequently became its Chair - Duncan Poore (a former NC Director) was President at the time. There were huge challenges to nature, e.g. habitat destruction from farming, straw burning and the destruction of the Flow Country from conifer afforestation to name but a few. In the early 1980s, Cambridgeshire was like many other counties in England and Wales, where any decent size semi-natural woodland had been and was still a target of destructive forestry practices funded or carried out by the Forestry Commission. At one point, after work hours, I would look in the filing cabinets, searching for file notes that recorded meetings and correspondence with the Forestry Commission. It was soul-destroying reading the pleas (begging) of NCC staff trying to halt the FC's blitzkrieging of ancient semi-natural woods going back to the 1960s and 1970s. BANC had commissioned a seminal report called The Future for Forestry and we aimed to dish the dirt on all and sundry to put the kibosh on environmentally-damaging Government forestry subsidies. At the time, I also had a meeting in Northminster House with Derek Ratcliffe and the then NCC Chair, Sir William Wilkinson, who were working a pincer attack with politicians and officials to scrap the subsidies, while George Peterken was also negotiating the issue with FC officers in terms of changing FC policy. That was a success story but NCC eventually paid the price. When he became Environment Secretary (1986-89), Nicholas Ridley began the process of breaking up the organisation. That marked the beginning of devolution (something that would have happened anyway). Ridley wasn't popular with conservationists and an effigy of him was unceremoniously burnt at the stake when it looked like he was going to green-light a major housing development at Bramshill in Hampshire. Andy Byfield, who was the local officer in Hampshire at the time, might have had some intelligence on that. 

The juggernaut of Germanic plantation forestry practice was hard to turn around, but in the 1980s and 1990s it did happen thanks to people like George, Keith Kirby and local NCC staff (including Jenny and Mark) who kept pushing, commenting on draft strategies and influencing. Jon Spencer, of course, went on to do much more as the FC's first ecologist - initially leading the way towards better management of New Forest woods, then getting in place policies on the restoration of replanted ancient semi-natural woods and open habitats as the head environmental honcho for the FC.

After the SSSI survey finished, other contracts followed, including a field survey of Cambridgeshire's ancient woods, a field survey of the Ouse and Nene Washes, work on the Ancient Woodland Inventory and a review of habitat change under George Peterken. My Cambridgeshire ancient woodland report was commented on by Oliver Rackham, who did not believe I had seen coppiced ash trees that had toppled over because they had become so top heavy. He did make some grammatical improvements. The county-wide woodland survey was an amazing learning experience. Among other things, I got to know the ‘jizz' of ground conditions that Herb Paris preferred - just one little detail that most ecologists wouldn't know unless they'd been there and got the badge. One woodland visited (Mustoe Wood) was owned by the local MP and was in the process of being bulldozed to make way for plantation forestry. Jenny intervened by chatting him up and I think got it stopped. I took some decent photos of the “dozer” among the toppled hazels and bluebells - these were subsequently used by the Countryside Commission in one of their reports about countryside change. Most of the woods were used as shoots, some with straw strewn on rides, piles of dead (poisoned I assume) chickens and gibbets full of dead things. It was hardly surprising buzzards had gone from East Anglia and were slow to return.

Another aspect of fieldwork at that time is that we usually worked alone, with no means of communication. Elf and Safety was not yet the thing and mobile phones were something used by Captain Kirk and the Star Trek crew. Us lone-working fieldworkers were fearless. Risk assessments didn't exist, nor was there a buddy system, although if the pool car didn't turn up the next day, no doubt questions would have been asked. I did come unstuck a couple of times - once grounding the NCC Astra on a track on the top of one of the banks that hemmed in the Ouse Washes. But my luck was in - the resident mole catcher towed me out of my predicament. I also told him I'd seen a Coypu - which he went off to dispatch - the species was finally eradicated later in the 1980s. Another time, I was kerb crawled by a toothless farmhand on a tractor - fortunately he was on the other side of a deep ditch.

