New People #24-35: National Trust Working Holiday

This past week I have been on a National Trust Working Holiday in the Brecon Beacons. There were 10 of us in total and 2 group leaders. The group was a great mixture of people, a wide range of ages, nationalities and backgrounds.

So what is a national trust working holiday? I’ll briefly state what it is here in this post as I’ll go into itfurther in a few days’ time. The working holiday gives a group of volunteers a chance to work on an area of National Trust land and work to improve it.

From Sunday to Friday we spent nearly every day at the Brecon Beacons working on digging ditches and drains. Starting at around 10am and finishing around 3.30. Our group leaders were Di and Peter and on the first day Peter managed to break his finger! They had been on several working holidays before and have done a variety of activities, so they were a great fountain of knowledge.

I got on well with everyone and was probably closest to Mel as she was one of the first people I spoke to. She was 20 and from Germany and was training to be a teacher. In Germany it takes 6 years to do this! She was great fun and in the last couple of evenings we ended up going for late night walks before bed to help big meals go down. Louise was also great fun and we cooked together the first evening. We made a fish pie which had the best roux sauce ever!

We all had different senses of humour which was good, Ulrich was a real joker and already knew another member of the group in Rob, Ed had a warped sense of humour which was entertaining and Malcolm’s was quite dry. Paul came out of his shell towards the end of the week and Jill had a very strong sense of self.

Our ranger for the work was a guy called Rob (different Rob to the one already mentioned) and he was very knowledgeable and funny. He ended up calling me Ross most of the time so I jokingly called him Bob. Huw who also worked with the trust was good fun. He was 27 and always wanted to work in the outdoors. He thought he’d get a job with the National Trust when he was much older so he was really pleased he got a job now, and he’d only been with the trust a couple of months.

There were regular trips to the pub after work which was a great way to wind down. We were really lucky with the weather and it only rained on the Friday evening, so we didn’t get wet while working. I even got sunburnt on the first day!

The week was hard work but fun and the group of people made it a memorable holiday.