NTS & SNH find fences unsightly so shoot 12,000 Mar Lodge red deer
published this on 12:20 pm, Monday, 23rd November, 2009Charities| Environment| News | Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping |
The Scottish Gamekeepers Association has blown the whistle on the disgracefully skewed priorities of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) with a forthcoming article in its magazine, Scottish Gamekeeper.
Over the past 15 years, 12,000 red deer of any age and of both sexes, have been culled in and out of season. This year-round assault on their numbers has been done in the name of taste and Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) has been complicit in the outrage. It has given moral support and grant aid of £750,000 – of our money.
The NTS adopted a policy of ‘re-wilding’ to recover land degraded by over grazing. This was to see the remaining trees on the Mar Lodge Estate allowed to regenerate by natural re-seeding. The only way to ensure the survival to maturity of such seedlings is to erect deer fences. This is standard procedure.
However the NTS set its face against this, deciding, as the Mail on Sunday reported yesterday, that ‘fences would have created unsightly hard edges to regenerated woodland, out of keeping with the natural environment it wants to recreate’.
This is the Victorian obsession with the picturesque run way beyond its time. The landscape they want to recreate took time to reach the point of visual perfection they imagine and didn’t stop there anyway. Nature evolves but the NTS and SNH do not.
The ‘no fences’ policy has now cost the lives of 12,000 red deer – for nothing. The project has failed. Senior officials of the NTS and of the Scottish Deer commission are quoted as ‘saying privately’ that the policy has been a failure.
The Scottish Gamekeepers Association, sickened at the continued and unnecessary culling of the deer, say that it warned from the outset that this would inevitably be the outcome and restated the case for fencing – to no account. This wisdom was echoed by everyone who knows anything about deer and about the landscape but the NTS knew better.
It is still publicly insisting that its policy is right and will continue. An NTS spokesmen, Alexander Bennett, is quoted as saying that there are no plans for fencing and that ‘We are trying to get back to a balanced ecological landscape. In 200 years time we want a deer forest of mixed habitat including deer. Until we can get the whole place into reasonable condition we will have to keep the deer numbers under control’.
They could always have got the whole place into reasonable condition – and very quickly – by fencing. And the ‘unsightly hard edges’ of the fencing would be long obscured before they got anywhere near the 200 year mark.
This madness underlines the loss of perspective which obtains almost without exception in the heritage protection industry. Prettiness is an urban concept and an occasional by product of nature. It is obscene to kill living creatures so indiscriminately to manicure prettiness in a wilderness.
Gamekeeperes are, by profession, a hard-headed bunch. Some of their number are alleged to poison rare raptors like red kites, sea eagles and golden eagles to protect grouse on shooting estates. If the gamekeepers are sickened at the waste in this 15 year deer cull, it is time to take notice.
It is also time to call time on these ‘guardian’ organisations.
They no longer have stable parameters guiding the judgments and actions they take. They can each be shown to make contradictory decisions on the same issues in different parts of the country. And there remains the indenfensible inverse logic of Historic Scotland’s preference of leaving Castle Tioram as a ruin rather than giving Lex Brown permission to restore it according to whatever specifications they laid down.
Our natural and built environments do need protection but the criteria governing the actions of the agencies policing such protection have to be transparent. They also have to have public credibility to the point where we unhesitatingly buy into them. This is far from the case at present.
A 12 month moratorium on developments in listed and scheduled areas of the natural and built environment and on activity by the guardian organisations would allow for the emergence of a policy fit for the 21st century – and a policing procedure beyond unquestioning paternalism fuelled by anachronistic and unchallenged values.
And a side note.
The story of the National Trust and Mar Lodge is an interesting one and lazy journalists have short memories.
Mar Lodge adjoins the royal family’s estate at Balmoral. In 1989 the 77,500 acre Mar Lodge Estate was bought by American millionaire John Kluge whose wife Patricia, later unveiled by the classist British press as a former belly dancer, had ambitions to associate with the royal family. Her husband’s fortune paid for sponsorship of the Windsor Carriage Driving competition for several years – a sport in which Prince Philip was then an energetic participant.
All Pat Kluge wanted was to be introduced to the Queen. The short-armed, deep-pocketed royals took the Kluge money but Pat Kluge never got the introduction. There was painful television footage at he time of her hovering hopefully in the vicinity of the royal party – at their event which she was paying for – and remaining below their regard.
Then the Kluges divorced in 1991 and shortly after that John Kluge left – having restored the estate and rebuilt the Lodge itself which had burned down in 1991. The estate was put on the market.
Prince Charles, not wanting any old neighbour and wanting the use of the beautiful Mar Lodge estate without the inconvenience of buying it himself, is known twice to have asked the National Trust to buy it. The Trust refused on grounds of affordability.
This was just before the launch of the National Lottery. When the first of the ‘National Heritage Lottery Fund’ awards were made in 1995 the headline controversy was the award of £13.5 million to Conservative MP Winston Churchill for the public acquisition of his grandfather’s papers. Ownership of much of the archive was disputed, with expert opinion asserting that the State already owned much of it.
But Churchill had the money and ignored the continuing furore, which successfully masked – with no questions at all – the grant of £10.5 million to allow the NTS to purchase the Mar Lodge Estate from John Kluge. Ann Marie Salvesen, a reclusive member of the Christian Salvesen shipping and distribution family, anonymously donated a further £4.5m to enable the acquisition. (Kluge had bought it in 1989 for £13 million and had spent £4 million on restoration.)
It is a moot point that the greedy Winston Churchill was used as a fall guy for the main plot. Giving him an obscene and unmerited amount of money – and it was only our money anyway – would draw the fire of media attention. This might let the Mar Lodge award – given as much to pacify a spoilt and demanding Prince as to conserve the scant remnants of the old Caledonian Pine Forest – slip away unseen. And it did.
The photograph above is in the Public Domain and shows Mar Lodge in the summer of 1995, rebuilt after a fire a few years earlier.
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