The present discussion with the National Park Authorities has come about as a result of a meeting which Dane Sherrard and Bob Seaward had with the Chairman of the National Park, Dr. Cantlay, at the end of which, having heard of all our problems, Dr. Cantlay told us to put up ‘No Camping’ notices at the entrance to the glebe.

 

Having done this, another official of the National Park, in response to a newspaper question, said, in effect, that these notices should not have been put up.

 

Thus we were caught in the middle of a difference of approach between the Chairman of the Park and his Open Access Staff.

 

Dr. Cantlay immediately told us that steps would be taken to ensure that the problems we were facing as a result of camping would be tackled, even if this meant using our case as an example of how the current legislation was not working and taking it to the Scottish Parliament. Carron Tobin, a director of the Park, was made our contact person with the task of helping us resolve this matter. We are delighted that she has been working with us not only on this but also in our planning for our celebrations in 2010.

 

 

Luss Glebe is a twenty-three acre site accessible by land only across a new bridge which was built for us by the Royal Engineers in May of 2006. The previous bridge had been carried away by a tree in a storm in January 1993 and for thirteen years there had been no access to this beautiful piece of land.

 

The Parish Church was anxious to rebuild the bridge because it wished to give access to the land to all of the many people for whom access to Loch Lomond was becoming more difficult as years went by.

 

Loch Lomond was the place to which many people from Glasgow came for a day out; it was the place to which many people came for their annual holidays. Now a journey from Balloch to Luss shows that more and more of the lochside is no longer realistically available to the public because of the presence of expensive hotels and exclusive golf courses.

 

Thus the Glebe Project was all about sharing our land by the side of Loch Lomond so that everyone could enjoy all that it had to offer and, by making this a place where tourists could visit, would also take some of the pressure off the streets, beach and pier in the village which sometimes resemble Sauchiehall Street when the sales are on.

 

 

The plan, which was dawn up over a period following the restoration of Luss Church in 2002, was to create on the Glebe a pathway to enable visitors not only to appreciate the beauty of our area but also to challenge them to think about all that they were seeing. The Church in Luss will celebrate in 2010, one thousand five hundred years of continuous Christian presence here. For much of that time the Church has been a pilgrimage destination as people came to pray at the burial place of one of Scotland’s earliest Celtic Saints. It is not at all fanciful to suggest that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries people came to Luss in great numbers on pilgrimage and that the village would not be so different from today in being a small community constantly over-run by large numbers of visitors. The only difference is that in those days the visitors were pilgrims and now-a-days they are purely visitors.

 

This understanding led the Church to think that an appropriate use of the glebe would be to create a Pilgrimage Pathway – a pathway which would go through the glebe enabling people to wonder at the beauty of nature: the loch and the hills, the birds and animals, the flowers and trees and to heighten awareness of what was to be appreciated by placing appropriate sculptures, monuments, plaques with poems, thoughts or Bible passages on them and so on around the pathway.

 

The initial pathway was designed as a loop, with a central crossing, around the meadow area of the glebe. A further six pathways were designed to go in amongst the trees, along the riverbank, down to the loch side and each of these additional paths was to have a theme to it such as love or loss or hope.

 

 

It is, of course, one thing having a plan, quite another making it happen. As the Church officials thought through the options facing them they realised that the creation of the pathway was itself an opportunity to do something special which might be as important as the creation of the pathway itself. Having a pathway to build provided the Church with the ‘excuse’ to bring together young people from all over the world to work, live and play together and through being together for up to three weeks to create lasting friendships and to learn about each other’s countries and what was important to them.

 

During the past three years young people have come to Luss from Scotland, Finland, Holland, Poland, Denmark, Portugal, Italy, the Czech Republic, Korea, and the United States of America to share in designing and working on our Pilgrimage Pathway. Lives have been changed and a community of young people around the world has begun to be created.

 

Many of our youngsters from overseas come from National Park areas and so create live links with the National Park programme throughout Europe. Many of our Scottish young people come from inner city Glasgow and bringing them into a National Park area is equally important.

