Course Description

This programme invites you to deepen your connection with nature by collaborating with trees. Perfect for those passionate about the environment, it’s a chance to grow alongside like-minded individuals and develop your skills in a supportive community.

Focusing on sustainability from the inside out, this course challenges participants to rethink their relationship with the environment and become agents of positive change. By the end of the course, you’ll be equipped to design nature-based experiences that benefit both the land and your community, creating opportunities for sustainable income.

Participants will learn how to diversify rural income through eco-tourism, focusing on experiences that support schools, NGOs, local groups, and individuals’ well-being, while addressing the climate emergency.

Suited to those deeply embedded in rural Highland communities, this course fosters empowerment and collaboration, helping participants become custodians of their environment and active contributors to sustainable change.

Course Schedule & Content:
This course runs over 7 weekly evening sessions from 18:00 – 20:30. Participants are expected to attend all sessions.

Week 1 – 15th September 2025: Conceptual Framework
Tamara Griffiths
An overview of conceptual changes in rural land use in the UK and Europe, including post-productivism and multi-functionality. This leads into the experience economy, with a focus on new tourism patterns and slow tourism. Each week concludes with designing experiences that correlate with the themes discussed. You can choose to build multiple experiences or develop one in-depth experience.

Week 2 – 22nd September 2025: Custodianship, Guiding, Unusual Wildlife Photography
Tamara Griffiths and Phil Knott
The session is structured in two parts: conceptual and practical. We start by investigating successful guiding principles in outdoor settings, relating them to Slow Tourism, the experience economy, eco-economy, and multi-functionality from Week 1. We also consider nature interpretation as a social construct. The practical section will focus on delivering a unique wildlife photography experience, using moths to stimulate understanding of local biodiversity.

Week 3 – 29th September 2025: Forest Gardening for Food and the Experience Economy
Tamara Griffiths
This session introduces the concept of forest food gardening, providing simple practical steps to start your own forest food garden. We’ll also explore the experience economy in greater detail, discussing how our experience designs can be influenced by this knowledge. Additionally, we look into the origins of the Slow movement and its modern applications in forest food.

Week 4 – 6th October 2025: Understanding Craft and Biocultural Heritage
Tamara Griffiths
This session explores the concept of crafts beyond being simply a tourist product or harking to days gone by, offering a dynamic and multifaceted understanding of their role in biocultural heritage. Participants will gain practical ideas for developing biocultural heritage experiences and revisit themes from Week 1 with new perspectives. As an applied example, we will discuss working with seaweed on Skye.

Week 5 – 13th October 2025: Tree Lives; Sentience of Trees, Synergies with Humans
Tamara Griffiths
In this session, we explore the synergies between people and trees across three frameworks: traditional thinking with rituals and history, critical theory in humanities, and scientific theory. We begin with traditional affinities and move into contemporary theories. The session ends by adding to our blueprint design for a forest experience, combining recent science, dynamic critical theory, and traditional beliefs.

Week 6 - 20th October 2025: Woodland Well-being
Date: 20th October 2025
Tamara Griffiths, Heidi Shingler, and Phil Knott

This session explores how working with trees can support well-being—whether for yourself, your community, or clients—while also benefiting the trees. The first part of the session examines woodland health and eco-therapy, featuring a talk by Heidi Shingler, an outdoor therapist from UHI. Heidi will share her experiences working in nature and introduce qualifications and professional standards for those interested in this field.

After a short break, we will join Phil Knott on Skye to learn about the Broadford Community Tree Nursery, a project focused on community regeneration and well-being. We will also explore small-scale tree propagation for nature-based experiences. The session concludes with a discussion on designing experiences with trees, considering how they can foster custodianship, well-being, and connections to social crofting.

Week 7 – 27th October 2025: Revisiting Interpretation and Guiding Skills within Woodland Crofts
In this final session, we learn about the evolution of woodland crofts and revisit the material from Weeks 1 and 2, examining the historic dichotomy between arable and forest lands. This session connects to the division between nature and culture in western thinking. The course concludes with a final discussion on the experiences we’ve designed each week, now enriched by the context of a woodland croft.

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Growing Roots: Creating Sustainable Adventure Experiences with Trees