Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

Item 5 Appendix 4b 24 April 2026 Page 1 of 9

Agenda item 5

Appendix 4b

2025/0167/DET

Rep­res­ent­a­tion – support

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Plan­ning Applic­a­tion 2026/0167/DET Con­struc­tion of a hill track, Pit­main and Glen­ban­chor Estate Rep­res­ent­a­tion from Dave Morris

Sum­mary and context

I sup­port this plan­ning applic­a­tion, with qual­i­fic­a­tions. Although there will be sig­ni­fic­ant impacts on nat­ur­al her­it­age val­ues and their enjoy­ment I recog­nize there are also poten­tial advant­ages from the pro­vi­sion of this track, from the per­spect­ive of wood­land devel­op­ment, deer man­age­ment, croft­ing activ­it­ies and some aspects of out­door recre­ation. These bene­fits poten­tially out­weigh the dis­ad­vant­ages. How­ever, this will only be the case if the qual­i­fic­a­tions that con­cern me are prop­erly addressed through appro­pri­ate plan­ning con­di­tions and oth­er meas­ures. If this is not pos­sible then my rep­res­ent­a­tion on this plan­ning applic­a­tion should be regarded as an objection.

It should be noted that this plan­ning applic­a­tion was pre­ceded by an earli­er plan­ning applic­a­tion for a vehicu­lar track which had a sim­il­ar aim of con­nect­ing Glen­ban­chor and Pit­main. This was to be loc­ated at a high­er pos­i­tion on the hill­side to the north west of the present pro­pos­al, up to 1km away, but in a much more intrus­ive and dam­aging pos­i­tion (plan­ning ref 2022/0421/DET). This applic­a­tion was refused on 28 April 2023 by unan­im­ous decision of the plan­ning com­mit­tee. The decision let­ter indic­ates that the plan­ning applic­a­tion was found to be con­trary to Policies 3, 4, 5,13,14, 20 and 29 of the Scot­land wide Nation­al Plan­ning Frame­work 4 (adop­ted by min­is­ters in Feb 2024) and Policies 2, 3, 4, 5 and 10 of the Cairngorms Nation­al Park Loc­al Devel­op­ment Plan 2021. These policies covered mat­ters relat­ing to land­scape char­ac­ter and impacts, rur­al devel­op­ment and eco­nom­ic growth, pro­tec­tion of biod­iversity, cli­mate emis­sions and impacts on peatland.

Giv­en the long list of Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment and Nation­al Park policies that the pre­vi­ous applic­a­tion was not com­pli­ant with, it would be expec­ted that the cur­rent plan­ning applic­a­tion would have addressed all these issues. It is there­fore sur­pris­ing that the doc­u­ments that sup­port this applic­a­tion are some­what defi­cient, apart from a com­pre­hens­ive report on biod­iversity aspects. There is no over­all state­ment to explain why this track is needed, apart from some aspects of forestry man­age­ment, no land­scape impact apprais­al, no ref­er­ence to out­door recre­ation, no ref­er­ence to croft­ing activ­it­ies and their inter­ac­tion with this pro­pos­al and no ref­er­ence to cli­mate change and peat­land issues. There are also some errors as regards track align­ment and classification.

Nev­er­the­less, des­pite these defi­cien­cies, I believe that a sat­is­fact­ory solu­tion can be found, provid­ing a com­pre­hens­ive set of plan­ning con­di­tions can be agreed upon and enforced.

I note that the decision of the CNPA to call in this plan­ning applic­a­tion was based on the fol­low­ing state­ment: ​“the applic­a­tion raises a plan­ning issue of gen­er­al sig­ni­fic­ance to the park aims for the fol­low­ing reas­ons: Applic­a­tion for the con­struc­tion of forestry extrac­tion track and track upgrad­ing for forestry pur­poses which could have a poten­tial impact upon nat­ur­al her­it­age and/​or land­scape sens­it­iv­it­ies; the applic­a­tion is con­sidered to raise issues of sig­ni­fic­ance to the col­lect­ive aims of the Nation­al Park.”

In com­ment­ing on the applic­a­tion I there­fore think it is appro­pri­ate to relate this pro­posed devel­op­ment to wider land use issues on the Glenbanchor/​Pitmain estate. Of par­tic­u­lar import­ance is the rela­tion­ship of track devel­op­ment and man­age­ment to out­door recre­ation as well as the poten­tial role of this track in regard to deer man­age­ment. These are all issues of cent­ral import­ance to the aims of the nation­al park and the role of this estate in safe­guard­ing nat­ur­al her­it­age and cul­tur­al val­ues, includ­ing land­scape, as well as pub­lic enjoy­ment for loc­al people and visitors.

