In January 2020 the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) announced (see here) it had secured £135k in funding from Visit Scotland’s Rural Tourism Infrastructure Fund to modernise the toilet facilities and install smart bins at its Visitor Centre in Balmaha:

“We know that the provision of things like high quality toilets and bins can make a real difference to a visitor’s experience. We are pleased to be investing in our facilities to ensure they are sustainable for the long term and continue to match the standard expected of Scotland’s first National Park.”  (Gordon Watson CEO).

In June 2020 Mary Jack explained (see here) how the LLTNPA appeared to be using the £135k from Visit Scotland to generate revenue for itself by hiking the charges for using the toilets.

I arrived at Balmaha on Monday to find the toilets closed and to  be “welcomed” by these signs on the door of the Visitor Centre:

 

It seems that the £135k grant had not been spent as intended.  At the March 2020 meeting of the LLTNPA Board senior management had reported on the Visit Scotland grant and how it was being spent:

This was a two-fold lie. By the time of the board meeting  LLTNPA management knew – just as with the Tarbet car park upgrade (see here) – that work on the Balmaha Visitor Centre was NOT on track.

The work actually took six months, not six weeks, to complete and was finished sometime in October 2020:

More importantly the adaptations to enable “24 hour access provision” to the toilets never happened.  The real agenda, as Mary Jack showed, was to “Maximise the generation of toilet income in 2 (Luss and Balmaha) of our 8 public toilet facilities following upgrades to charging mechanisms”.

Four years later that has clearly failed and the Balmaha Visitor Centre is now only open at the weekend during the winter. Instead of being available for the 168 hours in the week, raking in income to pay for their upkeep, the toilets are now open for just 13 of those hours.  The November edition of News from the National Park (see here) suggests this is part of a wider closure of public toilets and restriction of toilet opening hours during the winter:

“There have been changes to some facilities winter opening. Inveruglas toilets are now closed for maintenance. Firkin Point and Rowardennan toilets are also closed. Milarrochy Bay toilets remain open when they would usually be closed during the winter months. Balmaha Visitor Centre is now open on Saturday and Sunday only.”

The newsletter made no attempt to explain or justify the closure the LLTNPA’s facilities at Firkin Point, Rowardennan and Balmaha but clearly charging has not worked.

There were around 50 vehicles in the Balmaha car park when we left, say about 100 people.  Most of these are likely to have wanted to go to the toilet on arrival – Balmaha is an hour’s drive from the centre of Glasgow – and/or on departure.  The LLTNPA’s response to this lack of provision is to direct people a further 1.8m up the road to Milarrochy which is being kept open this winter, albeit with restricted opening hours:

That is highly inconvenient for people who arrive by car at Balmaha and adds to the National Park’s carbon footprint but it is completely hopeless for those arriving by bus as there is no public transport to Milarrochy.

Moreover, for the dozens of people who walk up Ben Lomond on fine days in winter unless they call in at Milarrochy they will never know it is the only toilet that is open on the east shore of Loch Lomond. The opening hours of 9am-4pm are of limited use anyway on short winter days when the safe thing to do is to set out at dawn and many will only return after dark.

This is not just a public inconvenience, it undermines the LLTNPA’s own stated intentions, as set out in the Strategic Tourism Infrastructure Development (STID) study for east Loch Lomond (see here), that it wishes to discourage visitors from taking their cars beyond Balmaha and along the narrow road to Rowardennan:

“Balmaha will be a Primary Hub with

• Park and ride type car parking and services
• A shuttle bus starting point
• Motor home facilities
• Cycle infrastructure
• Improved connections (pier, ferry, parking, visitor
centre, Conic Hill)
• Improved Public Transport connection”

 

The LLTNPA’s failure to use existing visitor infrastructure

The management failure is not just about toilet provision.  After walking over and round Conic Hill to look at the pathwork  and prior to dropping in at Milarrochy we went to Cashel.  The toilets there were also closed, hardly a surprise after the Cashel Forest/Royal Scottish Forestry’s Society to sell off a conservation project funded by public money for an unknown purpose (see here).  But its another building, like the Balmaha Visitor Centre which was funded through the public purse for public benefit and now lies unused.

Now imagine that the LLTNPA Ranger Service, which, according to the Park’s latest newsletter, “switches focus to supporting wider National Park priorities” during the winter months while  continuing “education and outreach work”,  was using the Cashel Visitor Centre for school groups to experience the wonderful east Loch Lomond oak woods and their associated wildlife during the week:

That would have helped bring in both visitors and income to Cashel .  Instead, unsupported and unpromoted by the LLTNPA, on a really beautiful afternoon there was just one other person there.  When we asked her what she thought the National Park could be doing on east Loch Lomond her response was “Don’t get me started”!

Similarly, there are  major opportunities for the LLTNPA Ranger Service to use the Visitor Centre at Balmaha for educational purposes. For example, one of the best geological walks in Scotland starts from the car park (see here).   Instead, however, of basing its Ranger Services out in the field in Visitor Centres helping the public get more out of their visits to the National Park the LLTNPA has them based at home or at the National Park HQ in Balloch.  As a consequences the toilets associated with the Visitor Centres at Balmaha and Cashel are shut.

 

All plans and no action

The LLTNPA has produced a plethora of plans for east Loch Lomond and Balmaha over the last fifteen years which mention toilet provision. None have made any difference.   Examples include:

1) The east Loch Lomond Visitor Management Plan 2010

2) The east Loch Lomond Visitor Management Plan 2014-19

This represented a step backwards:

Local authorities have historically provided public toilets within towns and villages.  At present there are public toilets provided by FCS at Sallochy and the NPA at Milarrochy, Rowardennan and at the National Park Centre at Balmaha during opening hours. Stirling Council also runs a comfort partnership scheme with local businesses to provide public access to their toilet facilities; this provision is also available in Balmaha.
Public toilet provision is one of the key issues for visitors and is the number one issue coming from the National Park Visitor Survey. [My emphasis] It is important that well used countryside sites have high quality public toilet provision; but a way has to be found at those sites to pay for the long term cleaning and maintenance.

