CGDTOn Thursday 10th October 6pm-8pm at the Colintraive Village hall
Welcome to a community open evening to discuss and establish the following:
Following this we will look in more depth at Forest access, associated challenges and your solutions.
Homemade soup and refreshments available.
All welcome!!
… over 50 folks made it to Colintraive to hear about and feedback on and plan for Stronafian Forest. Here are a couple of snaps of the evening.
As you can see, not only did we have all sorts of plans and presentations, but we also had soup and cake made by Danuta. Delicious!
From 6pm at the Colintraive Village Hall Mark, our Community Forest Development Officer will be hosting an evening all about the forest. There’ll be presentations, discussions, map-making and lots of lovely soup. Come along! All are welcome!
Last weekend an intrepid pair of Glendaruels ventured up to the chambered cairn – we thought you might like to see the photos:
We’re delighted to welcome Mark Chambers to our community. Mark will be working with us for at least two years bring forward all the elements in our Business Plan for Stronafian Forest. Mark will be spending the first couple of months getting up to speed on the project, meeting people and settling in. We’ll be announcing a Forest event shortly when everyone will get to greet Mark officially!
The board met on Monday 22nd August to populate a map of Stronafian with initial proposals for where certain activities could be located in the forest. This will be passed onto our forest consultant for his comments.
You can view a Google Map of the above areas here
The board felt the amenity area should be close to the Clachan since this would form a base for people to go into the forest from. The Forest School would also be located in this area. It was decided some investigation would be required to provide access directly from the hotel to the forest. Paths to an area higher up where there is little forest cover would provide an area for views, picnic sites and possibly an area for stargazing.
The areas for silviculture were chosen based on selecting areas close to existing access routes and with relatively level topography. Activities here might involve commercial wood fuel production as well as the possibility of forest smallholdings for low impact silviculture.
It was felt the only suitable location for affordable housing on forest land was in Stronafian since this was relatively level ground, on a road and near existing housing.
We welcome your feedback on proposals below!
At the last NFLS panel meeting in late January, at which the decision on our application was to be taken, important questions were raised regarding the timescales of the purchase and how that would affect our business plan for the forest, in particular our management of the forest itself. The panel therefore decided to defer their decision until 5th May to allow us to look at the implications of this.
The Development Trust has now fed back regarding the changes it has made to its business plan to effect purchase of the entire forest within 18 months of the approval of our application.
We will communicate the panel’s decision as soon as we have news but in the meantime will keep our fingers crossed.
Today myself and John McEwan met with Penny Cousins, the panel member for the NFLS, Malcolm Wield and Gordon Donaldson, as part of the process towards a determination on whether the right to buy Stronafian Forest should be granted to the Development Trust.
After a talking through the business plan and the full development programme the Development Trust is putting together, we walked around parts of the forest before repairing to the Colintraive Hotel for a Seafood Chowder lunch (which was delicious!).
The NFLS panel will consider our application on the 20th January, and a decision will be made by Forestry Commission Scotland’s Director, Bob McIntosh shortly thereafter. Fingers crossed.