Dave Hewitt ponders the future conservation of Scotland's mountain wilderness with absentee landlords and the increasing pressure for renewable energy in the form of hydro and windfarm schemes.
With the latest stage in the Scottish Land Reform Bill approaching its consultation deadline (21 December - see previous Summit Talks for details on how to submit comments to the parliamentary committee), a couple of major land/access-related stories need to be mentioned. The first of these is the sale - yet again - of the Glenfeshie estate on the western side of the Cairngorms.
Feshie's 42,000 acres of prime hill country last changed hands in early 1998 when Danish clothing magnate Klaus Helmersen paid £6 million for the place. The perils of having wild land owned by those whose financial situation can quickly decline has never been so apparent, as Helmersen has now hit the financial rocks on the other side of the North Sea - a story first broken in the 12 November edition of Copenhagen newspaper Berlingske Tidende (see www.berlingske.dk and thanks to Copenhagen-based Jim Chalmers for supplying the details).
Things moved quickly, and Feshie was snapped up by another Danish concern, as reported by the 11 December edition of Berlingske Tidende: "Salget af godset til en dansker, hvis navn Klaus Helmersen ikke xnsker at oplyse, har frigjort op mod 100 mio. kr. til Helmersens privatxkonomi." This, I am assured, translates as: "The sale of the estate to a Dane, whose name Klaus Helmersen does not wish to release, has freed up towards 100 million kroner (nearly £8.5 million) in Helmersen's private economy." The unnamed buyer is in fact one Flemming Skouboe.
Quite what this will mean on the ground in Feshie remains to be seen but the situation of having an overseas (never mind absentee) laird in control at a time when the Cairngorms National Park is moving ever nearer remains every bit as incongruous as when Helmersen was at the helm.
Andy Wightman, of the Caledonia Centre for Social Development Land Programme, has compiled comprehensive details of the Feshie ownership situation since 1967, when the trustees of Sir George Macpherson Grant of Ballindalloch offered the estate to the Nature Conservancy Council (forerunner of Scottish Natural Heritage) for £100,000. The NCC decided its money was better spent elsewhere, so Feshie was sold to Lord Dulverton, trading under the name of West Highland Woodlands Ltd, for £105,000 on 3 March 1967. Dulverton retained the estate until 16 November 1988 before selling to John Dibben, trading as Bargeddie Ltd. Bargeddie was registered in the British Virgin Islands and the price this time was a whopping £2,632,000.
Dibben in turn made a tidy profit just over six years later when he sold Feshie to Will Woodlands for £4,713,600 on 18 November 1994. The shadowy Will Woodlands - suspected in some quarters as having Royal connections - didn't hang on to Feshie for long, selling to Helmersen (under the name Glen Feshie Estate Ltd) for £6 million on 7 January 1998. Flemming Skouboe appears to have paid a kroner or two less than the initial quotation of £8.5 million for the estate: Wightman has recently seen the writ for the deal and this gives a figure of £7,997,500. The quoted purchaser was Castlelaw (No.379) Ltd, a company registered at Thorntons solicitors in Dundee.
In light of the 1967 offer to the NCC and all the subsequent land dealing, Wightman asks a pertinent question, "How much public money had been handed over to owners of Glenfeshie?" He attempts to answer this himself by calculating the annual capital growth on each of the deals.
West Highland Woodlands racked up growth of 16.58% per annum, Bargeddie Ltd added 10.2% (on which no capital taxes were payable due to the offshore registration) and the brief tenure of Will Woodlands (a registered charity) saw annual growth of 6.2%. The four years under Helmersen saw a further 12.3% and, overall, Wightman calculates that Feshie has appreciated by 13.6% annually since Dulverton splashed out his £105,000 in 1967 - although taking inflation into account this last figure reduces to 5.9% per annum. Whatever the precise percentage, it's still a hefty sum considering what was on offer to the nation 34 years ago.
