Controversy over £4m sale of Cashel Estate
Calls have been made to take an Scottish estate that incorporates a “forest for a thousand years” off the sales market, and for the ownership trust to consult the local community before any future sale.
The 1,200-hectare Cashel Estate, which sits close to the eastern shore of Loch Lomond, recently went on the market for £4 million.
The estate was bought in 1996 for a purchase cost of £800,000, using public money from the National Lottery. A further £100,000 of lottery money was also used to create a visitor centre at the site.
One of the concerns raised by the local community is that no answer has been forthcoming as to what will happen to the money when the estate has been sold.
John Hunt, a former programme manager for the Millennium Forest Trust, which was involved in both the purchase and early management of the site, has voiced concerns.
He has reportedly said that the Cashel Trust should “halt the sale in order to allow time for consultation with the local community and to consider other options, such as passing the estate over to another organisation willing to manage it, according to the original objectives, or imposing sale conditions to achieve the same thing”.
He points to “a huge amount of public money” that has gone into the estate, and says that money should not be taken out and potentially used for something that it wasn’t initially issued for.
There is also the concern that potential new owners could have no interest in native woodland development, and instead exploit the land in some way for money.
Royal Scottish Forestry Society (RSFS), which created Cashel Forest Trust and is its parent member, is also caught up in the debate about the estate’s future. In the late 1990s, the RSFS applied for and was awarded a grant from the Millennium Forest for Scotland Trust to purchase Cashel farm.
A recent letter from the RSFS vice-president to the society members described the estate in 1996 as “a tick and bracken covered sheep farm on the east side of Loch Lomond”. Its goal was to demonstrate how a typical landholding could be planted with native species.
Today, according to the sale advert, there is 300ha of native woodland, one of the largest and oldest of the “new” native woodlands in Scotland, including oak, birch, ash, aspen, alder, gean, hazel, holly, juniper, willow and Scots pine.
There is also the visitor centre, and recent works have included the rebuilding of a wildlife dipping pond and installation of a viewing hide for red squirrels.
A peatland restoration project has already been carried out on 80ha of degraded peatland with phase two, involving a further 140ha, due to start in September.
However, some RSFS members claim they were not given the heads-up about the sale. In response, vice-president Raymond Henderson said the primary objectives for Cashel have been “successfully met and the trustees have spent much time over the past two years considering where the future might lie”.
He said the trustees concluded the future of the estate would be best managed by “a new, better resourced custodian, more capable of providing the investment required to build on the achievements of the last quarter century”.
The estate was bought in 1996 for £800,000, using public money from the National Lottery