Kate Mavor, the outgoing chief executive of the National Trust for Scotland, and soon to be chief executive of new property-owning charity English Heritage, has criticised the Scottish Government and local councils for not doing enough to protect the country’s heritage.
The Herald Scotland writes:
Speaking at Culzean Castle in Ayrshire in her final week as the trust’s chief executive, Ms Mavor said the Scottish Government has been in too much of a rush to use wind farms to meet its climate change targets. In some parts of the country, she said, wind farms were a desecration on the landscape.
‘I do think the impact of change and development on heritage is not considered enough,’ she said in her final interview in the job. ‘Either it’s not required for people to properly evaluate it, or, as has happened recently with wind farms, there’s been environmental assessments done which have strongly suggested this is not a good idea and they have been over-ruled.
‘That’s just paying lip service. It’s particularly important when town centres are looking uniform and the same chains of shops are appearing everywhere and you have that whole monotonous uniformity of town centres.’
Ms Mavor, who is leaving the National Trust for Scotland after six years, said she felt she had to speak out about the proliferation of wind farms in Scotland. The trust has recently objected to proposals for a 67-turbine wind farm south east of Fort Augustus, which Ms Mavor said was part of a rush to wind farms that needs to be arrested.
‘There’s too much of a rush to one kind of electricity generation, being wind farms,’ she said. ‘There are many other things that could be done to bring down our carbon footprint which are not being emphasised such as making sure everyone’s house is insulated and educating people – that would be first thing to make the biggest dent.
