#crofts

When Algy woke up for a moment in the middle of the night, he could see large flakes of snow drifting down softly all around him, and by the next morning most of the landscape was white.

Flying over to the top of a hedge to admire the wintry view, he gazed out across the crofters' steading and was thrilled to see a snowbow appear over the ridges to the north. However, the sky around it was ominously dark, and although the low winter sun was shining, he suspected that it wouldn't last for long…

Crofts Bank Road in Urmston, Lancashire, England

An ambitious plan to plant at least a million native trees on crofts in the Outer Hebrides has taken root, its organisers say, with more than 200 small new woods sprouting across the islands. The Western Isles woodland project hopes to reestablish a thriving mosaic of small woods dotted across the islands by using vacant or underused crofts to reforest the Hebrides and promote nature restoration. Under the project, funded mainly by profits from the UK’s largest community-owned windfarm, west of Stornoway, 211,000 trees have already been planted on 245 crofts, plots of land that were historically family-run small holdings. Some of the new woodlands have up to 1,500 trees grown from local seeds, featuring alder, hazel, birch, rowan, Scots pine, blackthorn, sycamore and various species of willow. The project has been so successful it has helped establish three new tree nurseries on the islands.

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“We’re restoring a landscape which existed a thousand years ago,” [Jon Macleod] said. Using seeds gathered from local trees greatly increased their chances of prospering – “the survival rate and provenance is relevant to the place”. Calum Macdonald, the former Labour MP leading the project, hoped it could be a model for community owned energy projects across the UK. Four-fifth of the woodlands’ funding is from the £900,000 annual profits made by the three 3MW wind turbines owned by Point and Sandwick trust, a community development body. The turbines at Beinn Ghrideag generate up to 30GWh of power a year – enough, Macdonald said, to supply all the Western Isles with electricity.

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Green energy schemes generally employ only a handful of staff and engineers whereas community ownership allows people to capture the profits they produce and reinvest them locally, Macdonald said. In Denmark, about half of turbines are community-owned. Many rural communities in the UK feel excluded from the profits generated by energy firms, and resent the large turbines, sub-stations and large pylons built in their areas. “I would love to use the green energy revolution to get a lot more long-term benefits for our communities,” Macdonald said. Macleod agrees. “No one is against renewable energy here but community benefit is key, otherwise it’s just exploitation,” he said.

Freeman Wills Crofts worked as a railway engineer and trained as a civil engineer. He makes good use of this precision both in his description of what the criminals did to achieve their aims and in the rigorous investigation of Chief Detective Inspector French. The Jane Vosper is carrying five cargoes in its holds from London to various ports in South America ranging from Pernambuco to Buenos…