 

As the youth programme has taken off more and more people have wished to become involved. Now the Church works closely with teams from the Prince’s Trust, particularly from colleges in Kilmarnock, Greenock, Clydebank and Dumbarton. Links have also been forged with secondary schools that have brought their young people here to share in the project and to take part in leadership training.

 

Of course, our youth project is not all about working on the Glebe. That is one part of a larger programme which includes kayaking in the loch, climbing the hills, sharing in presentations about the different countries taking part, visiting important places in Scotland and so on. It is a programme which has engaged the support of many local businesses who support the programme financially by providing us with a commercial kitchen to feed our youngsters, donating cabins to become living accommodation, paying for the materials for the bridge construction, donating the biggest dining room table in the world so that everyone can sit around it. It is also a programme which has attracted support from many funders and trusts: Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Natural Heritage, the European Rural Funding programme, The Church of Scotland Development Fund, the British Council, the Morgan Foundation, the Barr Foundation; exchange visits have been subsidised by several overseas bodies including National Parks.

 

Last year the first of our monuments was erected – a large wooden Celtic Cross, designed to attract people on to the Glebe and to say ‘something is going to happen here.’

 

A Remembrance Garden with trees planted by those with someone special to remember has been created.

 

Visitors have been walking the glebe in large numbers. Often it appears that there are more visitors crossing the bridge than walking the pier and, of course, this is good for the village of Luss as it alleviates some of the pressures which tourists bring.

 

During 2009 and the early part of 2010 the plan is for a large number of additional monuments, artefacts and plaques to be installed around the pathway network. Many of the plaques have already been manufactured with one made by each of the youngsters who have been part of the project. Many of them contain a thought which is important to the person who wrote it and is in English and in the native language of the writer. Some of these plaques have already been installed by the side of the pathway.

 

 

After such a rosy introduction it may seem strange now to have to relate that we have one very significant problem. Right from the first moment the bridge was built (and even before) we have had a problem with campers.

 

Initially, because we are all about sharing, we went out of our way to welcome campers, going across to them as soon as they arrived, welcoming them, giving them a black bag for their refuse and letting them know where their refuse could be dropped off so that we could dispose of it. We negotiated with Argyll Council for a big refuse container so that the black sacks could be taken away and we arranged parties of people who would patrol the Glebe and collect refuse which was left lying around.

 

However good our intentions, they have not worked.

 

We cannot recall a single example of anyone coming to the Glebe for what might genuinely be described as legitimate ‘Wild Camping.’ We have rarely seen any example of camping on the Glebe which has not been accompanied by large amounts of alcohol – often amounting to a case of beer and a bottle of spirits per person!

 

A ‘normal’ camping episode is a couple of vehicles arriving and parking as close as possible to the bridge; a party of anything between six and twenty people crossing the bridge weighed down with cases of alcohol and tents; a night of revelry during which the Glebe is trashed, trees cut down, fires lit, human excrement left everywhere and soiled toilet paper by the sides of our pathways waiting to greet the visitors next morning.

 

When the ‘campers’ leave it is quite normal for them also to abandon their tents, sleeping bags, spare clothing and even the alcohol which they have been unable to consume. There is often a wide expanse of ground which looks as if it had recently hosted a football crowd. One at least one occasion needles and used condoms were also left lying around.

 

Clearly this form of camping is neither responsible nor legal, but the people who are coming to camp believe that they are permitted to act in the way they do, even although Luss is now part of a ‘no alcoholic drinking in public’ zone. Notices which encourage ‘responsible’ camping have no effect on these campers.

 

Irresponsible camping does, however, have a very significant effect on our visitors and serious questions have been raised as to whether it is appropriate for us to continue with our plans. There is even a body of opinion within the village which wants us to remove the bridge which we have worked so hard to achieve.

 

The picture painted by this report is of an area which is made quite unpleasant by reckless camping, but how does this impact on what the Church is trying to do?

