As children, my sister and I often played outside, as many children in Scotland may have in the 1980s. We built gang huts out of branches, stones, and debris. Through our stories, shared experience, and collaboration in making our secret hideaways, we made the spaces in which we interacted with friends, our place. Through touching, smelling, climbing, poking around, eating, and breaking bones (!) outside, we developed a part of who we were to become. We would gather tadpoles from beneath an old sewage tank, where the concrete basin had filled with rain water. The old tank sat amongst the trees in a woodland surrounding the old Victoria Hospital in Edinburgh, behind our homeâmost likely now a space out of bounds to children. We would watch the frogs lazily stretching down and beneath the murky water, their springy leg the last thing to plop in. We would rush tadpoles home, to our motherâs despair, to keep in the bath. We had jars with caterpillars in, making sure they had foliage to chomp on. We would catch bees by flowering bushes in jars too, listen to them buzz frantically before letting them free as we squealed.
We would hunt for things, beasties, and passage ways, and weâd leap out of trees. It would turn from daylight to dusk and only then would we come inside. We always found somewhere to play. But at some stage, I canât specify when, we stopped looking.
When I was 18 years old, I moved to London to study and was rarely outside of the city centre. The most that I engaged with anything remotely ânaturalâ was in growing herbs in my window or perhaps sitting in a large, busy public park on a summerâs eve with friends and a glass of wine. Years in London, as a student and waitress, went by with very little thought. It was all late nights out and cramming to finish papers. I was simply getting on with âstuff,â as people do, without tapping into how I was, mentally or physically. At 22, no longer a student and needing to find work, I moved to Birmingham City Centre, where the opportunities or chance engagements with any type of green space were minimal. I was working 18-hour shifts in an events venue, living next to one of the UKâs biggest shopping centres and living in a loop: work, pub, home, work, pub, home. I found myself exhausted, run down, and suffering badly with an anxiety disorder that had plagued me since I was a teenager. A good friend at the time insisted that we get out of the city. On the outskirts of Birmingham there was a vast park, Sutton Coldfield, with woodland and lake, and we were going to spend the day there. We wandered, paddled, sat, and talked. Within one month I had handed in my notice to leave at work and was heading back to Scotland.
Looking back, I feel that through our engagement with this childhood exploration and play, my sister and I, alongside our gang of neighbourhood friends, found a temporary sense of belonging. It is due to these encounters that I associate the outdoors with my own personal narrative. These days brought with them a sense of collective discovery, which I continue to see as vital as an adult. It is experiences such as these that have formed my interest in such a topic. As a person who has engaged with these outdoor landscapes due to a desire linked to a childhood spent in urban green space and visiting family in remote rural areas, there is a fond interest in spending time within these spaces. As an adult, I choose to engage with these spaces. I therefore position myself, as a researcher, as someone who deliberately engages with natural environments due to my own perceived benefits, regardless of their intangibility. Living within urban Edinburgh, I choose to journey to natural areas to walk, to rest, and to explore for many reasons. This choice is telling of a dispositionâI believe that these excursions are positive, for me. The question of what this kind of activity may offer to others or to groups and of what manifestations within these spaces may tell us of the phenomenological experience of natural spaces is still left pertinent. It is necessary to discover how these kinds of activities are evaluated.
Open air recreation provides people with great benefits for their health and well-being and contributes to the good of society in many other ways.1
The Scottish Outdoors Access Code, quoted above, intimates that the âright to roamâ has been put in place due to the belief that access to these kinds of rural natural and urban green spaces relate unequivocally to human health, wellbeing, and the good of society. In Scotland, then, policymakers and parliament, in the majority, have agreed that this access is positive.
When considering groups of individuals who venture out into these spaces I wondered, in what ways this access could be positive for the individual and the collective? When I began this project, I had several questions in relation to these group activities:
Why do people journey into natural spaces in groups?
What do they do within these when they get there?
And, what happens to peopleâs emotions, physicality, and social dynamics when they do enter these spaces?
To begin to answer these questions, it became clear that the way that people evaluate these activities must be understood. For this reason, we must ask:
What is positive about this kind of landscape engagement?
What do activities in natural spaces provide?
In what ways are group excursions into natural spaces considered to be personally and socially transformative?
And why?
In what ways is getting outside good for us as individuals and, as the Scottish Government seems to advocate, good for society?
And finally, what could be meant by âgoodâ in this context...
