The planning application for social housing at Balmaha on a site designated as Ancient Woodland raises some major issue (see here) which I hope to return to before it is considered by the Loch Lomond and Trossachs Planning Committee. Meantime, in order to understand the application, it needs to be considered within the wider context…
Month: March 2017
By Ross MacBeath Camping Forest Drive Zone B – 19th March 2017 Nothing more than Viewpoints pretending to be camping pitches. This Forestry Commission map above details the path (green dots) through what is now Permit Zone ‘B’. It doesn’t refer to any camping locations, but hosts three viewpoints. With the lack of any…
By Save the Cairngorms Campaign In 2014, the CNPA gave planning approval for what is, in effect, a new town of 1500 houses in the National Park. The site on the east side of the River Spey opposite Aviemore, is owned by John Grant of Rothiemurchus and is land of high conservation and landscape value. This…
Back in November I submitted an FOI request to the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority intended to enforce the proposed camping byelaws: “all information relating to any intention to prosecute whether internal, discussions or communications with the police, procurator fiscal, Forestry commissioner anyone else who might be involved in enforcing the byelaws.”…
Chris Townsend’s post on Friday on the destruction of trees at Loch an Eilein is well worth a read (see here). Chris highlights the hyprocrisy of some of the people responsible for managing our natural environments, who on the one hand lecture visitors about the damage they do (which is tiny in the scheme of…
By Ross MacBeath Forest Drive In order to stop people from camping by the loch shores and to meet their commitment to Scottish Ministers to deliver 300 “new” camping pitches, the LLTNPA had to find somewhere else for people to camp – so they leaned on Forestry Commission Scotland to use their land and have…
By Phil Swainson As stated at the end of my last post on Badaguish in Glenmore (see here), Speyside Trust has made yet another planning application, this time to convert a toilet block into a site base for staff. Like many previous applications, it is full of false or misleading statements, and as pointed out…
By Ross MacBeath For the last year parkswatch has been covering the development of the con at Loch Chon, the campsite the Loch Lomond and Trossachs LTNPA has created in a place few people go, in order to meet its promise to the Scottish Government to provide new camping facilties in the National Park…
Planning powers are the most important tool our National Park Authorities have to achieve their four statutory aims, conservation and enjoyment of the countryside and sustainable use of resources and development. How they are used is crucial to the success of our National Parks and parkswatch has covered a number of planning failures and areas…
Thanks to reader Fiona Mackinnon who sent me this link about crackdown on fly tipping at the former torpedo range on Loch Long by Arrochar (see here). While I welcome this belated attempt to tackle rubbish in the National Park (the torpedo site has been used as an unofficial dump for years) –…
Following my post questioning what the Cairngorms National Park Authority was doing about the unlawful hill track leading onto Carn Leth Choin in upper Glen Banchor, west of Newtonmore (see here), I wrote to the Cairngorms National Park Authority. On 8th March (I have been in Norway in-between) I received this response from Murray Ferguson:…
Following the announcement by Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority staff of their decision to close the slipway and ranger base at Milarrochy (see here), Peter Jack, Chair of the Loch Lomond Association wrote to James Stuart, new convener of the LLNPA, asking the Board to review the decision at their meeting last Monday. …
The LLTNPA is discouraging camping at designated sites. Following the implementation of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority Management Zones on 1st March and the requirement to purchase a permit for the use of designated sites or risk a criminal conviction I revisited two sites to refresh my recollection of the environmental condition…
The camping byelaws dominate the lengthy agenda of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs Board meeting on Monday. There is information or decisions about the byelaws and camping plans under almost every agenda item (see here for papers) as well as a specific paper on Your Park. The most important thing that should have been…
Three years ago I knew nothing about boating on Loch Lomond and, if you had asked me about the Loch Lomond byelaws, – the ones that control boat users on the Loch – my response would have probably been along the lines of “anything which controls speedboats must be a good thing”. That way…
. If you want to understand what is going wrong at Cairngorm (or indeed in National Parks or the wider economy), I believe you need some understanding of what is going on financially. If there is going to be any recovery of democratic control in Scotland, whether in our National Parks or outside, we…
The east Loch Lomond camping byelaws 2011 should have been repealed before the new camping byelaws came into effect on 1st March. (In fact they should have been repealed completely, not replaced, as they had only ever been agreed as a temporary measure (see here)). However, the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority hit…
In what I believe is a very positive development Onekind has launched a campaign to protect mountain hares in the Cairngorms National Park (see here). I think they are right to focus on the National Park – if we cannot protect wildlife in our National Parks then we are unlikely to protect wildlife anywhere except for…
On Thursday, I went climbing near Glen Coe and on the way up and back down the A82 checked out a few things about the west Loch Lomond camping management zone. I almost missed the sign announcing the start of the zone, just before Luss, despite looking out for it. A large proportion of drivers…
On Friday 19th August 2016, after a site visit, Cairngorms National Park Authority Planning Committee passed the latest, and certainly not the last, of a series of highly controversial planning applications by the Speyside Trust, which manages a large site at Badaguish, in the heart of Glenmore Forest. The applications are controversial because the Speyside…
Today probably marks the most retrograde in the history of access to land in Scotland since the Trespass Scotland Act of 1865 as the camping byelaws come into force. When even Radio 3, not renowned for covering the great outdoors, announces on its 7.30 news headlines that campers in one of Britain’s prime beauty spots…