Demands to halt £4m sale of '1,000-year-old' Loch Lomond forest

Public money was used to develop woodland on the estate, which is now up for sale for £4m.

Calls have been made to take an estate with a “forest for a thousand years” off the market and to consult the local community before any 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.

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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.

One of the concerns raised by the local community is there is no answer as to what the plans are for the money when it’s sold, it has been reported.

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 about the sale.

There have been calls for the sale of Cashel woodland in the sale of the 3,069 acre Cashel Estate to haltThere have been calls for the sale of Cashel woodland in the sale of the 3,069 acre Cashel Estate to halt
There have been calls for the sale of Cashel woodland in the sale of the 3,069 acre Cashel Estate to halt | Goldcrest

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 is reported to have said.

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Mr Hunt pointed to “a huge amount of public money” that has gone into the estate, and that money should not be taken out and potentially used for something that it wasn’t initially issued for.

There is also the concern 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, are 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.

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And 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 a visitor centre that includes education displays, 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 80 hectares of degraded peatland with phase two, involving a further 140 hectares, due to start in September.

However, some of the 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”.

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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”.

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