 

First of all the whole concept of a Pilgrimage Walk encouraging the visitor to think of the beauty of God’s handiwork is totally destroyed by having to walk to the loch side through soiled toilet paper, past abandoned tents with bottles strewn everywhere. As a tiny and elderly community we cannot be out cleaning every morning and this is a very serious and recurring problem.

 

Secondly, the whole ethos of the Pilgrimage Walk is to have wooden sculptures and monuments in among the trees so that as you walk you suddenly realise that what is in front of you is not another tree but a beautifully carved animal or figure. All of these may not be in place by 2010 but the Pilgrimage Pathway can, in time, become an internationally renowned walk with sculptures from all over the world which will bring visitors to Scotland just to walk it. (When one thinks that Luss Church already brings wedding parties from almost every country in the world this is clearly not a fanciful ambition.)

 

Our project can happily take responsibility for ensuring that everything is patrolled and cared for during the day – but indiscriminate camping will see many of these works of art destroyed by axe, chainsaw or fire within the first few months. One suggestion made to us was that instead of creating monuments of wood we should create stone or metal monuments – but such artefacts would work against the environment rather than be part of it. They would also be very much more expensive. Our wooded area is just that and it is appropriate that the artefacts within it should be of the same material as the wood itself points the visitor to something beyond itself.

 

Thirdly, the presence of campers at night when we use the Glebe to take young people to explore the loch side by night is a very significant risk. We take youngsters to the Glebe to introduce them to bats, for city children to experience what it is like to walk in the dark, to explore themes like trust and so on. All of our staff are carefully vetted, trained and have completed the appropriate police checks and yet we are taking them into an environment where there are others who have not only not completed those checks but who have been drinking heavily. The local police suggested to me that in such circumstances all I had to do was to phone them and they would come at once to remove any such campers before our evening activity began. I have discussed this with two head teachers both of whom told me that they would have reservations about bringing their children to take part in a night activity somewhere where police might first have to remove inappropriate people. The Risk is too great.

 

We have, as has already been recorded, discovered needles and on at least one occasion young folk have been made to feel unsafe by the presence of campers – an experience which has been shared by our staff at other times.

 

Thus our concerns centre around the experience of visitors walking the pathway, the safety of our valuable artefacts and the safety of our young people building the pathway and using the Glebe. It is also a dreadful memory for our overseas visitors to take home with them: assisting us in cleaning up the filth left by Scottish campers around their own loch side.

 

 

The first thing to say is that we have not seen examples of genuine ‘wild camping.’ This is hardly surprising because the Glebe is not on the way to anywhere. You can only go into the Glebe across the bridge and return the same way. In some ways it is thus rather like a walled garden – the walls in this case being the fortified boundaries of Luss Estates, the loch and the Luss Water.

 

Our campers are static campers who come in large numbers to spend their holidays or to have a party. Why?

 

One of the major reasons is that it seems so accessible. The bridge attracts people and the camper is both so near to the village and yet so far from it. Cars can be brought very close to the bridge and alcohol can be carried to the campsite without too much trouble.

 

There has been a concerted effort to remove campers from other areas around the village (where they can be seen) and so they escape across the bridge where they cannot be seen.

 

Many people come to the campsite in Luss expecting to be able to camp there, are turned away and make their way to the Glebe. It is an irony that a campsite, which exists to encourage camping can turn campers away, while we can not.

 

This section is included because one person has asked me if we are exaggerating the problem. It needs to be stated absolutely categorically that this is not an exaggerated report. The reason that it may seem like that to some is that it is our policy whenever we can to put matters right as soon as we discover damage has been done. This has meant taking parties of youngsters on to the glebe to spend a whole day tidying up after a wild night by campers on the Glebe, leaving them with an awful picture of Scotland and taking them away from what they should have been doing that day.

 

The safety issues identified are also very real ones. Within the last two weeks the police had to take one camper into custody because he was running wild in the community without knowing either where he had camped, or where he was. Earlier in the summer two campers were threatened at knife-point by another camper within a couple of miles from here. As responsible people with a duty of care there are some among us who believe that it may be more responsible for us to abandon our plans than to put people at risk.

