Following his post on the A82 upgrade (see here), John Urquhart and other volunteers from the Helensburgh and District Access Trust (HADAT) requested a deputation to the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority Board on their alternative proposals for a high road linking Tarbet and Invernan. This was accepted and the HADAT delegation was…
Author: Nick Kempe
In September it was widely reported (see here for example) that Standard Life Investments Property Income Trust (SLIPIT) had purchased 1,447 hectares of land in the Cairngorms National Park for £7.5m as part of its carbon strategy. This followed BrewDog’s purchase of Kinrara earlier in the year for similar purposes (see here) . This post…
The Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) Board meeting today was meant to be held both on-line and in public at the National Park HQ. With the wave of Omicron sweeping the country, I fully expected the meeting to be cancelled but the notice (above) was up last night and still was this…
In my recent post criticising the use of plastic tree tubes to plant woodland in the Cairngorms (see here), I argued that tree shelters wouldn’t be necessary if nature was not so out of kilter – primarily due to sporting land management. The addiction of the native woodland planting business to tree tubes, however, goes…
In Scotland it is often easy to tell whether land is protected for nature, it looks, sounds and feels like nature is doing well. Ben Dolphin explained this recently in a fine article for walkhighlands (see here) about why Scotland’s Nature National Reserves are a good place to walk. The challenge for both the Scottish…
One thing the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) needs to fix urgently in the new National Park Partnership Plan, which is currently out for consultation, is the plastic tree tube problem (see here). The case against using plastic in the countryside I had not driven along the A95 north of Grantown-on-Spey for a number of…
As a campaigner who is trying to change how Scotland’s two National Parks are managed, I am always pleased when posts are picked up by the mainstream media. I never expected my blog on the Royal Family and COP26 (see here) to end up on the front page of the Scottish edition of The Times…
While working on my last post criticising the response of the leadership of the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority to the climate emergency (see here), I had no idea of the damage that had by wrought by Storm Arwen at Stronachlachar in the Trossachs. My thanks to the Steamship Trust for including parkswatch…
The Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) website has had a makeover. If you click on their site address https://www.lochlomond-trossachs.org/ you are greeted by a photo of a digger in the uplands, the hashtag slogan “Let’s do net zero” and a page of links to information on various aspects of the “climate emergency…
A recent visit to the Cromdale Hills prompted some thoughts about the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA)’s policy approach to hill tracks, the use of All Terrain Vehicles and their impact on the natural environment. What the CNPA National Park Partnership plan says about hill tracks The draft National Park Partnership Plan (NPPP), which is…
The Abergeldie Estate, which I referred to in my post on the Royal Family last week (see here), is now under offer. That is hardly surprising. There are plenty of billionaires in the world for whom forking out £23m to become neighbours of the Royal Family is small change. Whether the prospective buyer will be…
Royal hypocrisy “It is a source of great pride to me that the leading role my husband played in encouraging people to protect our fragile planet, lives on through the work of our eldest son Charles and his eldest son William. I could not be more proud of them.” (Queen’s Speech to COP26 reception for…
There are lots of good aspirations in the draft Cairngorms National Park Partnership Plan (NPPP), which is out for public consultation until 17th December (see here), but at the heart of its plan for nature is an unambitious target for carbon emissions. The effect of this will be to allow unsustainable management of land to…
The divurgence between how people in Glasgow have welcome people to the COP -26 summit has been been most interesting. On the one hand sections of the population profiteering through exorbitant charges for accommodation – one wonders if any of the hotels or landlords charging delegates £1000s to stay will invest those profits in making…
On 10th November 2018 a large landslide took place above the eastern end of Loch Quoich. It was triggered by the collapse of a crag halfway up the steep hillside, demolished an electricity pylon and resulted in the road to Kinloch Hourn being closed for 6 months while the slope was stabilised at an estimated…
Parkswatch has long campaigned that most visitor facilities in the National Park should be kept open year round (see here). There are sufficient people, including tourists from abroad, visiting the National Park every day of the year that it no longer makes sense to close facilities over the winter. There are signs from the latest…
What the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) have discovered at Mar Lodge While away in Lochaber last week I read a very interesting article in the latest Reforesting Scotland journal (Issue 64) on ‘Regenerating aspen: “spontaneous appearance” at Mar Lodge Estate’. The author, the ecologist Andrew Painting, recounts how in 2018, while undertaking fieldwork in…
Development for “sporting” purposes on the Pitmain and Glenbanchor estates in the Cairngorms National Park, albeit interspersed with some tokenistic conservation projects funded by our public authorities (see here), is relentless. On 8th October Highland Council validated a planning application (see here), submitted by Savills, to erect a 6m high lattice radio mast and equipment…
After my post on NatureScot and the Scottish Countryside Rangers Assocation’s statement on the role of countryside rangers in Scotland (see here), a couple of readers questioned whether access rights were being afforded any more respect on the ground as opposed to what is being said in the policy world. They were right to do…
On Friday, while travelling north up the A82, I stopped by the first roundabout at the start of the Crianlarich bypass to take a look at the landscaping. It provides a lesson in ecology and current forestry practices right next to the road. The A82 Crianlarich by-pass, was completed in December 2014, almost seven…
On Friday I travelled up the A82 to Lochaber where I am staying for a week. The transformation of the verges and laybys that followed the installation of litter bins by the Friends of Loch Lomond and Trossachs, which I had blogged on a month ago (see here), has continued. All the laybys I could…
Wherever possible I try to visit sites before blogging about how they are being managed or the likely impacts of developments but sometimes that is not possible. I had only made one fleeting visit to Glen Falloch this year – to look at the project to remove the overhead powerlines – and had not re-visited…
Following my post which highlighted how Highlands and Island Enterprise (HIE) and Cairngorm Mountain Scotland Ltd (CMSL) were restricting access to the campervan park at Coire na Ciste to three time slots a day (see here), I am pleased to report that HIE/CMSL appear to have changed tack. According to the CMSL website (above) it…
In March, a Planning Application (see here) was submitted to the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) to add five new intakes to the Ben Glas run of river hydro scheme, above the Eagle Falls at the head of Loch Lomond. Parkswatch has covered this scheme before, (see here) and (here) for example,…
The Aviemore and Glenmore Community Trust (AGCT) was formed in October 2017 “to seek community ownership of the Cairngorm Ski Area and Infrastructure, in order to ensure that it is more effectively managed for mountain visitors, employees, and the local and wider community”. That purpose was recorded at the end of the minutes of their…