I paired up with Rosemary a couple of times. One fine morning did not start out well. We parked up and got to a bridge over the River Nene (which is, in fact, a wide, trapezoidal drain). Clipboards primed, we were ready to split up to survey different fields when Rosemary became quite demonstrative, no doubt gazing at the view, and forgot she was still holding her clipboard as she flung her hand in the air. The clipboard was instantly airborne and floated off down the river. On another occasion, we were tasked to survey the largest woodland in the area - Bedford Purlieus. After greeting some forest workers on our way to our starting point in the northern section of the wood, we split up, agreeing to meet up at a rendezvous point half-way into the wood at a ride intersection. Somehow, we missed each other and eventually met back at the car park in late afternoon. During that time, the forest workers had their chainsaws nicked (from in the middle of the wood - we had seen no one else) and Rosemary had been spooked by a strange guy who seemed to have followed her, then kept hiding behind trees. When she eventually got to the car park, a police car drove in, the policemen jumped the guy and drove off with him. Rosemary is still alive and well and living in Cornwall. As many will know, she went on to bigger and better things, including writing a New Naturalist on the Scilly Isles and is still a BSBI recorder for the Scillies. In 2023, she was awarded The Christopher Cadbury Medal by the Wildlife Trusts for her 60-years' worth of voluntary work on documenting the natural history of the Scillies. 

The habitat change review grew out of George Peterken's questioning (i.e. cynicism) of FC woodland change statistics, so initially we were examining those, but the job then expanded to collate more evidence of habitat loss across the UK. As the scale of habitat loss was unfolding, various wildlife trusts were collating the statistics - and they were horrifying.

There were a few salutary wildlife ‘emergencies' that I recall while working at Godwin House. One involved a load of wildfowl found dead in a field in Lincolnshire, poisoned by Aldicarb or something similarly deadly. Another was the frustration over the proposal to farm signal crayfish at Blenheim. The freshwater team knew this would turn out badly, but NCC's comments were, as usual, ignored by MAFF, the licensing body. MAFF and the NFU were no friends of nature conservation. It was a joyful thing in 2002 when MAFF was finally abolished.

This was also the time of hedges being burned to a cinder. Anyway, who cared if the straw burn ‘cleared out' the last hedge on the farm? At harvest time, the sky was black with smoke, often with the sun disappearing behind the fug. It was unwise to paint your house at that time as the smuts were everywhere. I sent some, anonymously, in an envelope to the local NFU office in Huntingdon. Someone from the Scottish Executive who had travelled down by train to a conference on International Conventions I had co-organised remarked on how he hadn't realised how bad it was. Straw burning wasn't to be banned until ten years later in 1993.

Eventually, the NFU could no longer defend a practice which, apart from countryside destruction, sent smoke billowing over dual carriageways causing car crashes. By then, the fire brigade had joined the push to get it banned and MPs finally ignored the bleats of the NFU, although it had (backed up by MAFF) been rather successful in delaying the ban. Incidentally, the conference was a BANC one and I had already used ECOS as a vehicle to put the case for an EU directive on habitats and plants. Other background ‘networking' from Alistair, Ian and Paul, eventually paid off. Stanley Johnson, who was Environment Commissioner, published a draft directive that eventually became the Habitats Directive and three of us (myself, Jane Thornback from WCMC and Malcolm Smith from NCC) had the first draft thumped in front of us at Stanley's office in Brussels. The rest is history, although not such a happy story now we are no longer part of the EU.

Sadly, Godwin House was closed, as was NCC's London office - I then had a 28-mile commute to Peterborough (Northminster House) - aka Petrograd. For the first few weeks, I suffered from shortness of breath and panic attacks, diagnosed as new building syndrome associated with glues, chemicals etc used in the finish. An early introduction to building science, something I subsequently revisited in the noughties when studying for a postgraduate degree at the Centre for Alternative Technology. The commute, working from a soulless Petrograd office with views that didn't inspire, and Cambridgeshire's trashed countryside were tolerated for a short while, but I was aware my original intention of two years in Cambridgeshire were stretching out to three. After working on the habitat change review, I refused another contract based at Northminster House and went to work as a temporary typist at a Cambridgeshire hospital while applying for other ‘proper' jobs. I came a close second for a Conservation Officer post at the Shropshire WT, and had an interview for a similar role for the Essex WT. The latter interview was memorable as the interview panel comprised half a dozen middle-aged/elderly men. I was not informed there would be a walk around the reserve and had dressed in smart shoes and a suit. In the absence of changing facilities, I disrobed and changed into scruffs and boots in the car park while they were all waiting for me. Some things have since improved. 