 

At a recent meeting with the local police (to discuss our plans for 2010 and how these might impact on the police and any police permissions we might require) the question of the Glebe came up.

 

We were criticised (quite rightly!) for attempting to deal with the problem ourselves – partly because we were putting ourselves in danger and partly because dealing with the matter ourselves prevented us from building up a catalogue of incidents to which the police could point in the future.

 

The reasons why we had tried to deal with the problem ourselves were because very often we did not discover the problem until after the camping had taken place. Our first knowledge would be when we stumbled onto the remains of a campsite with tents, beer cans, rotting food and human waste strewn around. Although I have taken police staff down to see where these things occurred, our first task was always to clear up as quickly as possible for the benefit both of the youngsters and the visitors for whom coming to our Glebe is an important experience and because the only way to beat vandalism is to put it right immediately. We do, however, have photographic records.

 

The second way in which we dealt with things ourselves was when we discovered people either setting up camp or crossing into the glebe to camp and persuaded them to leave. We felt that we had to deal with this ourselves because time was of the essence. It is obviously easier to persuade people to leave if they have not yet erected their tents and it is also easier and more responsible to move people on if they have not yet consumed the alcohol which would often make it impossible for them to move on.

 

Two weeks ago, when I met with the local police sergeant, he advised me that, no matter what happened, the next time I should immediately contact him. I suspect that both of us thought that that would not be until next year. However within a week I was on the telephone to him to tell him that a large party of young people were now camping on the Glebe. Police arrived and discovered that there was more drink than could ever have been consumed by the number of folk who were camping. The campers were moved on but later that night the police were again involved as some of the campers caused a disturbance in the village.

 

The police have told me that as soon as we discover campers we must contact them at once and that they will deal with the matter immediately. They point to the fact that now ‘as soon as the first tent-peg appears in the village’ someone from the village has telephoned the police and the matter is dealt with, and suggest that if we can do the same we will have the same success. I am grateful for that but I am sure that it is only one part of the answer.

 

We really need some kind of notice which makes it clear to folk that this is not an appropriate place to camp. I know that this creates problems with the law and I understand that it may be that we have to make representations to higher authorities. I am happy that we make these representations. Our campers do not pay any attention to advisory notices from the National Park – that is sad but true. Indeed our big party of recent campers walked right past it and sneered at it – and now the notice and the entire signpost has been knocked down (I have rescued it from going into the river and have it at the Manse).

 

We have a good case for making such representations – the Glebe is clearly important, is part of a National Park and is being made by people who are not trying to discourage access, but exactly the opposite: our whole effort is to encourage more and more people to come and enjoy something which will be quite unique but which will be destroyed if action is not taken.

 

The police were initially concerned about coming to a meeting with the National Park and with the Church because they thought that they would be in the middle between two bodies with opposing wishes. I explained that the impetus both for this meeting and for reaching a solution which would keep campers off the Glebe came from the National Park and that all of us are united in trying to resolve this problem. Dr. Cantlay has promised us that the Park will do everything it can to enable us to continue with our plans and to remove the problems which we are suffering from as a result of camping on the glebe.

 

It was against the background of all that is described in this paper that Dr. Cantlay told us we should put up a ‘No Camping’ sign. It is very significant to us that during the time which that sign was up there was no camping on the glebe, although there was a great deal of other camping around Loch Lomond. As soon as the notice was replaced with an advisory notice from the National Park the camping returned. At least we have discovered that a large ‘No Camping’ sign works. It suggests that Dr. Cantlay’s instinct was the correct one. The police have also told us that they believe that if they keep coming and moving campers on the word will get back and people will stop coming to camp in the numbers they have before. This is because most people come because of a word-of-mouth recommendation. If that recommendation dries up then, it is hoped, so will the supply of campers.

 

Something does need to be done. The urgency is that the Church authorities have to make immediate decisions regarding the spending of significant sums of money to create a visitors attraction which will be unique in our National Park, and regarding the safety of youngsters from around the world for whom they are responsible.

 

Dane Sherrard

Luss

October, 08