How Scottish tourism can develop into a nightmare

Paul Strachan in Scotland’s Sunday Herald reports that these are tough times for Scottish tourism, with even before recession solidified, the £4 billion-a-year industry struggling to meet growth targets once deemed the bare minimum to keep pace with global competitors.

But little meaningful is being done to enlist Scots’ hearts and minds in support of this revenue drive, which was supposed to make tourism “everybody’s business”. Indeed, that goal is being put out of reach by the failure of politicians and industry leaders to achieve clarity on how the planning system can produce a pro-growth tourist infrastructure.

For a case study in how this leadership vacuum leads to grotesque and alienating outcomes, observe what is happening to the Perthshire village of Kenmore, which has claims to being the birthplace of Scottish tourism.

Lack of leadership and common sense has given us a system that is lax where it should be prohibitive, and prohibitive where it should be enabling.

When Queen Victoria stayed at Taymouth Castle on her 1842 honeymoon 10,000 hangers-on followed, boarding in any available accommodation, with the novelty of having relatively well-heeled travellers staying in rustic accommodation marking the birth of the B&B. Victoria’s later description in her Highland Journal brought visitors to Kenmore from all over the world.

At the foot of Loch Tay, Kenmore is two hours’ drive from Scotland’s main cities and with its planned Georgian square, loch-side church and grand castle gate, it is a self-consciously attractive Highland village, prospering through “sustainable tourism” for a century before that phrase was coined.

Students and the younger folk came camping, while the less hardy stayed in B&Bs. Others rented cottages on the castle estate while the local hotel brokered hunting, shooting and fishing for affluent southerners. There was something for everyone.

Step forward to the present day. Kenmore is to be entirely devoted to deluxe mod-conned houses with hot tubs in their gardens. These are offered as “fractional ownership”, or timeshares.

In a village with a population of around 100, more than 400 holiday units have already been built or have planning consent within a three-mile radius of the village. Consent for a further 100 is under application.

The area lies unprotected between Scotland’s two great national parks, Loch Lomond to the west and Cairngorm to the east. Barring development in the parks, planners appear happy to squeeze as much indiscriminate holiday-building into this area as possible.

Perth & Kinross Council is hungry for these developments and has allowed itself to be convinced by the developers that they bring maximum economic benefits.

This is not true.

The backpacker, cyclist, camper or caravanner lives from day-to-day, spending money in local shops and pubs.

The fractional owner fills their car at Tesco in Perth, and once in situ, spends as little as possible.

The main argument for the explosion in these soulless developments is jobs for the locals, but in Kenmore there are no “locals” as there is no affordable housing.

The timeshares are staffed by eastern Europeans who are prepared (for now) to accept low-grade accommodation in trailers or huts.

Not one affordable house has been built in the Kenmore area in the past 10 years and now that the eastern Europeans are leaving, there is a dire labour shortage, with “Staff wanted” cards filling the post-office windows.

Many young people would like to stay in the area but have nowhere to live.

From the hustle and bustle of low-budget tourism we now have Brookside-by-the-loch.  Who does this benefit exactly?  Not the shops, not the local tradespeople and not the local jobs market.

The main winners are the developers and the council.

Four out of the five big Kenmore developments are owned by companies whose shareholders live outside the community.

Building work goes to contractors from outside the area. The council, meanwhile, rakes in council tax without having to supply education or other social services to the inhabitants of non-residential properties.

But developers are killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

People went to Kenmore to escape, but now traffic, light pollution and power-boat activity deters would-be visitors, not to mention wildlife and bird life.

Of the five fractional-ownership developments, the most outrageous proposal is for the Croft-na-Caber site adjacent to the celebrated Crannog Centre, to be squeezed into a seven-acre site are 66 holiday units, built in a postmodern style of jaggedy steel and soon-to-be shabby cladding.

An ancient manse, mysteriously never listed by council planners, is to be demolished, as will an 18th-century ferryman’s cottage. There are plans for a marina for 30ft to 40ft yachts more suited to an Atlantic crossing than the loch run-up to Killin.

The crowning extravagance is to be a three-storey high, 85 metre-long restaurant and spa complex, projecting 50 metres into the loch, a feat of architectural megalomania as unsuited to the economic climate as it is to the landscape.

The Costa Brava in Spain, idyllic and unspoilt until the 1960s, fell into the hands of developers who bought out and marginalised the locals.

We smugly thought that we had got it right here in Scotland but now we have it – the Costa Loch Tay.

Do the Scottish government and VisitScotland approve the evading of normal planning assumptions in the name of tourism in this part of the Highland heartland?

If they do, then it should be “everybody’s business” to tell them how short-sighted they are being.

Paul Strachan is director of Pandaw River Cruises, which operates in southeast Asia. He has lived in Kenmore since 1998

A Report by The Mole