Suns out, guns out!

After breakfast and a quick meeting in the lodge, we were all ready for our next adventure in Arran. We walked for about 20 minutes through the beautiful castle grounds and on the way we spotted some tracks in the ground, which were most likely to be from a red squirrel. We then arrived at the area of forest where we were going to clear the Rhododendrons. We met with our guide Katie from National Trust of Scotland, who explained to us about the Rheodedodrum Poticus and how it has had  a negative effect on the forests ecosystem. She showed us how to safely handle the equipment we would be using and how to dispose of the plant after it had been cut ( in the fire!) We were so excited to get our hands messy and begin our hard work.

As soon as we had the equipment in hand, we arranged ourselves into teams and moved to different areas of the forest. We used a saw for the thicker branches and used clippers for the smaller, thinner branches.  As a team, we transported the Rhododendron cuttings into our huge fire to prevent it from resprouting from the fallen branches.

After hours of hard work, we were so excited to dig in to our sandwhiches for lunch and some chill time. We then continued with our work for another two hours and after making huge progress, we stopped working and tucked into  roasted marsh mallows around the fire with our group.

We thanked Katie for the awesome experience and headed back towards the castle. To our surprise, instead of heading straight back to Shore Lodge we got the chance to be small kids again and went to the Adventure playground. After 20 minutes we were fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to visit and enter the Bronze Age Roundhouse which is situated on the Castle Grounds.