Daily Grind Of Still Water

All predators will be satellite-tracked, he insists, and any losses covered by insurance Trickier to resolve are questions about public access. The “right to roam” was among the first pieces of legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament. He was there to put his opinion over and that was all.” Jacqueline’s husband, Alex, expresses his fear that animals will escape. “A Welsh farmer was attacked by a wild boar the other week and he was nearly killed,” he says “His son hit it with a pitchfork and it didn’t do anything Eventually his wife turned on a high-pressure water-jet.

But he refused to take a vote on the matter at the public meeting. That would change the whole way of life here, and it’s going to affect the tranquillity of the traditional sporting lodges round here, and have a knock-on effect for their business.” Standing on her bungalow’s doorstep, Jacqueline Murray quivers with rage when asked about Lister: “I’ll tell you about that git – he’s nothing but an overgrown schoolboy throwing his money around Overwhelmingly people here just aren’t for it. “It’s not a playground,” says Bill Knott, a ship’s engineer from Ardgay. “It’s all very well having these ideas but there are people who live and work here They have to go about their business He’s talking about 30,000 visitors a year.

During the Highland Clearances – when the peasantry was evicted from the land, often forcibly, to make way for sheep – such schemes were euphemistically known as “improvements”. And, while many locals welcome Lister’s proposals (“The people I’ve spoken to think it will bring opportunities that we haven’t had round here before,” says Laura Maclean, a care worker in Ardgay), there is a rump that resists being improved by an outsider whose main home is in Oxfordshire. You’ve got people trying with great difficulty to make a living out of farming, people who’ve retired and those who leave the area to go to the cities because they can’t get a job. Wouldn’t it be lovely if all those communities down in the glen could be united?” Perhaps so. But historically Scotland has had more than its share of landlords willing to inflict social and economic experiments on the surrounding population. Things have never been the same since a bridge across the Dornoch Firth was opened in 1991. The new crossing meant that drivers heading north from Inverness no longer needed to travel through the village on their way across the river at nearby Bonar Bridge.