In 2024 the Abrdn Property Income Trust (APIT)’s shareholders took the decision to wind down the fund. Following the disposal of their other fixed assets in 2024, APIT have been having difficulty (see here) selling the Far Ralia estate which they bought in September 2021 for carbon trading purposes and then planted with trees with the assistance…
Author: Nick Kempe
This morning the board of the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) is meeting for the first time since the Abernethy/Glenmore wildfire which started on Wednesday 15th July. Increasingly the CNPA has started to resemble the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority where staff take all the decisions and the board acts as a figleaf. The…
Yesterday afternoon the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) further reduced the overall area covered by their unlawful exclusion zone in Glenmore (see here) and (here). Once again there was no news release to announce the changes although the day before the CNPA had issued a news release about King Charles’ visits to An Lochan Uaine at…
The section of dual carriage way on the A9 between Dalmamein and Dalnaspidal, just south of Drumochter, was opened in November 1979. The woodland along it is highlighted in Lesley Riddoch’s film, “Scotland’s Missing Forests: the Great Eco-Conspiracy” (see here). That film, which has had over 200,000 views, focuses on the restorative tree planting by…
On Friday the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) reduced the size of Abernethy/Glenmore the “Exclusion Zone” it had created in Glenmore/Abernethy. There is nothing I can find to announce the change on its website, apart from the changes in the map shown on its path closures webpage (see here) and nothing on its Facebook Page. …
Driving up the A82 in mid-July, before going to the Alps, I was surprised to see that the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA)’s works to ‘upgrade’ the Falls of Falloch car park, announced earlier this year and which I had blogged about in April (see here), were complete. Very few of the…
Todrig was once, as the photo of the main house shows, a wealthy hill farm in the Borders whose more recent decline is part of a decline in sheep farming more generally. It was acquired by Gresham House Forest Growth and Sustainability Fund LP (GH Fund) in 2022, in which the Scottish National Investment Bank…
After my post yesterday questioning the legality and justification of the Cairngorms National Park Authority’s ‘Exclusion Zone’ on Tuesday (see here), a reader sent me a photo of this sign at Inverdruie. I do not know who is responsible for the wording but there is no mention of any Exclusion Zone. That and the “welcome”…
[This is an even more belated post card from the Triglav National Park (see here) and will be the last in the series – some observations from the Austrian side of the Carnic Alps will follow]. We ended our traverse around the core mountain area of the Triglav National Park at the Vrsic pass. In…
The creation of access rights under the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 did not remove restrictions on access made under other legislation. Some of those legal restrictions apply to land more or less permanently, such as those applying to working quarries, but some are more temporary. For example, under the Fire and Rescue Services Act…
I went to have a look at the southern edge of the area affected by the Abernethy/Glenmore wildfire on 23rd August, about five weeks after the fire started and two weeks after Glenmore had been re-opened on 7th August (see here for timeline from the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service). All the photos in this…
A late postcard – I am back in Scotland! The most obvious impact of global warming in the Alps has been the retreat of the glaciers. At the end of the 19th Century the glacier on Triglav covered over 40 hectares. By 2019 it had shrunk to 1 ha and by 2022 was no longer…
I had wanted to climb Triglav, the highest mountain in Slovenia, ever since meeting some Slovenian climbers on a Mountaineering Council of Scotland meet many years ago. My interest was fanned by Mike Newbury, a stalwart of MCifS’ access and conservation committee, who went on holiday to Slovenia each year and whose privately published guide…
Walking up through the forest to our first hut below Debela Pec we had little idea if it’s extent until altitude started to stunt tree growth. Prompted by the Glenmore fire and Victor Clements post (see here) I wondered what would happen if a wildfire became established in a forest of this size and if it…
An RSPB newsletter I read before leaving Scotland for Slovenia, referred to capercaillie as birds of the Caledonian pine forest. This may now be the case in Scotland but wasn’t always so, as when capercaillie inhabited the mixed woodland on the Loch Lomond islands. Capercaillie, while mainly found in the boreal zone, are also distributed…
My original plan for this summer was to start walking the Via Alpina, which traverses the arc if the Alps from Trieste to Nice or thereabouts. The first part through Slovenia, however, did not sound that much fun so I decided to spend a week instead wandering through the Triglav National Park. Having skirted the…
I was prompted to start Parkswatchscotland as a means of combatting the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA)’s proposals to create camping byelaws. Having been involved, as President of the Mountaineering Scotland, in negotiating the agreement which was eventually enshrined in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 I believed there other ways to…
A month before large areas in Strath Nethy and Glenmore were consumed by fire, I went for a short walk to have a look at part of the Caledonian pinewood around Glen Brown which also lies within the Cairngorms National Park. This fragment of Caledonian pinewood is located on the Dorback Estate, which was purchased…
Walking back from Cook’s Cairn and Corryhabbie Hill in mid-June, I spotted shoeless hoof prints in Glen Suie and then a tepee and two horses in a field by the nearby estate bothy. I went over to have a look and got chatting to a woman minding the camp. She was with two companions and…
[NB This post was updated and corrected at 18.50 on 19th July. I wrongly reported the local resident as having seen smoke at 11am on Weds 15th about 45 mins before the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service were alerted to the fire when he had seen smoke in that area the day before. It was…
While efforts to contain the Glen More wildfire continue (see here) and have had some impact, it now appears likely only rain will extinguish it. In the last year the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) has approved fire byelaws, intended to reduce the likelihood of wildfires happening, and what was described as a ‘pioneering’ Integrated…
On 2nd July the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) announced (see here) a 12 week public consultation on the camping byelaws which legally require to be reviewed every ten years. Six days later they announced (see here) that all the permit and camping places that had been created to enable the public to…
At the end of June I went for a walk over Conic Hill, starting from Milton of Buchanan and then back along the main road from Balmaha. The first part of the route, which I have followed several times before, takes the West Highland Way through the western edge of Garadhban forest, owned by Scottish…
Following my post on the Loch Lomond South Community Development Trust (LLSCDT)’s registration of interest in Scottish Enterprise’s land at Balloch (see here), their accounts were published on 6th July by Companies House (see here). This was the day before the deadline and these were first accounts to appear since the company was incorporated on…
They don’t want you to know – the Caledonian Pinewood remnant in Glen Falloch is now at serious risk
Yesterday, I discovered by accident when looking through Scottish Forestry (SF)’s register of woodland creation and felling permissions (see here) that a public consultation on native woodland restoration proposals for the Glenfalloch Estate opened on 23rd June. While SF’s website now provides a tab allowing the public to comment on grant applications, it provides little…