Wild Land News no 53, Summer 2001

Letters to the Editor

Dear Sir,

ref "Comment", para 5: Grass as a crop in Highlands (WLN 52, Spring 2001) I'm not a farmer, but I know from visits to a croft on Raasay, and to my sister's Norwegian version of a croft in Sirdal, that grass that looks very mean and ordinary is cut for hay. On Raasay we were shouted at, and told to keep off the grass as we made a beeline up the hillside from the house. That was 25 years ago, and maybe people don't live so marginally now, but to that elderly couple, it was not risible at all. We were mortified of course, to appear to be so inconsiderate and ignorant.

The Law is poor protection of the access aspirations of the "good" - the "bad" public will use the rules to assert their right to be on the land while trashing it, and the "bad" landowner will use the same set of rules to deny access to every blade of grass as destructive to the nation's economy. It is tricky balancing the relative freedom of the past, based on live and let live, and now trying to tie up everything so nothing can be lost, and in the making of the law, finding that when that which was taken for granted has been analysed, and an all case assessment been made, that freedom is deemed to be unsafe.

So 1 understand what you mean, and agree some farmers and landowners will use every loophole to keep walkers and cyclists away, and especially in countryside around towns, but 1 wonder if your comment about the grass in this context is perhaps a bit off the mark.

Otherwise, once again, a most readable Newsletter, in content and format. My eyes are soothed by the black and white and your photos.

Best wishes,

Dr. Janet Trythall

Dear Sir,

While I support to the hilt Richard Gilbert's case (WLN 52, Spring 2001) against the Loch na h-Oidhche hydro scheme in Flowerdale Forest, and have written about it to the Scottish Environment Minister and to my friends and family, I'm not easy with his blanket condemnation of past schemes. Affric, Luichart, and Strathfarrar, he writes, "were plundered" and now "after fifty years, the power companies are returning". The post-war dams were built, not by companies, but to the order of a Labour government and a Scottish Secretary (Tom Johnston) who saw that the crofters throughout the Highlands desperately needed power to light their homes and dry their hay. I am sure that, like me, he often visited cottages where the light was poor and the cooking inconvenient because of the old reliance on Tilly lamps and Calor gas. The post-1947 schemes lightened the domestic burdens for thousands.

What was lost? Of the glens he mentioned, I visited Strath Farrar most recently, in June last year. It was a dream of beauty. Its "unspoilt" loneliness was a memorial to the clearance by Lovat a hundred and sixty years ago. Now birch, heather, and green pasture surround the few big houses of the absentee owners. After fifteen miles of this you come to the Loch Monar dam - a handsome and monumental work in concrete. Then the great loch snakes away into the core of the Highlands. On the day I was lucky that the water level hadn't been lowered by heavy use, exposing the raw shore. Are such shores, in Cluanie and elsewhere, much different from natural shingle beaches? Drought has much the same effect. The Monar dam, like the power-house downstream, is only a brief interruption in the long, unfolding, sinuous beauty of the glen.

The Highlands can't be left entirely unaltered, for the enjoyment of incomers. Their material resources have to be used, to make life comfortable for the people who live there. A piddling and unnecessary scheme like Loch na h-Oidhche shouldn't be compared with the major works of the Fifties and Sixties, which did their bit towards the saving of a culture.

Yours sincerely,

David Craig