THE GOLDEN PLOVER AWARD 2017

THE GOLDEN PLOVER AWARD 2017

The Heather Trust and Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) have announced the finalists for 2017’s Golden Plover Award for Moorland Management, sponsored by Lindsays.

The Award is presented annually to recognise progressive, practical and sustainable moorland management in Scotland, and the process is open to estates, farms, individuals and syndicates who have “gone the extra mile” for our hills

This year, the award has focused on the north and west of Scotland, appealing to landholdings that have shown a dedicated level of commitment to integrated land use, and this has taken the award into new and exciting terrain. After several years in the eastern Highlands, 2017’s applicants embraced diverse issues such as upland fisheries, rural employment, conservation, peatland, deer management and crofting.

There was a great deal of interest in 2017’s award, but the judges have identified three finalists who will now progress to the next stage. Ardnamurchan is a ten thousand hectare sporting estate on the west coast with a balanced approach to deer management, agriculture and tourism, while Reay Forest lies in Sutherland and has established a strong reputation for carefully integrated work between interests such as conservation, deer stalking and renewable energy. The third finalist is Fearann Eilean Iarmain, a stunning estate on the Isle of Skye which links traditional land management with crofting, a distillery and support for a thriving gaelic culture.

Speaking about the next stage of 2017's Golden Plover Award, Heather Trust Director Simon Thorp said “We had some really positive interest in the Award this year from estates and projects in the north highlands and up and down the west coast. We believe we've chosen a strong, diverse spread of applicants to go forward as finalists, and we look forward to learning more about their work in the next few weeks".

Head of Rural Services at Lindsays Michael Yellowlees added: “We are delighted to be supporting the Golden Plover Award again this year and to see such progressive work being recognized on estates across this area.

“We are particularly interested in the focus of this years’ award given our longstanding relationships with clients in the Highlands and Islands.  Before the Second World War Lindsays acted as factors and solicitors for numerous landed estate clients in that area and in the post-war era served these clients through the West Highlands Estates Office in Fort William.  The firm continues to provide legal services to many of the same estates.”

Site visits will take place in May and June, and judge Adam Smith, Director Scotland, Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust added was looking forward to heading out on the road. He said “All those on the shortlist have a strong case to be the Golden Plover winner this year, but there can only be one that takes the prize. This award continues to go from strength to strength and we look forward to announcing the result for 2017 on 30 June”.

The 2016 Award was won by the Hopes Estate in the Lammermuir Hills, and previous winners have included Finzean Estate near Banchory, Mar near Braemar and Edinglassie on Donside.  

Country Market & Sporting Sale 2017

The Heather Trust's Country Market & Sporting Sale closed last week after some exciting bidding wars. We'd like to thank everybody who helped make the sale such a success in 2017, and although payments are still coming in, we're on course to raise over £29,000 - all funds which will go towards supporting the Trust's important work across the U.K.

The Prize Draw took place immediately after the Sale, and the winner was named as Ronnie Graham, who can now look forward to a luxury trip to Kelso Racecourse, including accommodation at the Roxburghe Hotel and the use of a chauffeured vintage car on the day.

A few unsold Lots will be available to buy on the Auction website until Friday 19th May, and we can still accept cash donations from any latecomers.

Plans are already afoot for 2018, but there would be no Sale at all without generous backing from members and supporters alike - thanks again, and we're looking forward to next year!

Country Market & Sporting Sale 2017!

The Heather Trust's Country Market & Sporting Sale has returned for 2017, and we're excited to see some competitive bidding on a range of great Lots from our generous supporters. Some of the most popular Lots so far have been a day's Walked-up Grouse in Northumberland and a Box of Hebridean Lamb from Perthshire. Alongside some our old favourites which have featured in the Sale before, several Lots are new this year, including a Dog Portrait by Flora Blackett and a Shooting Lesson at Raehills estate.

After three successful years, the Prize Draw returns in 2017 with the chance to win an exciting day for four at Kelso Racecourse, including luxury accommodation at the Roxburghe Hotel and chauffeur transport in a gorgeous 1952 Bentley. Tickets cost £10 and can be bought on the auction website - you've got to be in it to win it!

The Sale generates important income for the Trust's work across the UK, and we wouldn't be able to continue supporting moorland management without the funds raised during the auction. Why don't you get involved!

Heather Beetle 2017!

