Friends of the Ochils Newsletter 16: Summer 2000
An end to a view...?
Christmas wouldn't be the same without a copy of the Tourist Board's latest calendar - ready to adorn our kitchen wall and guide us through the coming year. Argyll, the Isles, Loch Lomond, Stirling and Trossachs Tourist Board is a bit of a mouthful but, no matter its title, it always manages to come up with colourful and often spectacular scenes from the areas it covers. This year's millennium offering is no exception, and I'm particularly pleased with the view accompanying the month of August: a shot looking across to the Ochils from atop the Wallace Monument. Why so? Well, for a start, it's my home territory. Secondly, our much-built-on central belt boasts few enough scenic gems, but this, most assuredly, is one of them. Thirdly, it could - and I stress could - change out of all recognition in the not too distant future.
Clackmannanshire and Stirling councils are, at this very moment, wrestling with the colossal complexities of producing a joint structure plan which will affect the lives of us all up to the year 2016. More houses, and where to put them, is one of the great imponderables because a Scottish Office diktat says Stirling Council must find room for 4000-plus housing units. Its solution is to spread 1500 or so around various existing settlements and then to create a brand new big village / wee town of 2500-plus houses with concomitant schools, health and leisure facilities and so on. And where would this new Utopia be built? South-east of Stirling was the council's favoured spot but, on consulting the local people, it was discovered that many didn't take too kindly to the idea. It seemed politically expedient, therefore, to redefine said favoured spot to include land east of Stirling. This the council did - without consulting anybody.
Several housebuilders submitted thoughts on a location for this Major Growth Area and one suggested Manor Powis. Encouraged by Stirling Council's response to his proposal, the builder then produced a very detailed feasibility study which is breathtakingly monstrous. It has the temerity to suggest that the great, green and glorious floor of the carse between tiny Blairlogie and even tinier Manor Powis - land transformed into today's well-ordered scene by generations of honest, hard-working farmers - should be covered by 2500-plus houses, generating a population of 6000-8000. (That's bigger than Tillicoultry, bigger than Alva and three times the size of Menstrie!)
What kind of person dreams up this sort of thing? What makes such a person tick? Yes, I know; the answer's obvious. Only someone whose feelings are fine-tuned to the relentless pursuit of profit, to the exclusion of all else, could contemplate such an unspeakable act of environmental vandalism.
Before I'm accused of waxing hysterical, let me reiterate that, as of now, only one builder appears to favour Manor Powis as a Major Growth Area and the scheme is only at the concept stage ... but stranger things have happened. In the 1950s, my late father, Moultrie R Kelsall, wrote and produced a radio series called A Future for the Past. In these programmes he attempted to alert listeners to the activities of the developers of the day whose antipathy towards the generally well-built old houses of an earlier Scotland was legendary. The fact that it was actually cheaper (and the end result infinitely more attractive) to refurbish, adapt and preserve these buildings was dismissed out of hand. At the beginning of each programme - and at points during it - father had a pack of "developers" baying their hunting-cry, "There an auld hoose! Caa it doon!" And what of today's developers and their hunting-cry? How about: "There a green field! Pit hooses on't!"
Our green belt land and greenfield sites are coming under increasing pressure from the voracious demands of predatory developers; for all our sakes, they must be resisted. Listen to David Gill, managing director of Cala Homes (Scotland), writing in Scottish Planner magazine.
"...there are endless sites in the green belt around our towns and cities which are not environmental joys ... [they] would better suit family housing and, critically, not result in any perceptible expansion of the urban area."
What tosh! It's this kind of attitude that encourages the likes of our local builder to eye up the "environmental joy" that is the panorama from Wallace Monument to the Ochils with a view to obliterating it.
So far, this is not a planning application - but, if ever it became one, I hope sufficient resistance could be marshalled to ensure its refusal. Were it to be approved, you can bet your boots the tourist board would never again use this particular shot for its calendar.
In the end, perhaps there's no need to worry. I'm sure our Stirling councillors - especially those with an Environmental Quality brief - are far too wise and responsible to allow a daft scheme like this to get off the ground, let alone on it. You are, aren't you?