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Listen to your favourite podcasts first on BBC Sounds.

This Scotland Outdoors podcast from BBC Radio Scotland.

Hello and thanks very much for choosing to listen to this.

I'm Mark Stephen. This week I'm at a place called the Aegis Field Centre. It's up near Buley in the Scottish Highlands to meet its founder, Sir John Lister Kaye. Now John is a highly respected environmentalist, conservationist and indeed an author. When he was a young man, he worked with Gavin Maxwell of Ring of Brightwater fame, but sadly Maxwell died, which left John at something of a loose end. He knew he wanted to stay in Scotland, but how? Come to that, why? Well, he'd heard of the existence of field centres in England, but as far as he knew,

there were none in Scotland, so he decided to open one. Gavin Maxwell died aged 56, and I was out of a job

and out of a home, and in the Highlands. I didn't want to go back to England. I certainly didn't want to work

in commerce or industry. And so I had to dream up a way of staying in the Highlands. And so I did.

And I thought, because I had attended one or two field studies centres in England, there was

nothing in Scotland, I thought I'll try and start a field study centre.

And so I bought this little estate, which was semi-derallict.

I mean, it was really badly neglected.

You will remember that the Highlands was in serious depression in the 1970s.

And I wrote to the HIDB, the Highlands and Islands Development Board,

and asked for a soft loan, and they wrote me a letter back, which I've got framed,

which says that a field study centre in the Highlands would never work. People would never pay

to learn about wildlife or the environment,

and they recommended that I started a caravan site instead.

So anyway, we persevered and we pushed on,

and yeah, the first 10 years were a bit sticky,

...