In a positive move, the local community in Balloch, the site of the proposed Flamingo Land development, have initiated a process to set up a local community development trust which would have the potential to take over some of the land in the village currently owned by Scottish Enterprise (SE) and the Loch Lomond and…
Author: Nick Kempe
After its initial consultation at the end of last year on its plans for the Angus Glens, including Glen Prosen (see here) and Glen Doll, Forest and Land Scotland (FLS) have produced a “concept proposal” prior to producing a Land Management Plan. They are consulting on until 30th June (see here for documents and video)….
A few weeks ago I was alerted by a Parkswatch reader to an excellent post on facebook (see here) about the Muckrach’s new forest, which the estate describes as one the largest “landscape scale projects” in the UK (see here). On my way up north 10 days ago I decided to go and have a…
Besides operating as a museum, the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London promotes itself (see here) as having “world-class expertise” and being able to help tackle the biggest challenges facing the world today.” When it came to native woodland that certainly used to be the case, as anyone will know who has read Richard…
The Flamingo Land planning application and the £2.4m investment Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) staff have agreed at the pierhead, which I considered in my last post (see here), is far from the only important issue facing the National Park Authority which is not on the agenda for the Board Meeting on…
The Flamingo Land planning application & the LLTNPA’s investment programme On 29th April the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) sent a letter (see here) to all those who had commented on the revised Flamingo Land Application advising them that new documents, some of which it had held back for over six months,…
Following my last post on deer density (see here), which was prompted by the 200+ deer I had seen on the Quoich flats on 3rd May and which took a theoretical look at what 10, 8 or 6 deer per square km means for the natural environment, this post relates those arguments to what is…
Last Monday, I walked back down Glen Affric from Allt Beithe Youth Hostel and then over to Loch Mullardoch. On the short stretch of public road between the car park and the turn north into Gleann nam Fiadh we passed this lorry with a large metal section of pipe. I guessed at once why it…
I have been out and about quite a bit over the last month and its got me thinking about run of river hydro schemes again, from both a climate change and a nature perspective. While promoted by both Scottish Government policy and developers as a means of providing renewable energy and of reducing our carbon…
One evening three weeks ago I went up Ladylea Hill at the northern end of the Candacraig Estate. While the predominant land use in most of the upper catchment of the River Don is intensive grouse moor management, much of Candacraig has been used for commercial forestry for some time and the main “sporting use”…
Fourteen years ago, in 2010, the head keeper at Mar Lodge quit his employment with the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) claiming “deer numbers had fallen to dangerously low levels” on the estate (see here). His claims were not just poppycock, as this photo shows, they were a deliberate attempt to sabotage NTS’s effort to…
On 22nd November the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) issued a news release announcing it was investing £1.6m of Scottish Government funds in its facilities over the winter in order for it to become a “net zero” organisation by 2030. The bulk of the money was earmarked for “retrofitting” the LLTNPA’s HQ…
In 1995 the Mar Lodge Estate was bought by the National Trust for Scotland with a £10m+ grant from the Heritage Lottery Fun and a £4.5m grant from the Easter Trust. In 1996 NTS agreed with Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) set of principles by which the estate should be managed including that the remnants of…
On 24th April councillors at West Dunbartonshire Council (WDC) decided by a majority vote to accept the recommendation of officers (see here for the committee report and proposed response) and not object to the Flamingo Land planning application at Balloch. This was a reversal of the previous position WDC Councillors had adopted when, in June…
The 1996 Deer Act created a new duty for NatureScot, the body responsible for the control of deer in Scotland, to take account of “the size and density of the deer population”. The Report of the Scottish Government’s Deer Working Group, published in 2020 (see here), recommended that NatureScot “should adopt 10 red deer per…
On 5th April (see here), in the newsletter they email to land managers, the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) reported that their National Park Partnership Plan (NPPP) 2024-29 had been approved by Scottish Ministers. There is no mention of this on the “news” section of their website (last item International Women’s Day…
The failed Cononish goldmine & the failures of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority
This post provides a summary of some recent evidence that has emerged about the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA)’s mis-management of the crisis at the mine and some related financial developments. The “regular updates” given to LLTNPA Board Members about Cononish goldmine The Chief Executive’s report to the LLTNPA Board Meeting…
On 18th December a planning application (see here) was submitted to Highland Council on behalf of Akre Ltd for retrospective planning permission for works they had undertaken relating to the Far Ralia hill road, confirmation that the law had been flouted as I claimed last June (see here). The application form suggests the works started…
This post takes another look (see here) and (here) at the planning application to build an enormous pump storage hydro scheme between Loch Leambhain, facing Ben Alder, and Lochan na H-Earba. The Scottish Government’s unaccountable Energy Consents Unit Generally it is harder to find documents relating to planning application on the Energy Consents Unit (ECU)…
GB TTIt is over three years since parkwatch published a letter from Alistair Bell in Canada about HIE’s corporate gaslighting at Cairn Gorm and why people had allowed downhill skiing there to die (see here). There have of course been several campaigns against HIE before, successful in the case of the opposition to extend downhill…
On 6th March “Lomond Banks”, the brand name Flamingo Land uses at Balloch, issued a news release (copy here) announcing it had finalised a Section 48 agreement [under the Roads (Scotland) Act 1984] with Transport Scotland under which it would pay for an upgrade to the Stoneymollan roundabout on the A82 should its planning application be…
I was pleased to have this letter, full text below, published in the Herald on Tuesday. I hope it speaks for itself: “Your front page report on Saturday (Rural communities ‘at risk’ in phone network switch 13th April see here) shows the UK Government’s approach to telecommunications provision in rural areas, a Westminster responsibility, is…
I am very grateful to all the people who have promoted my post on Sunday (see here) about Scottish Forestry and the tree planting disaster at Kinrara and my apologies that the parkswatch website then crashed. This does not appear to have been due to a cyber attack by defenders of the forestry grants system or…
In mid-February (see here) I described how many of the trees planted by BrewDog, as part of the Phase I creation of its Lost Forest, had died and how they appeared to be investing little, if any, of their own money in the whole disastrous project. A week after the post I received a response…
Question: how does France (along with many other European countries) manage to have so much more woodland than Scotland and “do” forestry without fencing and planting? Answer: they control grazing by large herbivores, whether livestock or deer, using completely different legal mechanisms than exist in Scotland The fundamental failing with the legislative proposals in the…