When is it
morally right
to intervene?
Alan Fisher
A last-minute candidate?
‘Are there any
trees close
to your property?’
Vacancies
Fancy becoming a chair?
SR Extra
My left-wing father, who called George MacLeod a patronising old fraud
John Cameron on no ordinary cleric: a portrait of the Rev Sandy Cameron
Vacancies
Every Thursday, SR publishes details of public appointments which are up for grabs. The aim is to encourage suitably qualified readers to apply for these posts in the hope of widening the range of public appointees.
If you have an understanding of sustainable development and natural resource management, and a knowledge of environmental issues, you could be interested in becoming a part-time Forestry Commissioner for Scotland. The commitment is two days a month, for which you would be paid £9,433 a year. But you’d best hurry: the closing date for applications is Monday 12 March. For further information
click here
National Museums Scotland is looking for a new chair. (Museums tend to have enough old chairs to keep them going.) There is no remuneration for this important post – you are expected to do it for the greater glory of Scotland – and guidelines are somewhat brief. But if you fancy running Scotland’s museums and would like to know more
click here
The deadline for this one is Friday 16 March.
The Cafe
Unlike many publications SR doesn’t have an online comment facility – we prefer a more considered approach. The Cafe is our readers’ forum. If you would like to contribute to it, please email islay@scottishreview.net
Today’s banner
Early Spring flowers
in Angus
Photograph by
Islay McLeod
‘Are there any
trees close
to your property?’
Lorn Macintyre
I
Breaking dawn brings unaccustomed light. In this winter of exceptional storms I was wakened one night by a 50-feet high tree, its trunk more than the girth of my arms, crashing on to the patio only feet away from the wall against which my head lay in repose. It took me four days with a Bushman saw, like Robert Frost in one of his poems, to strip the branches ready for the chain-saw. There were 36 other very substantial trees bordering our property and that of my neighbour on two sides, and one morning after the next storm I woke to find that two trees had toppled on to his ground. Since the power cables serving our small community ran close to the line of trees, and since our neighbour on the other side has a crippled child, permanently on a respirator, with 24-hour nursing attendance, for whom the electricity supply is vital, I have had the remaining 34 trees felled.
When first light comes I fetch my axe to continue the herculean task of chopping up 20 of those trees. I could use a mechanical log splitter, but it’s not the tool for a wandering mind, and I wish to retain my arms, so the axe it shall be until the last log is stacked. ‘But you have sufficient firewood for five years,’ a neighbour points out. True, but we don’t have the trees in which the birds nested and which shaded our property. I asked a world expert at St Andrews University if these exceptional storms are the result of climate change and he said: ‘The higher temperatures in the atmosphere have given it more energy, therefore the wind is stronger’.
The sacrifice of these trees was a necessary preventative measure. Throughout the country people may have to consider having trees felled because of the destruction future storms may do to their property and to that of their neighbours, with bitter disputes over liability. One of my neighbours noted a new clause on his house insurance renewal form: are there any trees close to your property?
II
I visit friends in Boarhills, a hamlet minutes away by car. St Andrews University owns a tenanted farm in the vicinity of this hamlet on which it wishes to erect wind turbines, to the strenuous opposition of some of the residents of Boarhills and the surrounding area. But my friends are jubilant at the arrival of an American knight, Don Quixote style, not to tilt at these modern windmills, but to prevent their erection. Enraged by a proposal to site 11 turbines off the Aberdeenshire coast, near his controversial golf resort at the Menie Estate, Donald Trump sent his executive vice-president and legal counsel to a recent meeting in St Andrews, to stop the erection of wind turbines – ‘horrendous machines,’ Trump condemns them – in north-east Fife and beyond.
The American tycoon insists that wind turbines will disfigure the world-renowned landscape of Scotland (his mother hailed from Lewis) and deter international tourists, including dedicated golfers. Trump’s son has hinted that his father may bankroll the anti-wind turbine campaign with £10 million, which must dismay, not only St Andrews University, but also the government in Edinburgh.
There will be those who argue that Trump is being hypocritical, golf courses being an artificial and sterile transformation of landscape. But it must be easier to live with acres of smooth and undulating turf on which flags are fluttering than with scores of propellers turning high in the air, shredding disorientated birds. Since offshore wind ‘farms’ are also being proposed, the controversy is going to be angry and protracted. I abhor the thought of sailing in the Hebrides and being confronted with ranks of turbines in a seascape that inspired Mendelssohn.
Lorn Macintyre is a writer and poet
