Working Holidays - take a break by helping the National Trust

Why thousands spend their holiday helping, working and learning in some of the UK's best gardens, landmarks and countryside.

We’d all think Thomsons had gone mad if they started to sell holidays painting a lighthouse or working as a goatherd. And if you saw a late offer in Thomas Cook’s window offering a week’s holiday re-chalking the Cerne Abbas giant you’d think it was a joke.

Yet there’s one British holiday operator that thrives on holidays like this. It proudly advertises the opportunity to spend seven days doing things like labouring in a muddy ditch, strimming undergrowth or replacing galvanised five-bar gates with wooden ones. Last year it even sold a holiday spent on a remote island deducing the sex of wild goats through binoculars.

It’s the National Trust, of course, whose working holidays have become more and more popular over the years.

There will be around 450 different breaks on offer, from making bonfires in the Chilterns to building hedges in north Devon. You’ll have the chance to help behind the scenes at a National Trust open-air concert, learn dry-stone walling on a remote moor or prune an avenue of trees at a stately home.

At least 4,000 are expected to book places on these holidays and short breaks – demonstrating the huge success of the working holiday concept. Spending your time-off helping the National Trust has never been more popular.

But this level of success seemed highly unlikely when a group of 16-20 year-olds arrived for the first ever National Trust working holiday in 1967.

Their summer holiday was to be spent in mud, water and overgrown vegetation restoring the derelict Stratford Canal. Reading the details today, it is amazing that the idea ever took off:

Each of them paid £3.10s for the pleasure. This covered their accommodation – sleeping on the floor of a dilapidated and leaking wooden shed – and their food - a menu of spam fritters, instant mash and tinned sardines. Washing facilities consisted of a cold tap.

The team of pioneering holiday workers was led by a Major Grundy, who promptly confiscated a transistor radio from one of the guests. A female worker took one look at the shed and went home and two others left after a few days of drafty discomfort.

During the week, two of the ‘holidaymakers’ needed the doctor – one for a bad cut, the other for gastro-enteritis. Another man showed signs of severe exhaustion and one woman “was unfortunate enough to suffer from an attack of bronchial pneumonia on her return home.”

But someone at the National Trust saw the potential: “The calibre of the workers was greater than that of the convict labour on which the management of the canal has mainly relied,” said the internal report.

Today, 40 years on, that sounds a pretty austere holiday, even for the most hardened backpacker. Thankfully, conditions have improved vastly – accommodation is usually in converted farmhouses or cottages in scenic rural or coastal locations.

Nevertheless, most package holidaymakers would feel aghast at the shared cooking and cleaning duties, single-sex dormitories with sleeping bags on bunk beds and basic shared washing facilities. And what other holiday adds in the small print that “work starts at 9am”?

But even spending a week cutting sedge grass in a bog becomes attractive when that bog is a national nature reserve in an ancient East Anglian fenland. And weeding vegetable beds takes on a new dimension when you’re in a historic walled garden like Beningbrough Hall near York.

It’s certainly a holiday formula that now appeals to a lot of people. The working holiday offers the chance to live a simple life away from the stresses of normal life, helping a charity, learning traditional skills and mixing with a friendly team of like-minded workers. You’re unlikely to run into a boozy hen-party or have noisy lager louts in the next room.

It’s such a positive experience for some that the effect can be extreme. Several current Trust wardens were frustrated city office workers till they went on working holidays and were prompted to dramatically change their careers. And many guests met their future partners on a working holiday. The children of some of these working-holidays marriages are now appearing on working holidays of their own.

Indeed the Trust have this year started to discreetly allude to this matchmaking potential. They suggest “it’s great way for men to meet girls”. Of course it helps that there are far more women than men on the holidays - around a 60/40 ratio.

And the working holidays tap into another popular trend – environmentalism. They are the epitome of ‘low impact tourism’. The teams lead a pretty green existence on the working holiday – eating local seasonal produce from farmshops, composting or recycling their waste, saving energy, learning about conservation and reviving rural skills. The work itself often benefits wildlife and the countryside.

Almost 100,000 people have taken working holidays in the last 40 years and this huge army of hard-working holidaymakers has contributed enormously to their maintenance projects. The Trust estimates the holiday workers’ efforts – around 5.5 million hours-worth - have saved them at least £20 million.

The list of achievements from the holidays is growing all the time and includes the construction of five miles of footpath in Northumberland and recobbling an entire historic courtyard in Lincolnshire. Many estates rely on the contributions of working holidaymakers each year.

And the choice is good: there are a wide variety of jobs and a locations at National Trust properties all over England, Wales and Northern Ireland. They cost from £40 for a weekend break to £150 for the top-of-the-range ‘premium’ week.

These new premium customers enjoy the previously unheard-of luxury of twin rooms with ensuite shower-rooms. I suspect Major Grundy would be quite horrified.