What price Gordonbush?
The land affected by this monumentally inappropriate industrial development is set to dominate and face the central heart of Sutherland.
It sprawls across ancient boundaries of clan lands, churns up a Mackay skirmishing ground, desecrates a meeting of watersheds, is an old, precarious droving way, known well as a place where the rise and fall of the burns used to leave a traveller in trouble. Viking place names abound here, innumerable archaeological sites, now known to number far more than was accepted even a few years ago. Communities will have justifiable issues of noise and vibration, concerns about the ease with which the authorities may allow the destruction of one of their valued vernacular buildings, plus the effects to their roads and bridges. Gordonbush does not deserve to be forgotten in the process.
The feeding frenzy of monies offered to communities is obscene. Money is even being offered to Dingwall from the all too convenient Kilbraur wind farm in Golspie. The loss this application brings to Sutherland has no price. It is the back door to Gordonbush. So much was learned from the Helmsdale inquiry when the three wind farm developments were so justifiably kicked out, but the Highland Council refused to take any lessons from this rare exercise in local democracy. East Sutherland examined and found wanting, the many deceptions in the wind developer’s charm offensive. Nothing has changed, except that the profits game got bigger.
This is not just a Brora-Helmsdale issue but one that must be for the individual and is now of national and international importance. Our complex peatlands and wildlands are among some of the finest tracts of singular landscape beauty and rare habitat within Europe. All this is meaningless to the developers and their contractors, whose careless handiwork is already in monumental flailing form, demeaning and dominating sites around the Highlands.
Gordonbush is more than just a site seen from a minor road, it was once contained secret within a series of ranked hills, spectacular from all ridges and now utterly vulnerable.
Hazel Macmillan, 33 Tarradale Gardens, Muir of Ord, Ross-shire.
4 September 2008
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