Wild Land News no 60, Spring 2004

Scotland's future landscapes? Article

David Jarman reports on a LINK seminar

Alarm bells should ring when SNH puts a question mark on whether Scotland will have any landscapes in future! This was the title for their first major consultation on the subject. We went along to Battleby to hear all about it at a seminar convened by LINK, and have now submitted our own full response, as well as endorsing LINK's (drafted by Bill Wright of the Cairngorms Campaign). Copies of both are available by email from david.jarman914 at virgin.net.

Here are just a few of our key points:

rewilding - apparently this is the new jargon word for restoring places whose wildness qualities have been desecrated. We know it can be done - NTS with the Beinn a' Bhuird bulldozed track, SNH rewooding Creag Meagaidh, FCS taking out young plantations at Affric (join us there in June to see the benefits). Now it needs to be made a standard requirement for every organisation/landowner/ developer spending our monies/receiving our grants/getting our permissions. Just think how many obtrusive hydro installations, electricity pylons, and telecom masts could be screened by native woodland - if they can pay the landowner rent for the pylon site, they can rent a bit more and fence it off. Imagine how unsightly the West Highland Railway must have been when first cut - yet because it is fenced off from livestock, parts of it are now a ribbon of almost-natural woodland.
We called this 'redressing the mistakes of the past'. Here is one example. The power line to Skye is surely the worst case of pylons intruding into remote, wild landscapes (and sadly one of the most recent). It marches along and across Loch Quoich, through the magnificent pass to Kinlochhourn and across the ravines behind it, along the remarkable fault line, over a 500m pass behind Beinn Sgritheall, across Gleann Beag of the brochs and beautiful Glenelg, before taming magnificent Kyle Rhea with a pair of extra-high towers. Plus vehicle tracks up to many of the pylon sites. How did we let them get away with it? It would be easy to plant or regenerate scrub woodland along much of the route, but the longer-term aim should be to remove it. Skye could be a model of green energy, especially with marine hydro potential all around it, and it doesn't need a link to the National Grid any more than Shetland does.
value of wild land - remarkably, the SNH paper scarcely notices that Scotland's scenery and wild land is an incredibly valuable resource. It doesn't just underpin much of our tourist industry - as the boss of Perthshire Tourist Board said, that's 8% of our jobs, and the vast majority of visitors to Scotland are coming to see the landscape or go walking in it. It is also one of the few reasons why people with energy and talent might choose to stay in Scotland, or to invest here, rather than in less peripheral and less climatically-challenged parts of Europe. This is a theme we may well return to - what do you think? LINK is uneasy about overdoing the economic measurement of scenic value, because it can too easily be manipulated to start charging us to enjoy it!
new threats - SNH asked what we saw coming over the horizon. We suggested that renewable energy will soon start to go off-shore, which we support, but brings risks to views out to sea from wild coastal cliffs and hills, and also of shore installations and transmission lines. The east coast should be the priority - where the infrastructure already exists, and is closest to the cities. We also warned of increasing suburbanisation of road routes through wild and remote places. Have you seen Achnasheen by night recently? It is now an orange glow from miles around, Highland Council in its great wisdom having found cash not only for a roundabout at the old T-junction for Kyle (formerly a dreadful hazard and hold-up, not) but to illuminate it motorway-style.
making our voices heard how can we do this if we don't know what is proposed? Groups like us are not consulted on new plans and applications, and we only pick up on them if someone local tips us off. This is a real problem - MCofS are hiring someone just to monitor proposals for windfarm applications and the like. At a recent liaison meeting with 'recreation groups' SNH mentioned that Highland Council had put on its website a Draft Plan for the Wester Ross National Scenic Area - none of the groups there had heard of it, and it was too late for us to respond. On a related point, at Battleby SNH said that Ministers would not take Landscape seriously unless postbags bulged with responses. Obviously politicians don't realise that one reason people join groups like the Ramblers and even us is in the hope that they are 'voting' for the landscape to be looked after. So a letter or best of all a visit to your MSP is worth as much as your annual sub, if not a lot more.

Responding to such consultations can easily become a full-time job (said with feeling). Another important one recently was from Forestry Commission Scotland, on what to do with their vast land holdings now that (unwritten sub-text) the bottom is falling out of the market for expensive-to-produce Scottish timber. Again, our response is available.

Another vital consultation in March was the power company proposal to upgrade the transmission line from Beauly to Denny. This would become a full-scale whopper, like the biggest in the Central Belt and down to England. Parts of the route are very sensitive - over Corrieyairack, across Laggan, through Drumochter, past Ann Gloag's castle windows (sorry, but that was what Scotland on Sunday thought would most catch public attention!!). The issue should not be where it goes or what bits to underground (a likely prospect) but that it must be resisted at all costs. If built, it will open the door wide for exploitation of the Highlands for windfarms and more hydro schemes and unsuitable marine energy locations. Who will lose out, in the long run? The people of the Highlands - which covers many of our members.