Scotland Outdoors

If you added up all the land currently forming playgrounds and playing fields around Scotland’s schools, it would be roughly the same size as Dundee. Most of that is tarmac or grass cut short for sports but as Helen Needham discovered when she visited Levenmouth High School in Buckhaven in Fife, it’s possible for schools to use some of their land in a different way to improve biodiversity and benefit learning and wellbeing.Two rare needlework samplers thought to have been embroidered by Robert Burns’s sister and mother have been returned to the poet’s birthplace thanks to an American donor. Rachel visited the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway to have a look at the samplers and hear about their significance.Bird Gardens Scotland is a bird conservation breeding centre and home to over 300 birds from around the world. It’s been built over the past few years by Owen and his husband Mark and now boasts a coffee shop and visitor centre. Mark went for a walk around the sit and met some of the hundreds of fea