From the archive
20 Aug 2026
On a spring day in Glenmoriston, a group of teenagers stood round a fire they had lit themselves, learning to bake bannock bread. Earlier they had dipped nets into a pond and been walked through a recovering stretch of Caledonian forest, naming trees as they went. The children, aged eleven to fourteen, came from Farr and Kinlochleven High Schools, and they were at Trees for Life's Dundreggan estate near Loch Ness not as visitors but as researchers.
They were taking part in Healthy Young Minds, an early-intervention programme run by the University of South Wales with the University of the Highlands and Islands and Dundee University, and funded by the Medical Research Council. The premise is that mental health difficulties often arrive in early adolescence, and that young people in remote Highland communities face extra barriers - isolation, thin infrastructure, and the distance to any help that does exist.
Rather than handing the pupils a programme designed in a university, the researchers asked them to build one. In workshops facilitated by Ewen's Room, a Highland mental health charity, the children generated ideas for outdoor activities that might support wellbeing: camping, wild swimming, hill walking, outdoor cafés, beach combing, fires, natural crafts. Each idea was tested against feedback from other young people and from green health experts, refined, and then voted on.
The setting did some of the work. Dundreggan has been rewilding since Trees for Life bought the estate almost twenty years ago, and now holds more than 4,000 recorded species of plants and animals, many rare. Its Rewilding Centre has trails, a café, a storytelling bothy and purpose-built accommodation with twenty bedrooms and up to forty beds - enough for a school group to stay overnight in the glen itself.
When the researchers asked afterwards what had shifted, the pupils described spending more of their time outdoors than before the project. The woods and hills had come to feel bound up with how well they were coping, and several said they now paid more attention to the people around them. Along the way they were taught the five ways to wellbeing: connecting with others, learning new skills, giving, being active, and taking notice of small things. The research team is preparing two academic papers, seeking further funding, and plans to help the schools put the pupils' own designs into practice.
Borrow the method, not the programme: take a group of eleven-to-fourteen-year-olds outside for a day - a walk, pond dipping, a fire, bread over the flames - then hand them pens and ask what outdoor activities would actually help them. Let them critique and vote on each other's ideas. The voting is the intervention, and it costs a packet of sticky dots.
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