The job (another contract, this time for two years - wow - a contract that would last more than three months!) I finally accepted was back at Foxhold House, lying on the edge of Crookham Common, contiguous with Greenham Common - then home of the US Air Force with the longest runway in Europe - big enough to take the gigantic Galaxy cargo plans. While there, perimeter fences were being reinforced and huge pits dug at intervals around the perimeter, into which tanks for fuel were then installed. Bomb-proof concrete bunkers to house the missiles were constructed and it was assumed they were actually brought in and stored there. Later, in the mid-1990s and after the missiles went, Jon Spencer, while working for English Nature and also being involved with the local LibDems (the party in charge of Newbury District Council), helped to put together a plan to remove and recycle the concrete runways, restore the heath-grassland habitat and the whole common was eventually passed back to the Council. It is still a pretty amazing place full of field mushrooms, ceps and abundant Autumn Ladies' Tresses, lichen-rich heath, dry heath, pools and alderwoods. However, new housing estates have crept closer and it is increasingly busy with people and dogs. With English Nature's rationalisation of properties and offices, and as part of Government cash-saving exercises, Foxhold House was eventually sold and returned to use as a private residence. Some of us ex-Foxholders held a reunion when it closed, finishing with a walk on the common. 

The job based at Foxhold was part of the national Rare Plants Project to survey for what were then Red Data vascular plants across the NCC's South Region under the leadership of Lynne Farrell. Back working at Foxhold, I made other lifelong friends, including Ted Green (who had just been given the ranger job at Windsor Great Park), Peter Marren, Mick Finnemore, Andy Byfield and Sarah Garnett. Dick Hornby was still Deputy Regional Officer but he later left to join the Bureau, a move that marked the beginning of his new career until retirement as environmental scientist based in the Middle-East. Other contractors included Mike Clark (who was carrying out New Forest habitat surveys - he subsequently became CEO of RSPB). Phil Wilson and Ro Fitzgerald were also employed to do rare plant surveys in other regions, so we met up from time to time. I am occasionally in touch with Phil and he is still an active and highly respected ecological consultant who runs a small farm in south-east Devon with his partner Marian. 

The rare plant surveys took me to a wide variety of field sites in search of meadow clary, the downy woundwort, pennyroyal and little robin, to name just a few. A highlight was one summer spent searching for tuberous thistle. I had done my homework on one impressive location for the species documented by Druce that had not been seen for many decades. This took me on an exploration around Great Ridge Wood in Wiltshire and to my delight, I came upon the Druce site - a high quality chalk grassland full of tuberous thistle in flower. It was not an SSSI and still isn't but was by far and away the best site I saw for the species. On a previous excursion in search of the elusive Druce site, I had taken with me the BSBI recorder, who at the time was waiting for a hip operation. My Renault 4 rattled along the main track before we headed off towards a grassland at the north-east corner. Stupidly, I turned the wheels off the increasingly rutted track onto the downward facing slope, where the car became well and truly stuck. This was about as remote as you could get in this part of Wiltshire. I left Ann sitting on the hillside and set off for the long walk to the nearest road (and telephone box). A few hundred yards along, lo and behold was a posse of young ladies from a local private school out for a pony ride. Having explained my predicament, one dismounted and doubled up behind another. I got into the then vacant saddle and off we cantered to Wylye where I was dropped off by the phone box. I found Bill Elliott's phone number (warden of Parsonage Down) in the telephone directory and called it. By a stroke of luck, his son answered and within ten minutes had collected me with his pickup, drove us to my car and towed it off the slope. 

Some way into the rare plants contract I had my first child (David) and reduced my hours, with John Norton capably working alongside to complete the contract. My office at Foxhold was shared with Martin Warren, who went on to set up Butterfly Conservation and subsequently became its CEO. Our office was in a small outbuilding, fronting the garden; sometimes I'd stick baby David in the pram while working on a report. 

Paul and I had talked for some time about setting up a consultancy. At that time, there were rather few, and in 1988 we did just that, bringing in Sarah Fowler as a co-director and a designer, Peter Creed, whom we had got to know well. Once the Nature Conservation Bureau was up and running it became my job until leaving in 2000 to become self-employed. The NCB (now Naturebureau) was an amazing place for us all to develop new roles for ourselves and was set up with an ethos of supporting nature conservation initiatives and, in some cases, developing them ourselves. Paul further developed his work overseas, especially in East and Central Europe and we worked on many different contracts for IUCN, including on policy matters and producing publications for them. Sarah was instrumental in founding the IUCN Shark Specialist Group, the European Elasmobranch Society and The Shark Trust and is still ‘sharking' around the globe, an acknowledged leader in global shark conservation and biology. The Bureau, with Peter Creed's input, was able to provide a whole package of services, including ecological consultancy, writing, copy-editing and designing through to print for newsletters, technical books and other publications. Many NGOs saw the benefits of working with Peter, including wildlife trusts and RSPB as well as the European Commission. Peter Creed is still MD. He is an amazing naturalist and photographer and, from being a complete computer luddite in 1989, is now an expert in state-of-the-art computer-aided design, producing many complex and impressive publications that in many cases use his own photographs. He is one of the best ‘amateur' naturalists I know and meshing his two passions and skills - natural history and design - makes him unique. We originally met as he was a close friend of Caroline (née Peachey's) late husband, David Steel. They worked together back in the mid-1980s to produce a couple of publications about wildlife in Oxfordshire in their own time - the origin of Pisces Publications, the Naturebureau imprint.