Despite stating public toilet was the number one issue for visitors, no commitments were made.

 

3) The Buchanan Community Action Plan 2015-20  (see here)

A year later, in an about turn, a commitment was made to the local community to improve access to the toilets in the Visitor Centre:

 

4) The National Park Partnership Plan 2018-23:

Note that Rowardennan, Milarrochy and Balmaha were all identified as priorities for improved toilet provision.

 

5) The joint response Visitor Management Plan 2022 (developed as a result of Covid):

6) East Loch Lomond Strategic Tourism Infrastructure Development (STID) Framework May 2022

Almost 15 years of plans and the LLTNPA is no further forward when it comes to toilet provision on east Loch Lomond.  In fact, the situation appears to have got worse, not better, with the toilets at Cashel and Sallochy no longer available to the general public and with just one toilet being available on weekdays in the winter months.

Moreover, yet more plans will apparently be needed before anything meaningful happen.  A masterplan is being developed for Rowardennan, arising out of the STID plan, and when money and time allows another is to be developed for Balmaha.  The cost of all of this in payments to consultants, staff time and the time of the public, who are continually asked to engage on plans that lead nowhere, is considerable.   The LLTNPA needs to stop creating new plans until their staff have delivered on the existing ones.

Indeed, the LLTNPA would have achieved considerably more if instead of all these plans they had continued to base their Ranger Service locally, given them the power to take the initiative and promote full use of the existing infrastructure and employed a couple of people to assist the Rangers to undertake practical visitor management tasks: things like maintaining the toilets, clearing up litter (there was a fair amount around the Conic Hill path) and undertaking minor footpath repairs.

While the costs of producing all these plans escalates, the LLTNPA’s existing operations are highly inefficient.  On Monday I saw a Ranger van, which must have been driven out from Park HQ in Balloch, and at Milarrochy a van from Pristine Cleaning Services (I think I have got the name right).  The marginal cost of a van travelling out to the east shore of Loch Lomond to clean one toilet block must be considerable.

Even if the financial costs of keeping existing infrastructure open during the winter was slightly more than closing most of it, the value for the public pound would be far greater.  It would not only end the public inconvenience but the systematic discrimination caused by the closure of the toilets.  Men like myself who know “How to Shit in the Woods” – its the title of a book – may not be put off by having to do so but for many people this is simply not an option.  While preaching equality of opportunity and expressing concern about  certain groups being unrepresented amojng  visitors to the National Park, the LLTNPA are actually making it far harder for older people, women and ethnic minorities to do so.

 

What needs to happen

In September 2020 I addressed the LLTNPA Board about the urgent need to improve winter provision for visitors on east Loch Lomond as a result of the Covid pandemic (see here).  Board Members listened attentively, asked some intelligent questions but then changed nothing.  As a result I concluded that “it is predictable that the visitor management chaos and wasted opportunities in places like east Loch Lomond will continue”.

It say something about the National Park that either most Board Members don’t visit places like Balmaha or, if they do, just accept what is being done in their names. What is the locally elected member for east Loch Lomond and Mentieth, David Mackie, who owns the Drymen bakery and deli just down the road and who is involved in the Drymen Community Development Trust (see here) doing about this?  Perhaps he just goes home when he needs to go to the toilet?   Or what about Stirling Councillor, Martin Earl, who represent Stirling Council on the board and lives far enough away that he might appreciate a toilet?

And then there are the six board members selected by Scottish Ministers who are meant to represent the national interest: Dr Heather Reid (Convener) ,Claire Chapman (Chair of Planning and Access Committee) ,Dr Sarah Drummond (Chair of Futures Group),  Ronnie Erskine (Chair of Audit and Risk Committee), Professor Christopher Spray (Countryside Trust Rep) and Colin Lee?  How many of them get around the National Park on a regular basis and see what is happening on the ground?  Do any of those that do visit not wonder how visitors and local communities are being served?  Do any of those who prefer to sit at their desks look through past plans and not appreciate that there is an endless cycle of words without action?  Have any of them considered how the lack of toilet provision discriminates against certain groups?

One of the primary arguments being used by the Galloway National Park Association in favour of the proposed National Park there is that it would bring in more money to support rural tourism. The record of the LLTNPA over the last 15 years contradicts that.  They have failed to make proper use of their own facilities, many of which they inherited from local authorities in the area. Where “improvements” have taken place they have  invested very little of their own money, relying on other organisations to provide funding: the National Heritage Lottery Fund for footpath work in the mountains; NatureScot for the Green Recovery Better Places funding and Visit Scotland for the Rural Tourism Infrastructure Fund.  A local authority could as well do that.

Part of the explanation for the LLTNPA’s reliance on external funding lies in their having wasted so much public money on implementing and enforcing the camping byelaws.  They have had little money for anything else and the result has been that its staff spend lots of their time chasing campers or grant  funding rather than actually doing things which would benefit the public.

There is no reason in principle that a  National Park in Galloway couldn’t be different but unless Scottish Ministers acknowledge the many failings of the LLTNPA, as evidenced for example by the plethora of plans and lack of action on east Loch Lomond, we are likely to end up with more of the same.  That is why Scottish Ministers need to review our existing National Park before creating any new ones.  As part of that they should commission an independent cost-benefit analysis of the camping byelaws, which started out on east Loch Lomond and are due to be reviewed next year .