Until fairly recently Glen­ban­chor and Pit­main were sep­ar­ate estates, under dif­fer­ent own­er­ship. In 2017 Pit­main estate was exten­ded by the pur­chase of Glen­ban­chor estate so that both areas (nearly 5,000 hec­tares in total) are now under the own­er­ship of Majid Jafar, a busi­ness­man from the Middle East, whose main res­id­ence would appear to be out­with Scot­land. The estate man­age­ment is under the con­trol of Savills via their Perth and Inverness offices.

Forestry pur­pose

It is unclear, from a forestry per­spect­ive, why this track, stretch­ing for around 4 km across mainly open moor­land is needed. There appears to be no obvi­ous reas­on why trees from the two forestry plant­a­tions at either end of the track all need to be trans­por­ted, one way or the oth­er, across this moor­land. The west­ern block can be extrac­ted down Glen Rd onto the main road in the centre of New­ton­more while the east­ern block can be extrac­ted down to Bal­lachroan and the main road just north of New­ton­more or by oth­er tracks which arrive in or close to Kingussie.

The applic­a­tion makes ref­er­ence to future forestry pro­pos­als, poten­tially involving tim­ber extrac­tion and re-plant­ing on the Glen­ban­chor sec­tion of the estate. Again, such tim­ber can be extrac­ted via Glen Road. Note that the pre­vi­ous plan­ning applic­a­tion made ref­er­ence to extrac­tion down Old Glen Road. That was clearly a mis­take as OGR is a minor, unadop­ted road with sharp bends and a very bad road sur­face. Glen Road is the route used by all large vehicles, includ­ing oil tankers, agri­cul­tur­al and con­struc­tion vehicles, remov­al vans etc. Tim­ber extrac­tion by this route would only require the remov­al of a few over­hanging limbs on the vet­er­an birch trees on the moor close to the plant­a­tion requir­ing extraction.

Most of the forestry plant­a­tions on Glen­ban­chor have been sub­ject to severe dam­age from wind­throw over the last 20 years. Much of the fallen tim­ber has been lying on or close to the ground for many years. All of the plant­a­tions have fences that are no longer deer proof and are used by red and roe deer in winter for shel­ter. From a gen­er­al land use per­spect­ive it may be bet­ter to leave much of this wood­land in its present state as con­tinu­ing shel­ter. The deer have nowhere else to go in winter, except bare over­grazed hillsides.

Fur­ther­more, the cost of remov­ing the tim­ber from these vari­ous plant­a­tions is unlikely to cov­er the cost of con­struc­tion of the pro­posed track across the moor. It is obvi­ous that one of the primary aims of the pro­posed track is likely to be for trans­port­ing guests for game bird shoot­ing and deer stalk­ing, along with the asso­ci­ated estate man­age­ment activ­it­ies. The pro­posed track would provide a vehicu­lar con­nec­tion between the Pit­main and Glen­ban­chor sec­tors of the estate without vehicles hav­ing to divert into New­ton­more to make this con­nec­tion via the pub­lic road net­work. There is no ref­er­ence to this poten­tial use in the plan­ning application.

The plan­ning applic­a­tion makes ref­er­ence to poten­tial future forestry plant­ing on Glen­ban­chor. As far as I am aware no forestry grant approvals have been giv­en for such forestry and it is unlikely that such approvals will be giv­en in future if the pur­pose is the pro­duc­tion of tim­ber for com­mer­cial pur­poses. In Janu­ary 2025 the UK Cli­mate Change Com­mit­tee, when con­sid­er­ing the land use changes needed to meet cli­mate change mit­ig­a­tion object­ives, indic­ated that a sub­stan­tial increase in tree plant­ing across the UK was needed. But they emphas­ised that this needed to be on min­er­al soils and not on organ­ic or organo-min­er­al soils. Future forestry for com­mer­cial pur­poses, espe­cially tim­ber pro­duc­tion, is there­fore likely to be focussed on low­land, non-peaty areas. Places like Glen­ban­chor are much more likely to be developed with nat­ive, nat­ur­ally regen­er­at­ing wood­land, primar­ily for biod­iversity recov­ery and car­bon cap­ture through whole eco­sys­tem approaches. Such a land use pat­tern would not need any new tim­ber extrac­tion tracks.

Not­with­stand­ing the above com­ments about wood­land, it should be recog­nised that a new track across the moor to con­nect the Glen­ban­chor and Pit­main sec­tors could be use­ful from the per­spect­ive of deer man­age­ment, recre­ation­al shoot­ing activ­it­ies, croft­ing activ­it­ies and out­door recre­ation. There is no oth­er vehicu­lar route which at present con­nects these to sec­tors, oth­er than by des­cend­ing into New­ton­more and Kin­gussie and access­ing the pub­lic road net­work. Tra­vers­ing between the sec­tors today is by non-motor­ised means, usu­ally on foot, ski or horseback.