One of my early, albeit small, contracts when joining the Bureau was with the umbrella group for plant conservation that had recently been established - the Conservation Association of Botanic Societies. However, it became clear that CABS, despite its good intentions, was a talking shop and that something different was needed to put plant conservation to the fore. A small group of us agreed that we would try to secure a mandate for a national plant conservation NGO and, backed by Richard Mabey and David Bellamy, agreed on a resolution, which I put to a plant conservation conference being organised by the Fauna and Flora Preservation Society. There was overwhelming support and the six of us then progressed setting up Plantlife. Andy Byfield was one of the six, along with Clive Jermy, Jane Smart and Tony Hare. Plantlife is now a major player in the UK NGO sector and is also active internationally. Andy went on to work for Plantlife and is still heavily involved with projects to restore populations of rare plants such as pasque flower, juniper and the unique flora of the Lizard, which he knows so well. Andy now lives in Devon and is a great chum - Sarah and I have spent the last two Christmas's with him.

In 1997, I was also involved in establishing a second wild plant charity, Flora Locale, along with Miles King, John Akeroyd and Donald MacIntyre. FL focused on promoting good practice in sourcing and using native plants for projects, with a strong emphasis on land manager education and training, and the promotion of UK-sourced grown seed and plants. One of the first things I did, with help from a young intern employed by the NCB, was to create a website for FL - at that time, English Nature, RSPB and other NGOs did not have one. The fact that we did was down to the technological skills and knowledge held at the NCB. Paul was particularly tech-savvy and when we first got home computers this enabled me to be the first person at Foxhold House to use the first computer delivered there (around 1987). All my rare plant data were entered into an early type of database, enabling print-outs of all the species, their location and other basic details.

The work with FL put me in the front line, working with people on habitat creation and restoration, with species-rich grassland creation becoming a particular passion. I knew that there just wasn't enough seed to go around and in 2003 bit the bullet and bought a brush harvester from Geoff Eyre, an agricultural contractor from Derbyshire who had adapted a Logic paddock sweeper to harvest heather seed. Geoff has done some amazing work restoring heather moorland and, after I had quizzed him on whether the machine could work on wildflower meadows, put in my order.

Charles Flower also wanted to harvest wildflower seed, so we had the two machines delivered and that year began commercial seed harvesting. Thanks to a funded initiative via the then Rural Development Service, I began harvesting seed in meadows on the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire border, as well as from a Cotswold limestone grassland. The owners of that grassland had got in touch after I had written an article in a magazine. This seed was used, along with that purchased from Emorsgate, and in 2004 from Salisbury Plain, on my first and largest grassland creation scheme in the Berkshire Downs.

In all, 50 hectares were completed as part of a Higher Level Stewardship project, which had full English Nature backing (thanks to the brilliant Des Sussex - now conservation manager at Windsor Great Park) and the seed was fully grant-aided. The farm had been mixed before we joined the EEC, after which the last grasslands were ploughed and the farm, apart from a few small paddocks, was ploughed. I was engaged to put together the HLS survey and package. The owner, an eccentric racehorse owner, wanted to see old-fashioned downland restored. Most of the created grassland is still there. Fragrant orchids appeared on one of the fields after four years - no doubt originating from seed collected on the Plain.

My seed harvesting enterprise continued for ten years. It was never my main job and was logistically tricky. Barn space had to be found for two months each summer, and harvesting was dependent on consistent, dry weather. The dreadful downpours of 2007/8, thunderstorms following heatwaves in subsequent years, and having to fit in with farmers and the MoD proved increasingly difficult. The good news was that confidence had greatly increased in meadow creation and restoration, something in which Flora Locale had no doubt played a part, along with people like Donald MacIntyre and Charles Flower who had hosted training and demonstration events. Meadow projects proliferated - wildlife trusts bought seed harvesters and more local seed was being collected. I donated my seed harvester to the local wildlife trust in 2013. Eventually, a national meadows project (Magnificent Meadows) got off the ground, spearheaded by Plantlife but it had been many years in the making, having been talked about and planned by the former grassland habitat group in which English Nature had played a major role.

