My Workaway Experience on the West Coast of Scotland

Caitlinepstein415/ June 14, 2022/ Europe/ 2 comments

In September of 2021, I moved to Brighton, England to do my master’s degree at the University of Sussex. While I loved living in Brighton, it was super expensive and left me looking for other opportunities for a couple of months after my in-person classes wrapped up in April. I spent months during the pandemic scrolling through Workaway.info fantasizing about doing interesting work exchanges all over the world. In February, I finally found my first Workaway up in Western Scotland.

What is Workaway?

If you haven’t heard of Workaway, it’s a website that facilitates work exchanges where thousands of hosts provide accommodation in exchange for about 13-25 hours of work a week. There are hosts all of the world looking for help with all kinds of different tasks, from art projects to farming to helping in hostels. Accommodation ranges from caravans on the less nice side to berths in boats and private rooms in large houses on the nicer side.

Workaway memberships are $44 a year for volunteers, and for me it ended up being well worth the cost.

Finding my perfect first Workaway

When I set out to find my first Workaway, I knew I wanted to find a great one that I was confident committing to the entire month of May. Workaway lets you search for hosts by location or keyword, and then narrow things down by host type (i.e. family, NGO, or farmstay), dates, languages, and host score. Hosts listings include the host’s availability, a description of the work they need help for and the accommodation they will provide, photos, and reviews left by other volunteers.

For my search, I looked for hosts in Scotland for the month of May and narrowed down the search to find hosts that listed art projects as part of their Workaway. After reading a lot of listings and even more reviews, I reached out to several hosts introducing myself and explaining why I would be a great help in May. When applying for Workaways, treat it like you’re applying for a job – lay out clearly what you bring to the table and what drew you to that specific host. Eventually I connected with my host, Karen – you can read her Workaway listing here.

Karen and I messaged back and forth a bit before having a video call to see if we’d be a good fit. We agreed on dates for May and then I was ready to go!

Living, working, and studying on the West Coast of Scotland

In late April, I flew up to Glasgow, Scotland to visit there and Edinburgh for a few days, and then on April 30th, I hopped on a bus to a tiny village on the West Coast of Scotland. I told the bus driver that I needed to get off Whitehouse village, but it was so small that he blew right past it and my host, Karen, had to chase the bus down to the road a few miles to the next stop. From there, Karen drove me half a mile up the main road on a dirt lane, where I got my first glimpse of the large white house where I’d be staying for the next month.

The house is a giant, old manor house built by wealthy whiskey producers back in the early 1900s, and now it’s divided up into a few homes. My host, Karen, owns the middle section of the house and the huge garden out back. I stayed in a beautiful bedroom with a gorgeous view of the loch, and my host’s amazing artwork hanging on the wall.

Whitehouse was a super remote and isolated place to live, but the house was gorgeous and provided the perfect setting to finish up my final university assignments, create art, and slow down a bit between two months of crazy travel.

My host

My lovely host for the month was Karen Beauchamp, an artist from London who has lived lots of lives and who shared so many of her rich experiences with me. She has lived up on the West Coast of Scotland for over a decade, and creates lino, monotype, and collograph prints as well as pastel artworks and watercolor and acrylic paintings. She has the most incredible art studio and spent time walking me through new print methods, which I’ll share a bit more about below.

Karen is also a fantastic cook – she made me absolutely delicious home-cooked meals every day, a great gardener, and the co-owner of an adorable little vacation cottage a little bit up the coast. She astounded me daily with her work ethic and ability to create artworks in many mediums.

You can find Karen’s work on her website and on Instagram @karenbeauchampstudio and @ink.colour.paper

Karen and I were also joined by her friend Margaret, who is staying up at the house while she and her husband’s cottage down the road is being renovated. Margaret is a retired nurse, a jeweler, and an all-around lovely person. I was incredibly lucky to be able to spend the month with not one, but two great women.

Karen also has a very vocal Siamese cat named Persephone who inspired a couple of art pieces.

The work

It’s called Workaway for a reason. While I think I got the better end of the deal, what with the home-cooked meals and access to the art studio, I did do several hours of work each week. I helped with cleaning around the house, clearing garden beds, and helping to turn over Karen’s vacation cottage for new guests.

Art!!

It’s no coincidence that I chose a Workaway host who is also an artist, but I had no idea that I would have the opportunity to learn new mediums and create works of art in one of the most incredible studios ever. I learned letterpress printing when I studied in Florence, Italy and fell in love with the medium, so I was beyond excited when Karen offered to teach me other printing methods.

I learned how to do lino printing, intaglio printing with oat milk cartons, and a bit about collograph printing.

After proving myself as a printmaker, Karen trusted me with doing a print run of one of her own prints. I am the first person she has trusted to do a run like this, so it was such an honor, and I had a great time creating the prints.

Baking

When I arrived at Karen’s house at the beginning of May, she asked me what foods I really like, and I responded ‘scones’. Living in England has really made me love a nice warm, fluffy scone with a warm mug of tea. From then on, I spent the month making batch after batch of scones, trying out different recipes until I found the one I liked best.

My personal favorite recipe is lemonade scones – you can make them with just 3 ingredients: sparkling lemonade (or really any sparkling beverage), self-raising flour, and double cream (heavy cream in the U.S.). They are so easy to make, and I made them with Scotland’s signature bright orange soda, Irn Bru, as well just for fun. Now that I know how simple they are to make, I’ll be making lots and lots of scones in the future.

I also learned how to bake a few different cakes from scratch – I made a rhubarb spice cake with a lemon sauce, a walnut coffee cake, and a gin and tonic cake. I’ve never been much of a baker or cook, but I’m super happy to have left Scotland with these new skills.

Seeing Western Scotland

During my month staying in Whitehouse, Karen was kind enough to drive me to see different parts of the West Coast of Scotland. Unfortunately, we all had COVID during the first two weeks of my stay, so we kept to the house. It was rough, but fortunately we all came out on the other side of it not too worse for wear, and afterwards we were able to do a bit of exploring.

I was able to see Oban, Kilberry, Campbeltown, the Crinan Canal, and the nearby fishing town of Tarbert with Karen as my tour guide – she pointed out landmarks and friends houses along the way each time, giving me a great overview of the area. I was also able to take a day trip to the small, yet beautiful island of Gigha as well as a two day trip to the Isle of Arran on my way back to Glasgow at the end of the month.

Western Scotland is beyond stunning – one of the most naturally gorgeous places I have ever seen. It’s definitely a part of the country that not many people make it to, but they’re missing out. I can’t wait to make it back to Scotland in the future and explore the highlands and more of the coasts.

I am beyond thankful for my time on the West Coast of Scotland and to Karen and Margaret, for making me feel so welcome, for making me some of the best meals I’ve had in my life, and for teaching me so, so much. The best parts of traveling are meeting new people and learning new things, and I got to do that and more through this Workaway.