Track width and surface

No inform­a­tion is provided in the plan­ning applic­a­tion as regards track length, bor­row pits, passing places or the pro­posed width or con­struc­tion meth­od. Through­out most of its length this track, wheth­er it is built as a new track or on the align­ment of an exist­ing track, should be a max­im­um 2.5 metres in width. This would be suf­fi­cient for nor­mal vehicu­lar use, as in the rest of the estate. In addi­tion a centre strip of grass should be estab­lished along the whole length of the track. These meas­ures involving width lim­it­a­tion and grass strip would greatly help in integ­rat­ing the track into the wild land­scape of the moor­land and also provide a good sur­face for non-motor­ised pub­lic access. A wider width would be appro­pri­ate in those sec­tions where lor­ries are needed for tree extrac­tion – this should only be required with­in the wood­land at the west­ern end of the track plus the con­nec­tion to Glen Road and with­in the wood­land at the east­ern end where there is already dir­ect access onto the exist­ing track network.

The track sur­faces on this estate are very vari­able. Over most of the estate there is a lot of loose mater­i­al, stones and small boulders on track sur­faces. While this may be sat­is­fact­ory for vehicu­lar use it dimin­ishes the enjoy­ment for oth­er, non-vehicu­lar users, not­ably those who use the track sys­tem for walk­ing, cyc­ling, ski­ing or horse rid­ing. Improve­ments in the sur­faces gen­er­ally on the estate would be wel­come, as found on many estates else­where in the Nation­al Park. A high­er qual­ity sur­face there­fore should be an essen­tial require­ment for any track approved under this plan­ning application.

It should be noted, how­ever, there are some tracks on this estate, not­ably those fol­low­ing tra­di­tion­al routes from the vil­lage into the hills, that have a very good grassy sur­face, extend­ing across much of the track width, which is excel­lent for non-vehicu­lar users. Every effort should be made to pro­tect those sur­faces where they are an integ­ral part of this plan­ning applic­a­tion. It should be noted that one of these tracks, going along the east­ern flank of the Allt na Loinne only goes as far as the water reservoir/​tank. The plan­ning applic­a­tion is incor­rect in show­ing the next sec­tion, going up to the forestry plant­a­tion, as an exist­ing track. It is a nar­row path for most of its length, not a track, albeit that there is some use of adja­cent veget­a­tion by argocat or quad bike.

There is also an exist­ing grassy track going up the west­ern flank of the Allt na Loinne and cross­ing the Allt na Feithe Buidhe which is the tra­di­tion­al route of ascent from this part of New­ton­more to the hills and sum­mits bey­ond, includ­ing A’Chailleach. This is the track which it is pro­posed in the plan­ning applic­a­tion should be dis­con­tin­ued, with the ground re-instated. My view is that should not hap­pen – it would be bet­ter for that track to remain, man­aged in the same way as now, provid­ing an excel­lent sur­face for out­door recre­ation use as well as vehicu­lar access for the crofters. This is not the same as oth­er situ­ations in the Nation­al Park where new tracks have been jus­ti­fied on the basis that some old tracks, usu­ally badly con­struc­ted in high alti­tude loc­a­tions, are dis­con­tin­ued and the ground rein­stated. In the case of Pitmain/​Glenbanchor the best option would be to retain the track on the west flank of the Allt na Loinne, link­ing it into the new track at the loc­a­tion pro­posed in the plan­ning applic­a­tion. This would then provide a cir­cu­lar route for out­door recre­ation users want­ing a short excur­sion from the Strone Road end of New­ton­more, as well as retain­ing the high qual­ity access route to and from the hills above via the west flank of the Allt na Loinne. This track which should be retained is also set down into the moor­land, retain­ing snow when that is thin on the sur­round­ing land and so provid­ing a good ski route across the moor.

Deer man­age­ment

The pro­posed track ought to improve the effect­ive­ness of deer man­age­ment on this estate, allow­ing more flex­ib­il­ity and effi­ciency in the deer cull­ing pro­cess, espe­cially in winter, so that deer stalk­ers can move more eas­ily by motor­ised access across the low ground. This is import­ant in view of the massive size of red deer pop­u­la­tions on this and neigh­bour­ing estates. The res­ult­ing graz­ing pres­sure is pre­vent­ing tree and shrub regen­er­a­tion over most of the estate, along with the heavy tramp­ling of peaty areas and land­slip prob­lems. Ideally there needs to be agree­ment between the estate and the CNPA on how these deer num­bers are to be reduced, with­in an appro­pri­ate times­cale, before any plan­ning approv­al for this track is granted.

Croft­ing

It is anti­cip­ated that the pro­posed new track across the