Alan Joyce

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It is with deep regret that we have to report that Alan Joyce died on the 22nd September 2007 after a long, but hard fought, illness.

The Highland Naturalists Project Team wish to extend their sincere condolences to Alan’s wife as well as all his family and friends.
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Alan Joyce cannot recall any particular childhood influences in his choice of career but he has encouraged many youngsters into natural history study over his forty years of teaching.

Spending his school holidays working on a Surrey farm, he resolved first to undertake research into agriculture. He graduated in the sciences in 1949 - at Reading University, under a professor who was, incidentally, a palaeobotanist (study of plant fossils) specialising in pondweeds. Alan joined the Scientific Civil Service but found himself directed into food research at the Fisheries Laboratory in Aberdeen.

A few years later he read an article in Country Life Magazine about a rural bus sevice which runs from Lairg to Durness and so resolved to visit Sutherland; his first experience of the Highlands. Ending up at Rhiconich he then walked and hitched all the way home to Aberdeen. After he married in 1953 he and his wife took numerous camping holidays to Sutherland until, in 1961 the Ministry of Food Laboratory in Aberdeen closed and the staff were moved to Lowestoft. It only took 18 months for the couple to decide to move up to Sutherland permanently and Alan took up a post in Golspie High School teaching biology.