What We Do
Thane of Fife Wildlife and Heritage Tours offers a first class full spectrum wildlife and heritage, Fife based, touring service. Our services meet our varied customer needs for excellent wildlife and heritage experiences in Fife and across Scotland; for high quality tour guiding, accommodation, food and drink; and educational and cultural activities. They also showcase, market and add value to the wider Fife tourist product.
All our services seek to make Fife’s wildlife and heritage accessible to all, and actively seek to promote these to schools, third sector organisations, and to groups sometimes under-represented as visitors to Fife and elsewhere.
Our Services
- ★ For the independent traveller we can organise a bespoke tour that includes accommodation: self-catering, Bed and Breakfast and hotels across Fife. This range of accommodation meets your budget and, most importantly, your interests. We can offer advice about where to go to see wildlife, and about how to best enjoy Fife’s heritage.
- ★ Other independent travellers may prefer to take advantage for our dedicated part or full day wildlife and heritage ‘safari’ guiding service direct from their self-catering, Bed and Breakfast, or hotel accommodation. We will take you around Fife (and further afield if required) to see the very best of Fife’s wildlife and heritage; especially ‘hidden gems’ such as the Eden Centre, Letham Pools, Drumossie Bogs known to our guides.
- ★ We offer group travel options to visitors arriving as part of a package deal, for example those arriving on cruise ships. Our part day trips allow visitors to enjoy Fife’s wildlife, beauty and heritage.
- ★ We recognise that for many visitors Fife’s premier attraction is golf. The views from some of Fife’s golf courses are among the best in the world. We also offer a full service to golf ‘widows’ and ‘widowers’ so that they can enjoy Fife’s sights while their partners enjoy their golf.
- ★ Our guiding service offers our customers the opportunity to explore Fife ‘thematically’. In wildlife terms this may mean focusing on the wildlife of the ‘coast’ or the ‘interior’ or at a particular time of year, in heritage terms on historical times or personalities such as Mary Queen of Scots.
- ★ We also offer our customers the opportunity to enjoy Fife through a variety of foci: new ‘pilgrimage’ touring, modern social and political history as told through the story of mining communities and Gothenburg pubs, and through Fife’s appearance in film (e.g. Charoits of Fire), television (e.g. Dr Findlay’s casebook),music (e.g. Sir Jimmy Shand in Auchtermuchty and East Weymss, and Johnny Cash in Falkland) and in literature (e.g. Rebus in Cardenden, Robinson Crusoe in Lower Largo)
- ★ Our guiding service can meet the needs of various photographic groups for wildlife, landscape, architectural and historical photography. Fife offers great opportunities to mix both subjects and styles. Photographers should bring both wide angle and macro lenses. Our tours offer tuition to the ‘beginner’ photographer, but also access to prime opportunities to get the sort of pictures sought by more advanced photographers.
- ★ We offer bespoke ‘scavenger/treasure hunt’ opportunities to community and other organisations. For a fee, Thane of Fife Wildlife and Heritage Tours will research the clues and organise the event on behalf of the organisation.
- ★ We are developing wildlife and heritage activities that meet the needs of the primary school curriculum for environmental, historical and cultural education. We are developing wild and heritage activities that meet the needs of young people with special educational needs as part of community education and development.
- ★ We are developing guiding and excursion service for senior citizens groups, through day centres and residential facilities. All our tours have been assessed for wheel chair access and general accessibility. We are developing wildlife and heritage opportunities for people with disabilities generally and for those with specific needs such as: sensory impairment, learning disabilities.
- ★ We are conscious that many organisations find monitoring customer satisfaction and service quality difficult. As a result we offer a customer/quality surveying service based on our 25 years of social surveying experience. We would work with you to develop methodologically sound surveys, the results of which you can use to grow your business and meet needs of your customers.
Our Principles
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1Thane of Fife Wildlife and Heritage Tours corporate philosophy is one of seeking to welcome all people to come enjoy the pleasures of Fife. Our services meet the needs of groups sometimes forgotten or under-represented as visitors such as: people from Black, Asian and other communities such as LGBT.
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2Sustainable tourism is tourism committed to generating a low impact on the surrounding environment and community by acting responsibly while generating income and employment for the local economy and aiding social cohesion. Sustainable tourism aims to ensure that economic development as a result of tourism is a positive experience for everyone involved; local community, tourism businesses and visitors.
In practice this means Thane of Fife Wildlife and Heritage Tours operates under industry wide best practice standards to minimise the impact of tourism on Fife’s wildlife and heritage resources. It can be simple as picking up all rubbish while on a trip, through encouraging the use of public transport to wildlife areas and attractions, to avoiding close disturbing endangered species such as badgers and sea eagles. -
3We actively seek to operate under a cooperative and partnership building business model where individual enterprises and services add value to each other. This approach builds sustainability profitability for each individual enterprise or service while multiplying the value of tourism to the Fife economy. The visitor gains through accessing high quality goods and services that meet their needs.
biography
Although working for most of his career in central and local government as a senior social researcher, Ken has always had an interest in wildlife and history generally, and particularly those of Fife. Born and bred in Kirkcaldy he attended Kirkcaldy High school where he won the Pathhead Feuars history prizes in his 5th and 6th year. Throughout his university days at Lancaster and Glasgow he continued to enjoy the natural world and local history around him, this he continued whether working in London and Sheffield or travelling across Britain, in Europe and India. Returning to Fife in the early 1990s afforded him a further opportunity to explore his other great love: Raith Rovers Football Club. Indeed, he enjoyed as brief spell as the club’s commercial manager.
During 2014, Ken decided on a career change by returning to study HNC Travel and Tourism at Fife College. He won an Adam smith Foundation Tullis Russell scholarship, which allowed him to form Thane of Fife Wildlife and Heritage Tours.