Golden Plover Award 2016

The Hopes estate, Golden Plover Award winners 2016

The Heather Trust and GWCT (Scotland) are excited to announce that the Hopes Estate near Gifford has won 2016’s Golden Plover Award for moorland management, sponsored by Lindsays.

The Golden Plover Award celebrates the best of integrated, sustainable upland management, and this year’s theme was sheep farming. These are challenging times for upland farmers, and the judges were looking for businesses, individuals and properties who have been able to knit successful sheep enterprises into other land uses, including sport, conservation and renewable energy.

Applicants came from across Scotland, and the judges narrowed down the field to four properties with a strong farming interest. In the North, Cawdor Estate and Phoines both demonstrated the benefits of sheep to grouse production by means of mopping up ticks and fostering close relationships between farmers and gamekeepers. On Donside, Candacraig Estate introduced sheep to assist with heather management and now run a flock of blackface and cheviots as part of a progressive and successful agricultural enterprise.

Site visits were carried out over the last few weeks, and The Hopes was ultimately announced as the winner of the award after the judges were impressed by the breadth and variety of management on the Lammermuirs estate. Grouse bags have steadily increased over recent years, and sheep have been successfully introduced to compliment existing aims and provide a profitable enterprise in their own right. This can be a difficult balance, but The Hopes has worked carefully to achieve it. As a result, there have also been opportunities to control tick numbers on an area where louping ill is present.

At the same time, significant investment has gone into restoring blanket bog, and the estate’s management strategy also takes into account the needs of a biomass boiler, planting 28,000 trees on the moorland margins to provide fuel and biodiversity.

The Award was presented to the Hopes along with a specially commissioned print by the artist Colin Woolf at a special ceremony held at the Scottish Game Fair on Friday 1^st July. This is now the fourth year of the Golden Plover Award, last year’s winner being Mar Estate near Braemar for their pioneering work into peatland conservation.

Speaking at the presentation ceremony, Heather Trust chairman Antony Braithwaite explained that “the good management that is taking place in Scotland is easily lost nowadays in the barrage of negative press that surrounds moorland management, and the purpose of this award is to highlight some of the very best work that is taking place across the country”.