Go wild for a different kind of holiday

There are pockets such as the mountain bike tracks of the Borders and walking tours in the mountains of Glencoe which have their own aficionados, but few holiday companies offer truly unique experiences.

Enter Wilderness Scotland, an Edinburgh-based company trying to sell something different.

Set up by two friends who met and discovered a mutual love of the outdoors at the University of Dundee, the company was established three years ago.

Now, with an increasing reputation for providing high-quality holidays and having amassed a string of awards, Wilderness is fast approaching a total of 1000 clients a year.

Forres-raised Neil Birnie and Paul Easto, from Bromley in Kent, were attracted to Dundee by the promise of good golf and playing in the university team in national and international competitions, including tours which they organised to South Africa and the United States.

After leaving university, Mr Easto worked as a surveyor and property consultant for Hillier Parker and then Ryden in Edinburgh, while Mr Birnie was employed as a solicitor for Dundas & Wilson. But over the years they often discussed the possibility of doing something in the line of adventure travel and leisure.

Mr Birnie says: "We were both well advanced in our professional careers and had a good feel about what kind of things people liked to do in their leisure time.

"We’d also both enjoyed adventure travel, myself in Africa and North and Central America and Paul in South America and the Himalayas.

"Having experienced adventure travel products in other parts of the world it became obvious that some countries, such as New Zealand, were streets ahead of what was being provided back home."

He adds: "We both thought that Scotland had a vast untapped potential with respect to adventure tourism and that it could be combined with other aspects such as the history of the country. It is a really under-utilised destination."

Using their knowledge of Scotland and taking advice from Mr Birnie’s father, Gordon, who had 40 years’ experience as a walking guide, the pair decided to devote time to researching potential tours.

Mr Birnie says: "We knew a lot of itineraries in different areas - as well as accommodation providers and other businesses we could work with - but it still took another 18 months of research before we could begin. One of the most important things was liaising with landowners whose land we wanted to use.

"There are around 15 to 20 areas of the Highlands where we work and that meant a lot of fickle landowners to convince.

"But we explained to them how it would be a good alternative use for land outside of hunting and stalking periods and we have developed really good working relationships."

By 2000, Wilderness Scotland was ready to go. Mr Birnie gave up his job in September that year and Mr Easto soon after. "We both believed it was necessary to give up work and devote ourselves full-time," he says.

The first trip was tailor-made for a 23-strong group from Dublin who visited Knoydart together with two boats and three Land Rovers.

The trip was judged a major success by all involved and the Irish group has testified to that fact by coming back to Wilderness for more holidays.

During the first year, the company operated 20 trips with no advertising at all, apart from an early feature in Trail magazine. Almost all the business came by word-of-mouth and through personal contacts from the pair’s days in business.

Repeat custom and a growing reputation increased the number of trips threefold in 2001 and, last year, there were more than 100 holidays carrying between 700 and 800 clients.

Around 50 per cent of the business now comes from organised tours and the rest is tailor-made itineraries for a very diverse client base, including corporate activity trips and a growing number of honeymoons.

Much of the business still comes from personal recommendation but the use of the internet has also led to a growing number of overseas clients.

Mr Birnie says: "Most people find out about us from the website.

"Around 60 per cent of the people we take are from the UK but last year we had 14 different nationalities.

"This year it’s a bit different because of the effects of the war in Iraq so it’s been a wee bit quiet from America but we have had a number of large groups from Canada."

And a surprising amount of business is from within Scotland, from people who are looking for experiences with a touch of excitement attached.

Mr Birnie says: "There is huge competition for straight walking holidays in areas such as Ben Nevis and Glencoe."

"But elsewhere, in Knoydart and the Outer Hebrides for instance, there is very little."

He adds: "We do have interest from overseas for our straight walking tours but, for people within the UK we have to be a bit more imaginative and that’s why our combination tours including sailing or kayaking as well as walking are proving most popular.

"There’s been a great deal of interest in our winter walking tours, too, which are more of a holiday with some degree of instruction rather than the more normal skills-learning weekend.

"Next year we’re going to offer ski mountaineering but staying at a castle in Speyside - we expect that to appeal to a purely Scottish market."

After receiving a string of awards last year, including ones for ecological sustainability and most promising newcomer from the Highlands and Islands council, the future is looking good for the successful development and expansion of the company’s current programmes.

Mr Birnie says: "We’re obviously going to continue developing our existing itineraries and want to add more in the Outer Hebrides along the lines of the walking and sailing tours which have proved to be our most popular.

"It would also be great to develop things in the corporate market, for events such as team-building.

"We can offer something a bit different from just shooting clays or driving jeeps around so we have plans to target companies to make them aware of what we’re doing."

He adds: "The corporate trips we’ve run so far have been popular with the ideas coming from clients on our trips who have gone back to work and thought how their experiences could be applied to their businesses.

"They are also very affordable - we could offer 16 people a few days away on boats for the price of a day at one of the top golf courses."

Overseas trips, originally started when clients asked Wilderness if they were able to travel further afield, have also grown "organically" with the company providing five groups with visits to Kenya last year as well as trips to New Zealand and Bolivia.

But the company is content to leave that part of the business at a low level and to concentrate on matters closer to home.

Mr Birnie says: "We feel we are the only ones doing what we’re doing and what we want is to become the specialists for the wild places of Scotland."

Heartfelt homage to Lothian-born all-American hero is only natural

LOGGING on to the Wilderness Scotland website, visitors are greeted with the words of the Lothian-born sage of the wilderness, John Muir.

"Keep close to nature’s heart", he said, "and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean."

Venerated in the United States as the man who devised the country’s national parks system, and hailed as the greatest Californian who ever lived, Muir, who was born and raised in Dunbar, is hardly known in his native Scotland. He was born in 1838 and his first discoveries of nature and ideas of conservation were made during childhood explorations along the East Lothian coast and while roaming around the Pentlands and the Lammermuirs.

His family left the seaside town when he was ten years old and made the arduous six-week trip across the Atlantic to New York, before riding a wagon to Wisconsin where they established a farm.

But the young Muir was restless and it was while wandering through the Sierra Nevada and further west in the late 1860s that he came across Yosemite and the course of his life was set.

Becoming an advocate for the protection of wilderness - and making epic journeys across the United States - he mixed with eminent Americans such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and most importantly, President Theodore Roosevelt.

He also helped found the country’s primary environmental lobbying organisation, the Sierra Club, and campaigned for the extension of Yosemite’s protected area as part of the emerging US national park network.