#monadhliath

You may well ask what the point is of protesting against something that is a done deal. Well……standing atop the Monadliath plateau, whisky in hand, surrounded by like-minded people staring at a coffin and listening to a moving speech in memory of our wild land…..I confess I found myself thinking the same thing.  What IS the point?  What will this achieve?  After all, planning approval has been given by Highland Council and the machinery is moving in.  A done deal.

Well…..when things we cherish die, we mourn them. When our loved ones leave us, we know we can’t bring them back but we still make every attempt to celebrate their life, their worth, and we gather together socially to remember, to lament, to mourn, and to consider how our lives will be diminished by their absence.  We begin the process of adjustment, to find a way of living life without them.  And I think that was my main motivation for going.  If nothing else, I wanted to pay my respects.  I wanted to mourn and celebrate the wild Monadhliath with others who hold our wild land in high regard.

That it’s a done deal for this part of upland Scotland is not disputed, not least by the organiser of the wake, Alan Sloman.  And standing up in those hills I reasoned that regardless of one’s opinions on wind developments, whether you support them or oppose them you would surely have to concede that the land, such as it is, will be irrevocably altered in appearance and character.  The Monadhliath that we can see now, will be gone.  Even if you find yourself supporting the Dunmaglass development and others like it, surely it would be proper and respectful to acknowledge the sacrifice that these hills have made?  We should ALL be raising a toast.

Looking about, turnout was pretty good for a week day I thought, but it would have been good to have still more people there.  However I’ve always felt that funerals with low numbers of mourners are bestowed with an extra sense of melancholy.  You always see them in Holywood films where a character dies, usually in an act of sacrifice and then they get a teeny tiny funeral attended by only a few mourners.  They're never the hero of course, they’re just someone on the periphery who was little known but incredibly important to the overall story.  Once they’re gone there is an implicit recognition of their importance, but the sadness of their loss is itself lost in the greater sadness of the level of attendance.  Only a handful of mourners, whose private grief is made heavier by the knowledge that few people will ever know just how important the deceased was, and what a pivotal role they played in the story.

And so, standing there beside the coffin I felt there was extra poignancy in that so few people were there to mourn.  True, this was a Tuesday in a remote location far from any road…..but all we needed was for the fog to descend and we’d have been on a Hollywood film set.  Taking a final good look around at the chilly, damp, windswept moor it dawned on me how difficult it is to get the public to appreciate land like this. I suddenly felt rather despondent.

Firstly, it is not designated.  That’s to say it is not a National Park, a Regional Park, a National Nature Reserve or a National Scenic Area.  It’s not Glen Coe.  It’s not Skye.  It’s not Beinn Eighe.  It is not nationally renowned for its beauty and I doubt many tourists ply the B851 expressly to visit it.  It’s a vast collection of big rounded hills that, by the absence of honeypot munros and the lack of sharp ridges or aretes, are little-frequented and little-known.  Furthermore they are not on a major route.  Traffic roars constantly along the Great Glen just a few miles to the northwest, but being on the south side of Loch Ness puts it firmly off the beaten track.

Something else likely to hinder any efforts to galvanise public opinion in favour of uplands like this, is that in less-than-ideal conditions many people would find these hills hard to love.  On a clear sunny day in May, with dry ground underfoot, skylarks singing in the breeze and views stretching for miles in every direction you would expect even the most urbane people to be moved by the grandeur and vastness and…….well……Scottishness of it all.  However, after a prolonged wet spell, with cloud in the glens and that dampness being driven into your very soul by a relentless gale, it’s not everyone’s idea of a beautiful landscape.  It’s hard to love soggy uplands whose sphagnum pools and deep peat threaten to pull the boots from your feet with every step. It’s easier to get an emotional response from someone about beautiful forests, lochs and glens.  But a land of peat hags and bogs?  You’ll have your work cut out, believe me.  Peat isn’t pretty.  Blanket bog isn’t beautiful.

All these reasons are of course at the very root of why the northern Monadhliath are so relatively untouched in the context of tourism and hillwalking.  Instead they have been left to the estates to quietly manage for deer and game for generations, and to a handful of hardy hillwalkers intent on seeking out the truly wild & lonely heart of the highlands.

The logical metaphor to employ at this point is that if you remove the heart, the rest of the body will die.  It sounds drastic, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the loss of the Monadhliath coupled with the new majority SNP government represents a game change in the history of the Scottish Highlands.  It does not bode well for other areas of undesignated, lonely wild land, because the reasons cited above for why they are relatively untouched are also the reasons why the Monadhliath have been lost to wind developments so comprehensively. 

They have few champions and were therefore unlikely to solicit any sizeable public outrage.  That this part of the range is largely devoid of designations doesn’t mean they should be plastered with development however, but that is what the developers often cite.  They make a great deal out of the fact these are undesignated lands.  And to be fair, if a council has identified an area as suitable for wind developments in their Local Plan, then you can hardly blame a profit-minded developer for targeting those areas specifically.  That’s where they’re allowed to apply to build them, and having them identified as such in the Local Plan makes it much less likely that any ‘material considerations’ raised by objectors (such as visual impact upon the landscape) will be considered as grounds for refusing planning permission.