The other land/access situation meriting a wider public is the proposed Shieldaig hydro scheme first outlined here in November. A company named Highland Light and Power is hoping to tap the three medium-sized lochs of the Badachro river system to the north of Beinn Alligin, a plan to which there has been an objection or two given the eco-sensitive nature of the area plus its massive environmental quality as one of Scotland's least meddled-with landscapes. A formal planning application is likely early in 2002, after which, as always, there will be a scarily narrow time-window in which to lodge objections.
After the November piece, Andrew Johnston got in touch with the address of a useful and interesting website devoted to the Shieldaig hydro issue. It's at www.lowimpact.demon.co.uk and provides a wealth of background and information about HLP's proposed waterworks. There's too much to go into great detail here - best to have a look for yourself - but particularly worthwhile is the batch of correspondence from the Gairloch Times.
Also of note are the scheme's potential benefits as defined by HLP in their brochure. The development would provide a "significant contribution to the government's targets on renewable energy" as well as short-term employment during construction, a long-term, full-time job, the "ability to reduce incidence of flooding in Gairloch area", "regular income for Gairloch Estate (which would be) used to reinvest in the local community", "an annual contribution to a local community development trust for the Gairloch area", plus local self-sufficiency in terms of electricity supply.
Quite whether any actual development would prove as rosy as this remains questionable. Johnston cites the Scottish Executive's forward-planning study, Scotland's Renewable Resource 2001, which identifies the potential for renewable energy resources across Scotland during the years 2010 to 2025. "The study used up-to-date information on each resource," Johnston notes, "and modelled it against planning/environmental, economic and technical constraints. It plainly shows the huge potential of wind, wave and tidal power outside of protected areas. Small-scale hydro is insignificant in comparison." A summary of the report, in Adobe Acrobat format, is on the Executive's site here.
Johnston was also present at a recent conference on renewable energy held in Inverness, an event which he describes as "very much propaganda from the development lobby, whose vision (backed by government and the Highland Council) seems to be a turbine on every hill and a run-of-the-river scheme in every glen. The concept of wildland or wildlife standing in the way was apparently incomprehensible to most delegates. Speakers got cheered every time they attacked SNH who will need encouraging to object this time." It sounds as if a busload (sorry, Range Rover load) from the Mitchell/Macleod/Manford anti-authority conference in Perth had travelled north for the day. Whatever, Johnston was demoralised if not dismayed by what went on. It was a case of "think globally, trash locally," he notes.
"New energy" is a complex and difficult area, one to which Summit Talks will return from time to time. There is often what could be termed an "internal conflict" for those hillgoers who prefer to see quiet, natural forms of energy generation but who also dread the developers moving in to the particular quiet places they love. This conflict is most evident with regard to hugely visible windfarms. The situation whereby mid-height hills in non-honeypot areas are being considered for turbine construction raises difficult questions about the merits of lower and less spectacular hills versus the surely-immune rocky showpieces.
To give an example, mighty Slioch is never likely to be threatened with turbine-isation, whereas Windy Standard in the Afton/Carsphairn hills in south Ayrshire has already acquired a major hilltop windfarm. Maybe this is a reasonable way to distribute things, maybe these are just hard realities - but there are certainly people who love Windy Standard every bit as much as others love Slioch and they deserve to have a voice in such matters.
The hydro version of this argument is similar but different. The visual impact is less far-reaching than with wind turbines but lochs and glens can be nevertheless be utterly transformed/degraded with the arrival of concrete dams, metalled roads etc. If there was an indisputable case that such schemes would provide bucketloads of energy along with sustainable local jobs, then it would be hard to argue against them solely on the grounds of eco-intrusion. But the energy and employment factors are far from proven, so it's hardly any wonder that a great many people see schemes such as that proposed for the Badachro as both damaging and worthless. It's not on for mega-buck megawatt companies to move in and asset-strip a landscape in this way.
The next few months will tell in this case, as the HLP proposal is likely to arrive fairly soon. While the interested agencies and concerned individuals all wait to see the fine detail of the application, anyone wishing to make contact with the Low Impact people should email shieldaig2002@yahoo.co.uk, from where they will receive update-mailings as and when the Shieldaig proposal hits the Highland Council planning office.
Dave Hewitt
20/12/2001
