Tag: conservation

February 24, 2024 Nick Kempe 3 comments

On 24th November Pitcher Partners, a company based in Western Australia, were appointed administrators for Scotgold Resources and its subsidiaries which operate in Scotland, SGZ Cononish, which operates the Cononish goldmine and its exploratory company SGZ Grampian.  Two weeks ago a reader pointed me to information about two meetings Pitcher Partners held with creditors of…

February 19, 2024 Geoff Riddington 5 comments

In December the Planning Committee of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) unanimously approved the planning application by Mr and Mrs Young to build a luxury holiday lodge on Inchconnachan (see here  for committee report). Initially the application had included a proposal, based on advice from NatureScot, to remove the wallabies from…

January 26, 2024 Nick Kempe 11 comments

Following my post on deer fencing and capercaillie on Speyside (see here), a friend and sometime contributor to Parkswatch, Nick Halls, brought to my attention to the latest issue of the Geographer, the magazine of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.  It is all about trees. In it there is an interview with Thomas MacDonell who…

January 8, 2024 Nick Kempe 4 comments

On Friday the following comment was submitted to my post on Access Rights and Grouse Moors (see here) “Without mammalian (mustelid and rodent) control there would be no ground nesting birds of any kind, grouse or otherwise.” Comment: This is plainly wrong. Ground nesting birds evolved along with mustelids and rodents long before any predator…

January 4, 2024 Nick Kempe 6 comments

Wildlife, however much depleted, is present everywhere.  Consequently if wildlife was a reason to keep to tracks there would be no right to roam anywhere.  And in my case I could not have attained my objective on Hogmanay, the trackless summit of Carn nan Tri-Tighearnan a few miles north of the Cairngorms National Park.  The…

December 18, 2023 Nick Kempe 3 comments

The publication date of the April Monitoring report of the Cononish goldmine is given on the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA)as 26th October (see here), four days before the Planning Committee Meeting on 30th October (see here) which considered and then “noted” the “annual report” on the mine. There was absolutely no…

December 16, 2023 Nick Kempe 7 comments

The Scottish Government’s consultation on Tackling the Nature Emergency (see here) closed on Thursday. It is yet another consultation that will have consumed vast amounts of time and energy but is unlikely to change much. This post considers some of the key reasons why the Scottish Government’s proposals for nature restoration won’t work.  A second…

December 8, 2023 Nick Kempe 4 comments

The Scottish Government’s consultation on “Tackling the Nature Emergency: Scotland’s Strategic Framework for Biodiversity” (see here), which was launched in September and includes proposals to reform Scotland’s National Parks, closes on 14th December. To date I have only considered the Scottish Government’s undemocratic proposal to increase Ministerial control over appointments to National Park board appointments…

November 5, 2023 Nick Kempe 4 comments

At the start of October, almost a year after they bought the Glen Prosen Estate for £17,555,000,  , Forest and Land Scotland (FLS) launched an initial consultation of what to do with the land and buildings under the banner of developing an Angus Glens Land Management Plan (see here). When I last wrote about Glen…

November 1, 2023 Dave Morris 4 comments

The recent report from Cairngorms Connect (see here), which explained the last 30 years experience of rewilding on the western slopes of the Cairngorms massif, was covered in the Strathspey and Badenoch Herald (“Fences are “no answer in Forests””) and attracted two letters in responses from Basil Dunlop and myself – see below. The information…

August 9, 2023 Nick Kempe 2 comments

On 28th July the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) lodged a response to the Flamingo Land Planning Application (see here) which could scupper a large part of the proposed development: “The outputs of the FRA [Flood Risk Assessment]  (illustrated in Appendix G) [see map above] indicate the majority of Zone B – Riverside and part…