Sadly, much as some of us might want it, it just isn’t practical to designate every square inch of wild land in Scotland.  Development of any kind would be brought to a halt.  And that’s what the planning process is supposed to facilitate in the name of sustainable development; the identification of areas in a council boundary that are least UNsuitable, where the LEAST cherished or designated landscapes will be identified for development.  I don’t envy any council the task of doing this.  Someone or some thing always loses.  Arguably however, the Monadhliath are not suitable hills for huge wind developments given their altitude, topographical prominence, distinct habitats, wildlife and national significance in terms of wild land.  But that’s by the by now.  The Local Plan exists, and has been used to justify this industrialisation.

However, identifying areas in a local plan shouldn’t be a green light to the kinds of rampant development these hills are currently experiencing, and should serve as a wake-up call to the people of Scotland that on-shore policy needs to be reviewed immediately.  Note however, this will come too late for many south of the Central Belt.  Though this piece of writing concerns the highlands, we should not forget that the Borders and Dumfries & Galloway have already succumbed to encroaching wind developments.

Like most of the themes at the core of the wind development issue, the question of what any new, reviewed policy should look like is open to debate.  I certainly don’t have the solution but in my heart I feel that developments like Dunmaglass are wrong.  You could see this is a cop-out on my part, but it has always been too easy to label anti-turbine campaigners as being naïve.  Allegations abound that they are sticking their heads in the sand; that they don’t or can’t suggest alternative strategies for energy generation and that they won’t be able to write their online blogs when all the nuclear and fossil fuel plants shut down and the lights go off.  But none of the walkers I spoke to who attended the Wake for the Wild were against renewable energy, just the SCALE of certain developments.

For my part, I'm not against wind turbines by any means......but I think they, along with other renewables schemes should very much be local developments to improve the lives of the communities they serve.  Locals should have a long-term stake in wind developments themselves rather than being offered financial sweeteners and infrastructural improvements by outside developers, and the energy should primarily be sourced locally, to be used locally. BY the community, FOR the community.

The islands are providing the model for this, such as Tiree and Eigg.  If anyone has an excess to sell to the Grid via an existing connection, then that's grand.  But the scale of the wind developments would then be relative to the size of those communities rather than it being a wholesale drive to export energy, which is largely driven by financial gain, big business and in the case of some highlands developments, millionaire absentee landlords developing Scotland’s dwindling wild land just so they can stuff more money down their gobs.

And I think that is what really concerns me about the developments currently getting approved. It is verging on a free-for-all, utterly rampant, and I am worried that the Scottish Government is moving too fast and that their targets are too ambitious for the timeframe.  I can absolutely understand the excitement and optimism that any Scottish government experiences when they see the energy potential of Scotland's wind resources, which constitute a sizeable portion of the European total. It beckons with its dream of self-reliance, and....let's be honest, flippin’ great big piles of cash.  And it SHOULD be exploited.....but it should be a considered effort alongside other means, and not the wholesale plundering of our natural heritage.

The one part of this story that I just can't seem to get to the bottom of and form my own opinion on concerns wind turbines' efficiency.  Certainly there are limitations to wind turbines, in that they are most efficient at particular speeds, and that too little or too much wind can mean they can't or won't be allowed to turn.  But the true figures are elusive and I can’t say I blame some of the public for being apathetic, as both sides of the argument throw figures & percentages about and make it near impossible to reach your own informed opinion on the matter. Who is right?  Which side is telling the truth? Both sides will be to some extent, probably.....but with both understandably exaggerating and omitting according to their agendas, such that the truth is therefore difficult or impossible to discern for the rest of us.  I'm still wary of taking any research at face value, whether it’s from an organisation I support or from one I do not.

Finally, there's that horrid, creeping nature of new development.  The disturbing blindspot of just a few turbines being acceptable. 'Oh it's just another three......oh it's just a handful'. As with anything done in small increments, they soon build up. Look after the pennies, as the saying goes. The Dunmaglass development was approved in spite of up to 11 golden eagle deaths being forecast. I can see developers and Highland Council regarding those mortalities as a drop in the ocean. I worked it out, it's about 1.4% of the total golden eagle population in Scotland.  I can therefore easily understand the ‘so what?’ attitude I encounter when I tell people about the eagle statistic.  It’s hard for people to care about 1.4% of a given population that they rarely, if ever see.  1.4% does seem insignificant if viewed in isolation.  My response is to ask what if every developer currently erecting wind turbines used the same justification that 'it's only 1.4% of the population'...... how long is it before you've reduced the population by 50% or more? Where does it end? For that reason I find their cold, calculated acceptance of the death of nearly a dozen iconic, protected birds still recovering from centuries of human persecution hard to stomach.

I could of course ramble on forever, and assuming that you’ve got even this far you may well be fidgeting or need the toilet……so I'll try and stop.  My general point, if there is one, is that there must be more sympathetic ways of going about this, and constructing locally with community input seems a much less dramatic approach. Not perfect by any means, because we all quite rightly have the NIMBY attitude don't we?  But wind turbines are however something we should ALL get used to in our back yards in the long run......just not on the vast scale envisaged as a means of making Scotland its billions.