Working on a Scottish farm

For many of my generation, the gap year between school and university was spent volunteering in orphanages or sunning on an Aussie beach. Being pretentious but poor I decided instead that my fate lay on a Scottish island. I had been to Mull on holiday and figured I would spend my days wandering the beach, reading epic novels and having flings with strapping farmers.

I was a troubled teenager, desperate to escape the woes of life in a remote Kentish village, terrifyingly clueless about my career path.

When I told her my plans, my mother, somewhat spitefully, said, "How on earth are you going to do that?", which galvanized me into asking the tourist office if there were any friendly farmers. Fortune had it that I managed to speak to a girl called Claire, a conversation that changed my life. Claire knew of just the man, a farmer in the south of Mull who periodically "took in" young folk like me to help out on his 22,000 acres. Our brief phone call (he had an impossibly posh accent) went something like this:

"Have you ever worked on a farm?"

"Erm, nope."

"Know anything about farming?"

"Nope"

"Are you fit?"

"Not particularly"

"I like your chutzpah. I'll pay your coach fare. If we like you, you can stay."

I stepped off the ferry in cropped, dyed red hair, round glasses, ripped jeans and Dr. Marten boots, prompting the farmer to squint at me in disbelief and ask if I was a punk.

Lochbuie – where I lived – is a 17-house village, beautiful and appealing to holidaying wildlife lovers, archaeologists and photographers. Sites include the uninhabited 15th-century Moy Castle and the impressive (inhabited) 18th-century Lochbuie House, overlooking the loch. Mull remains one of the most beautiful, unspoilt places in the UK. I returned recently and nothing had changed.

I hated it for the first few weeks. But the farmer and his wife persevered through my astonishing ignorance about the world and I went from self-obsessed teenager who'd never done a day's work in her life (bar the sort that you could give up if you didn't like it) to a useful member of the community.

I emerged at the end of the experience fitter, fatter, better-read and able to sleep.

From The Guardian

Hazel Davis, 33, journalist, Huddersfield