On 19th March the Herald revealed (see here) that Scottish Forestry, having suspended grant payments to BrewDog after it was revealed many of the trees in the Lost Forest had died, has now paid them £1.2m and agreed to pay a further £1.5m for the project. This post takes another look at the scandal in the…
Tag: forestry
On New Year’s Day I went with Dave Morris for a short walk on the Dorback Estate which had previously been managed primarily for sporting purposes. The estate had been owned for the last four years by Salingore Real Estate Ltd, registered in the Bahamas, but at the end of 2024 was bought by…
A few days ago Lesley Riddoch posted some excellent drone footage from Lettoch Films (see here) of the woodland that has developed in the central reservation of the A9 between Bruar and Drumochter. Most of the trees and other plants have spread there through natural regeneration and were able to do so because of the…
Early on Xmas Eve staff at Mar Lodge issued this tweet, sad news for a natural landmark but with reasons to be optimistic for the future. By coincidence the campaigner Andy Wightman appears to have written about this very tree in an article for Holyrood Magazine at the end of November (see here): “Sitting high…
The risk to Nick’s proposal to suspend the Scottish Forestry Grants system for a year (see here) is that you destroy the woodland creation capacity we currently have, including tree nurseries, and in a way that we never get it back again. No-one will ever trust the Scottish Government again and they won’t invest in…
In my last post I argued that the Scottish Government should transfer some of the £53m it has allocated for forestry grants next year to its own agency, Forest and Land Scotland, to reduce deer on its land. What’s been happening at Glen Prosen, which FLS bought in Autumn 2022 (see here), provides a good…
How to reduce Scotland’s climate emissions and damage to nature – suspend the forestry grants system
On 19th December 2023 the Scottish Government announced that Scottish Forestry’s grant budget would be cut by £32m or 41% for the year 2024/25. Almost a year later the Scottish Government, in its budget for 2025/26 announced ion 4th December, is proposing to increase spending on forestry grants next year from £45,367,000 to £53,000,000 a…
There are two ways in which the Scottish Government attempts to increase the extent of native woodland grant at present, the first is by directly funding native woodland creation like at Far Ralia or BrewDog’s Lost Forest, the second is by requiring all new and re-planted commercial forestry to include a proportion of native trees….
Importance of the pinewoods. Forestry policy, private and public landowners and deer management will be under scrutiny next week at the native pinewoods conference in Fort William (28/29 Oct see here). This post examines what needs to happen to save our ancient Caledonian pinewoods and who might lead the way. The future of our Caledonian…
I have not visited Far Ralia, the land in the Cairngorms National Park Abrdn’s Property Income Trust (APIT) bought for £7.5m three years ago and has now put on the market for £12m, since January. I have, however, recently obtained a copy of an inspection Scottish Forestry (SF) conducted in June through a freedom of…
Following my post (see here) on how the Royal Scottish Forestry Society (RSFS) are cashing in on Cashel , Andy Wightman wrote a fine follow up piece on the Cashel estate and the post war labour government. This filled in some of the historical gaps and demonstrated how the public ownership of land was once…
The basic elements of the the scandal concerning abrdn’s proposed sale the Far Ralia estate in the Cairngorms National Park are very simple. Having bought the land now known as the Far Ralia estate for a reported £7.5m in September 2021, Abrdn are now trying to dispose of it for £12m having in the intervening…
When James Watt, sometime chief executive of the beer company BrewDog, speaks about tree planting in the Highlands, he reminds me of unpleasant landowners of the past. In his latest attempt at defending BrewDog’s disastrous planting efforts on their Kinrara estate near Aviemore in the Cairngorms National Park, Watt did not mince his words when…
Last Friday the Cashel Forest Trust, set up by the Royal Scottish Forestry Society (RSFS), announced they had put their property at Cashel on the eastern shore of Loch Lomond on the market at offers over £4,085,000 for the whole or as five separate lots. Goldcrest’s brochure (see here) claims this is an “opportunity…
After its initial consultation at the end of last year on its plans for the Angus Glens, including Glen Prosen (see here) and Glen Doll, Forest and Land Scotland (FLS) have produced a “concept proposal” prior to producing a Land Management Plan. They are consulting on until 30th June (see here for documents and video)….
Besides operating as a museum, the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London promotes itself (see here) as having “world-class expertise” and being able to help tackle the biggest challenges facing the world today.” When it came to native woodland that certainly used to be the case, as anyone will know who has read Richard…
One evening three weeks ago I went up Ladylea Hill at the northern end of the Candacraig Estate. While the predominant land use in most of the upper catchment of the River Don is intensive grouse moor management, much of Candacraig has been used for commercial forestry for some time and the main “sporting use”…
On 5th April (see here), in the newsletter they email to land managers, the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) reported that their National Park Partnership Plan (NPPP) 2024-29 had been approved by Scottish Ministers. There is no mention of this on the “news” section of their website (last item International Women’s Day…
I am very grateful to all the people who have promoted my post on Sunday (see here) about Scottish Forestry and the tree planting disaster at Kinrara and my apologies that the parkswatch website then crashed. This does not appear to have been due to a cyber attack by defenders of the forestry grants system or…
In mid-February (see here) I described how many of the trees planted by BrewDog, as part of the Phase I creation of its Lost Forest, had died and how they appeared to be investing little, if any, of their own money in the whole disastrous project. A week after the post I received a response…
How many of the trees planted at Kinrara last year have survived? After my posts in the autumn about the destruction being caused by BrewDog’s tree planting at Kinrara and how it has been releasing carbon into the atmosphere (see here) and (here), I heard through a third party that someone with professional expertise thought…
Deer fencing and stock fencing generally serve very different purposes, the former is used to keep deer out, the latter to keep sheep and cattle in. While I have covered the disastrous consequences of deer fencing quite often on parkswatch, most recently in relation to the case of BrewDog’s Lost Forest and its impact on…
Last week I went out at Balmaha, the first time for over a year, and was greeted by a new forest of tree tubes. It looks terrible, is terrible for nature and ,this post argues, it exemplifies what is wrong with the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) and its new National Park…
I had not attended a Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) board meeting in person since before the Covid lockdown but on 11th December once again took the train to Balloch. Having just written a post on The fundamentally useless National Park Authority and its useless National Park plan it was very decent…
Having written fairly extensively about the impact of grazing on landslips, earlier this week I was alerted that sheep had got into the new native wood plantation intended to help stabilise the slopes above the A83 at the Rest and Be Thankful. I contacted Nick Halls, a contributor to Parkswatch, who by chance was returning…