It’s the height of the muirburn season and the clear blue skies at the start of the month helped highlight the folly as the Cairngorms National Park was dotted with plumes of smoke. The pollution caused by muirburn doesn’t just release carbon into the atmosphere, it reduces air quality and harms the health of people…
Category: Cairngorms
It’s now four years since I wrote about the potential for landscape scale conservation (see here) and the problem of bulldozed tracks (see here) on the Dinnet Estate. I have been meaning to explore the area further ever since so I was pleased recently to be sent some photos of the way the land…
This post takes a further look (see here) at the ongoing mismanagement of health and safety at Cairn Gorm. After concerns about the safety of the lift infrastructure at Cairngorm Mountain were raised by a member of the public in 2018 the Health & Safety Executive (H&SE) visited and issued three Improvement Notices. The Inspectors (“they”)…
Whether you know Dave or have never come across him, the 10 minute video produced by the Fort William Mountain Film festival (see here), much of which is set in the Cairngorms National Park, should be an inspiration for anyone concerned about the natural environment and access to nature. It shows just what can be…
I was warned before being sent some photos of deer carcasses from Kinveachy in the Cairngorms National Park so, if you at all sensitive or squeamish, either steel yourself or don’t scroll down. The mass disposal of red deer carcases, however, gets to the heart of our muddled relationship with the natural world and understanding…
This post takes a critical look at the implications that the Scottish Land Commission’s “Legislative proposals to address the impact of Scotland’s concentration of land ownership”, published on 4th February (see here), has for our National Parks in the light of the purchase of the Kinrara estate on Speyside the week before. The sale…
When I started this series of posts (see here), (here), (here), (here) and (here) I had expected to write three, maybe four, before reaching a conclusion. But as time went on, more and more information has been revealed through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. These FOI’s enabled correlation with the COWI (engineering )report, Highland and Islands Enterprise (HIE’s)…
Fifteen months ago, I tried to find out from Highlands Enterprise the estimated costs of removing the funicular and, after an initial brush off, they admitted they had commissioned a “Funicular Railway (Railway Dismantling Report” in May 2019 (see here). However, HIE refused to provide the report pending their development of a business case for…
Regular reader will know that in investigating what is going on in our National Parks, contributors often use information published on the Companies House website. Recent examples include my coverage of the Cameron House fire (see here) and Tim Ambrose’s analysis of the level of public subsidy provided by Highlands and Islands Enterprise to Cairngorm…
Continuing this series of posts (see here), the idea for funicular at Cairn Gorm was I believe inspired by the Ellmau funicular. A comparison between the two railways is instructive and raises further questions about whether the proposed repairs to the Cairngorm Mountain funicular. The most outstanding difference is the viaduct itself, steel piers and…
[Tim Ambrose is a retired Chartered Accountant and Treasurer of The Cairngorms Campaign] The first Accounts of CMSL were published at the end of November (see here). They show losses as expected but raise many questions. Background – What is CMSL? When Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) took over the business of the former…
Recently I was sent photos, taken in 2019, of a stink pit at the northern end of the 42,000 acre Glenavon Estate, about 5km south of Tomintoul. The person who sent the photos had been alerted by a walker who had stumbled across the pit a couple of months earlier in February and reported finding…
Following on from my last post (see here), which looked at whether vibration from poorly maintained rails could have caused damage to the piers supporting the funicular, this post focuses on the concrete parts of the structure, especially the ends of the “I” support beams and the in-situ blocks. The “I” beams are described as…
This post takes a further look at the longer costs and benefits of the funicular railway at Cairn Gorm as set out in Highland and Island Enterprise’s Full Business Case (FBC) (see here) . What I failed to mention in my first post on the FBC back in October (see here) was the total estimated costs…
Since the release of the COWI report on 11th December, which Highlands and Islands Enterprise had withheld for two years, Parkswatch has been able to start investigating the repair of funicular (see here) and (here). We have been uncovering new issues and questions on an almost daily basis. For example, Pier 9 (photo above) featured…
In the first part of this series of articles (see here), about whether the repairs Highland and Islands Enterprise (HIE) has planned for the funicular will work, the following picture was thought to be that of a pier base. Photo credit. G.Paton. It is now believed to be that of Anchor Block(AB) 48. Notice there…
Reforesting Scotland’s excellent Land Revival Study Tour to the Cairngorms in June 2018 – for the site visit to the Anagach community pine wood, see here – was based at the attractive looking Cairngorm Hotel in Aviemore (here). While enjoying a stimulating conversation over dinner the first evening, I doubt whether any of us present…
A week after the Herald piece, on 29th December, Prince Charles was interviewed about his views on the natural environment by Margaret Atwood, guest editor for the Today programme (see here – from 2.20.30 to 2.29.30). It is highly recommended listening. I had not realised that Prince Charles had been speaking out about the dangers…
Four days after its damp squib of an official opening on 19th December (above), Cairngorm Mountain Scotland Ltd (CMSL) announced that it was shutting up shop indefinitely (see here), but also that it had decided to lock the snow gates at Glen More for good measure, making it very hard for anyone else to enjoy…
In the last three weeks two very significant pieces of information about the funicular railway have been made public and both raise serious questions about the proposed repairs. The original plans for the construction of the funicular Highland and Island Enterprise (HIE)’s £16m business case for repairing the funicular (see here) did not explain why…
“Health and Safety and customer service is what drives us at Cairn Gorm” so claimed Susan Smith, Interim Chief Executive at Cairngorm Mountain Scotland Ltd (CMSL) in a video on 9th December (see here), a message repeated earlier in that same video by Colin Matthews their Operations Manager. If that is the case why, after…
As usual, the latest edition of Earth Heritage (see here) has some excellent articles about Scotland but I was particularly interested to read “Reflections from a Geoheritage Sabbatical in Scotland: The View from America”: “Scotland was a natural choice for a geoheritage sabbatical for several reasons: spectacular and diverse geology; the importance of Scottish scientists…
[Post corrected 16th December 18.15] A week ago Cairngorm Mountain Scotland Ltd posted a video on facebook (see here) in preparation for the official opening of the new ski season on 19th December. Both interim CEO Susan Smith and Colin Matthews referred to the excellent snow cover on the mountain. As the video panned across…
The tree tube problem The theme of the Spring/Summer issue of Reforesting Scotland was climate change. It ended with an excellent piece by a forest manager, Willie McGhee, on “Seas of plastic in the countryside”. His guesstimate is that in Scotland we may have used 200 million plastic tree tubes in the countryside over…
The problem with the Scottish Government’s response to the Werritty Review (see here), which I blogged about almost a year ago (see here), is that fails to tackle the central issue, the intensification of moorland management in order to produce more grouse for shooting. The conversion of Scotland’s moors into vast farms for grouse is…