Bog Myrtle & Peat

There was a fine hum of excitement at the mart this evening. The No-Parkers had convened a meeting with NatureSCOT to discuss the proposals for a new National Park in Galloway, and it seemed like the silent majority had finally woken up with all the snoozy irritation of a bull too-long-bothered by a cleg. Of course I love this place and the people in it, and if there was a whiff of threat and thunder in the air, the moment was all the richer for it. Two meek and gentle-looking civil servants from NatureSCOT were propped up inside the ring with a clapped-out tannoy system, and perhaps they were glad of the steel railings which stood between themselves and the packed attendance.

The mood was firmly in opposition to the Park, but it was hard to see how a punch could be landed on the idea. Every reasonable concern was deflected and sidestepped by NatureSCOT excuses that “you can have your say in the consultation” – or “that’s not for us to decide”. If one substantial action point had been exposed, it would have been scragged and despatched in a spray of froth and phlegm like the rat which bolts from the henhouse. Instead, the discussion swayed and swerved without ever breaking cover – and always the same insistence upon the paper-thin idea that the decision hasn’t been made yet. 

Even this essential strand of the conversation felt veiled and inconsistent. At times, the civil servants explained that they hadn’t decided what the outcome should be – not long afterwards, they were keen to insist that the decision was not for them. This was always going to be the keenest bone of contention, so it’s surprising that their responses were so pallid and confusing. There was also strange repetition of the idea that this consultation will be over by the end of January- and that February will be a mad rush to get feedback compiled and digested for Ministers. But this timeline has no obvious rationale, and if the consultation is genuinely trying to understand what people in Galloway want, it should take as long as that takes. So perhaps I don’t feel sympathy for NatureSCOT staff who will have to work double time to turn this report around. This idea has been drifting around for seven years – it’s surely best to get it right?

In the end, two clear points arose from this meeting. The first is that if you want a National Park to protect you from wind farm development, look elsewhere. The government intends to change existing legislation around wind farms in designated landscapes, so we could easily get a National Park *and* the turbines. It’s not an issue that particularly exorcises me, but it’s a major bone of contention for many and it will make a difference in discussions around protecting beautiful landscapes.

The second point is that this consultation process is costing the Scottish Government £135,000. Perhaps Ministers would argue that it’s not much, but when you see how much money has been forcibly reclaimed from other conservation workstreams across NatureSCOT in the last six months, that’s a staggering amount of money to be spent on a consultation which might say “No”. It feeds a wider sense that it probably won’t say no – although further questions about how a future park will be funded ended in a fuzziness of uncertainty. Cash may still kill this proposal.

Importantly, it was useful to feel like this issue finally had a home. As soon as the idea grounded itself in Castle Douglas, it became real. For a start, I knew a large number of the people I saw on the ringside seats – it felt like a proposal that was relevant to “us”, and something that we could get to grips with. But this sudden sense of ownership was strangely at odds with the idea that the same proposal is currently under scrutiny in Wigtownshire and Ayrshire. Out west, there could be rings of people I don’t know from communities I’ve never heard of. Here’s one of the trickiest angles of this entire debate, because Galloway is vast – the proposal encompasses an enormous slab of fragmented and disjointed countryside – when you stand on the Market Hill in Castle Douglas, it really credible to imagine that Galloway runs 90 minutes up the road to Girvan? A diversity of communities is an asset, but the proposed park boundary feels like a bizarrely incoherent over-reach. On the engagement portal, there was a useful comment from somebody in Ayrshire that greater publicity needs to be given to the project out there – local people are confused because they don’t know why Galloway National Park is relevant to them – surely it’s an issue for people in Galloway? To be fair, nobody can explain why the Galloway Park was ever extended to include Ayrshire anyway – least of all people in Ayrshire.

That’s maybe the greatest frustration of the evening – because so much momentum and excitement is now in place to do something – if not a Park, then surely something positive. And yet the proposal is still so maddeningly faint and indistinct – there’s nothing to punch or be punched by – and yet we’re deeply enmeshed in it. The way the process works, we can’t see what we’re getting until we’ve got it. At that point, we can only ask for what we want and hope it comes. And from every angle, it feels disconcertingly like everybody involved in the formal part of this process has got an interest in making it happen. We can fill a mart and growl and enjoy ourselves, but even if we scrag a civil servant or two, is it all just a foregone conclusion?