One-Week Adventure Summer Camp in the Scottish Highlands

The week is an outdoor adventure programme, not a lesson-based course: there are no classroom lessons. Instructors qualified through Mountain Training UK and British Canoeing lead each day's activity, and young people are taught the skills they need as they go — paddling, climbing and abseiling technique, fire lighting with a striking flint, foraging, shelter building with ropes, hazel spars and old yacht sails, and navigation on the hill. Skills build through the week towards the final night, when the group survives overnight on an uninhabited island on its own.

One price covers the residential week: accommodation at the adventure school, all meals, every activity and the instruction that goes with it, use of the centre's technical and safety equipment, and the instructor-accompanied coach transfer between Inverness Airport and the centre at the start and end of the week. Campers travel to Inverness themselves; the school asks parents to agree travel plans with Rebecca before booking flights.

Young people sleep in a collection of Norwegian-style wooden cabins clustered just yards from the seashore. The main building, with its distinctive red roof, holds the living and dining room, several bunk rooms, and separate loos and showers for boys and girls; further bunk rooms are in the outer cabins, along with a drying room for wet kit. Bunkrooms are spacious, clean and well lit, all on the ground floor, with windows onto the loch, and all beds are made up with clean sheets and duvets on arrival. Bedrooms are arranged so that young people share with others of their own age. On expedition nights the group camps out with its instructors, and on the last night sleeps under yacht sails on the island.

All meals are home-cooked on site and there is plenty of food: a cooked breakfast, a packed lunch to carry out for the day, and a two-course hot evening meal — either soup and a main course or a main course and dessert. The kitchen is nut-free and caters for most special dietary requirements when told well in advance, as the centre is a long way from the shops; details go on the booking form.

Sea kayaking on the sheltered sea loch, including a mini journey and circumnavigating an island, looking out for nesting birds, seals, otters and sea eagles. Rock climbing and abseiling on an ancient rocky outcrop. A mountain climbed from a wild base camp. Raft building from salvaged materials, then racing them on the sea loch. Foraging for edible plants, winkles, limpets and mussels and cooking them on a fire the campers light themselves. Laying pots for crabs and lobsters and fishing for mackerel from the workboats. A beach day on empty golden sands, swimming in the sea. A survival night on an uninhabited island. Evenings at the centre are supervised social time — volleyball, table football, cards, chess, backgammon — or preparation for the next day.

The adventure school sits on the shore of Loch a' Chadh-Fi in the north-west Highlands, with its own workboats used for fishing and for the crossing to survival island. Alongside the cabins there is a large kit store and workshop and a drying room for clothing and equipment. The centre has no mobile phone signal, no television and no wifi. Ridgway Adventure Ltd is registered with the Adventure Activities Licensing Authority and licensed for climbing, trekking and watersports, and all staff are background-checked through the Disclosure Scotland PVG scheme.

Rebecca Ridgway and her family have run an adventure school on this shore since 1969, and the first group through the door was a two-week international summer camp for 12 to 17-year-olds. Rebecca and her husband Mark live on site all year and see the young people daily, often at mealtimes or out in the workboats. Only one camp runs at a time, with a maximum of 36 young people, and some campers are now the children of former campers. The camps are deliberately phone-free: phones and valuables are collected and kept safe on arrival. Most young people come on their own and leave with friends from across the UK, Europe and beyond.