If you’ve been along the A82 in the last eight months, you might have seen this wrecked car just off the road south of Inverarnan. I first saw it last summer  and when it was still there in October wrote to Gordon Watson, Chief Executive of the National Park Authority to ask if the Park had noticed it and were planning to do anything about it. His reply makes instructive reading   FOI 2015-045 Response – abandoned car

This photo was taken on 16th February on my way back from Glen Coe.   It is a tad ironic that the car is in the west Loch Lomond camping management zone where the Park and Ministers want camping banned from next year because, wait for it, the unacceptable litter left by campers.  Perhaps the park  could explain why wrecked and abandoned cars are more acceptable than wrecked and abandoned tents?

The Park though has form on wrecked cars, as John Donohoe, my successor as President of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland told me last year.  He had been a member of the LLTNP Local Access Forum for a while and on a site visit a member of Park staff pointed out a wrecked car and said they had no powers to deal with such issues.  A member of the LAF then asked who the landowner was and was told Forest Enterprise – who have better haulage and removal equipment than anyone else in the country.  It would only have taken a phone call.

Its hard to see how the absentee landowner – and in 2012 at least the Garabal estate was owned by Tuwo Daugard A/S from Denmark – would object to removal of this car but there are clear links to the land reform agenda.  If the Park is having difficulty tracing then landowner, then this is another argument about the need for transparency around land ownership.   If the landowner is refusing to act, its an argument for public authorities to be able to assume the powers of landownership where landowners are not acting in the public interest.