I continued to work as technical adviser to FL until it folded some 20 years later when my colleagues and I no longer had the energy to carry on and our funds and resources were given to CIEEM. Incidentally, in 1991, the Bureau also provided the first secretariat to the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, the professional body for ecologists. This was something BANC had pushed for as we became aware there was insufficient respect for ecologists and a need to professionalise the sector. Its formation was supported by RSPB and the British Ecological Society. Early supporters involved in its formation included David Goode, Tony Bradshaw and Barbara Young, then RSPB Chair, who subsequently became Chair of English Nature. The Institute now has Chartered Status. A potted history of its establishment written by David Goode is given in a 2012 issue of In Practice at https://t.co/PK6258sQi4. My role was as its first Development Officer, directly employed by IEEM but based at NCB with Paul as its CEO. That job brought me into contact with a huge number of ecologists across all sectors - the networking that body is able to provide now seems increasingly important as many ecologists and land managers, including those in the statutory sector, are rather isolated and opportunities to meet up and learn from others is vital.

Most of you will know of me from writing the regular Conservation News column in British Wildlife. I began to write the column while working at the Bureau, having been introduced to the owner and editor, Andrew Branson, by Clive Chatters. Clive is another colleague I met long ago while based at NCC South Region. Later, he became Chair of the New Forest National Park Authority and, of course, has written a New Naturalist book on heathlands. Writing Conservation News involved absorbing as much information as possible on what was going on in the conservation world, then condensing it for the column which gave me a unique insight into the sector's trials and tribulations. In the early years, all the information came from press releases and articles published in national newspapers and magazines. Increasingly, it came in as e-mails, but over the past two decades the internet became an increasingly amazing source that I would mine. There was no shortage of news. Initially, the column was 5,000 words, with six editions a year. This changed in later years to eight editions and 3,500 words. My last column was published just over a year ago. I count myself as more or less properly retired now, although I am still a very active commentator @suesustainable on Twitter (X) and have 3,800 followers - I am now on BlueSky too (same handle). For all the nastiness of social media, I have found that it does depend on who you talk to and what your interests are. For me, it remains a positive experience and a great way to keep in touch with conservation news, to share knowledge and communicate with like-minded folk, particularly leading conservationists and nature-friendly farmers. As you will appreciate, I am a networking animal. I have made many wonderful friends and met many amazing people working in conservation. Much of this network stems from those formative times while working for the NCC. It is great to keep in touch and this year attending the 49 Club reunion provided another opportunity to see former colleagues. See you in 2025, if not before!

Interview with Tom Pritchard (1932-2023)

The interview covers a lot of ground not relevant to Rostherne Mere. Topics include the acquisition of the Nature Conservancy's office for the Midlands (later just West Midlands) at Attingham Park, Shrewsbury. Successes at defending SSSIs at public enquiries, including the diversion of the M6 to avoid Coleshill Bog SSSI. Frustrating the Central Electricity Generating Board through the successful defence of their plans in respect to SSSIs which led to what became a fruitful relationship with Arthur Hawkins who was to become Chairman of the CEGB. Out of this came a field studies facility for local schools at Rugeley Power Station and a gathering of senior staff from the CEGB and senior conservationists at Attingham Park and later, when he was working in Wales, the financing by CEGB of a civic facility at Llanberis in N Wales related to CEGB's major pumped-storage hydroelectric scheme. This part of the interview provides insights into Tom's ability to take advantage of situations and to work productively with others with different agendas.

The interview then reverts to Rostherne Mere and Tom Pritchard's time as Midlands Regional Officer, with reference to NC's connections with universities and the establishment of the Mires Research Group and the Meres Research Group and an international peatland inventory set up by him and David Bellamy, linking to the International Biological Programme and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Also, what Tom refers to as David Bellamy's first TV Programme which was filmed at Chartley Moss NNR, including bog snorkelling.

Parts of the interview relating to Tom's early years with the Nature Conservancy (1957-59), to the appointment of Philip Oswald and to the establishment of the Midlands Region Office at Attingham Park, have been transcribed and were published in The 49 Club Newsletter, 2023.

Interview with Philip Oswald (1933-2021)