An adult heather beetle

With warmer days and rising temperatures, heather beetles have been on the move. Dry conditions have helped to create the right conditions for heather burning, but beetles have been conspicuous as they begin to emerge from hibernation and start to disperse across open ground. We usually receive our first reports of beetles "out and about" in late March and early April, and some dispersals can be extremely dramatic. In previous years, gamekeepers have reported plagues of beetles which are so dense that they have had to use windscreen wipers on their vehicles in order to see where they're going. These are extreme cases, and most beetle dispersals will be subtle affairs as adults begin to search for breeding grounds and mates. The Trust's Project Manager Patrick Laurie saw a few beetles  on Sunday 26th, and it's not surprising that small numbers of these native insects should be moving around at this time of year.

The majority of beetle damage is caused in midsummer when beetle larvae emerge from their eggs and start to feed on fresh heather growth. Serious problems can be caused at this stage, and while a good deal of heather will simply regenerate and come back in subsequent years, extreme cases can result in the total death and destruction of thousands of acres of heather in a single season. When beetle attacks become cyclical, they can result in the total and permanent loss of heather coverage, and the Heather Trust believes that beetles may have been the driving force behind heather loss in some wetter western areas where damaged heather is easily over-grown by invasive grasses.

The Heather Trust has led the way on research into heather beetle for the past ten years, running the only national survey of beetle damage and funding important research into heather restoration after beetle outbreaks. We'd be very interested to hear from you if you see beetles dispersing this spring or if you've witnessed beetle damage in the past - let us know, view our previous surveys and find out more about heather beetles on our heather beetle page.

Heather Cutting in Practice

Cutting heather with a mini-tractor and flail

As the heather management season is now upon us, conditions have been perfect in many parts of the UK for burning. Near the Heather Trust's offices in Dumfries and Galloway, conditions have been wet for several weeks, and despite a few drying days at the start of March, the hills are decidedly soggy. When the conditions are right, burning is a crucial asset to have in the moorland management toolbox, but if the last few years are anything to go by in Western Scotland, things have been getting wetter and less conducive to fires.

Part of the answer is to cut heather rather than burn it, and it was very satisfying to visit work undertaken by Heather Trust members Lawrence and Penny McNaught this afternoon on an area of heather ground near Dumfries. Even if the weather had been perfect, the hill is surrounded on three sides by commercial forestry, and there would be legitimate concerns about fires in this kind of ground considering that much of the heather is long, rank and could burn extremely vigorously in the wrong conditions.

The Heather Trust has been focussing on heather cutting for the past four years, and we produced a Briefing on the key considerations relating to mechanical management. Certain types of cutting were particularly suited to this ground, and we were happy to provide advice and support in the autumn when plans were being made. Contractors arrived yesterday and made impressive progress putting cuts onto the hill with a small tractor and a flail mulcher. The small tractor was crucial to gain access through wet fields without causing too much damage, and the speed with which the flail cut through the heather made up for the narrow width of each pass.

This work is being driven by a desire to improve the sporting assets of the hill, which once was renowned for its grouse. Nowadays there are not enough to support even a symbolic harvest, so it is hoped that this investment and effort will be repaid in a brace or two of walked up grouse on the Glorious Twelfth. The work should also benefit a small but strategically significant population of black grouse and could also be of use to ring ousels which have declined dramatically in Galloway over the past fifty years.

The Heather Trust is always keen to provide advice and support to projects both great and small, and we believe that integrated, balanced management can tick multiple boxes, from sport and conservation to agriculture and tourism. We wish the McNaughts well with their project, and we look forward to catching up with them again soon!

Golden Plover Award 2017 - Apply Now!

The Golden Plover judges are now looking for new applicants to get involved in 2017's Award!

If you are part of a thriving upland business, farm, croft or estate which balances a number of different land uses, The Heather Trust and Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust would love to hear from you!

You might be a crofter involved in peatland conservation or a forester balancing livestock with tourism - it doesn't matter how big or small your project is, the award is seeking people who can demonstrate a genuine passion for Scotland's uplands, along with a dedication to getting the best out of balanced management.

In previous years, the Golden Plover Award has been based on themes like sheep farming and peatland, but 2017's Award has a particular focus on the north west Highlands, west of the Great Glen and down into Argyllshire and Bute, including the Hebrides. This covers a fantastically broad and diverse area of Scotland, embracing new and exciting terrain for an award which has until now been based largely in the east.

If you would like to take part in the Golden Plover Award 2017, or if you know someone who would, find out more at www.goldenploveraward.co.uk, where there application forms are available to download until the end of February.

John Phillips Obituary

JOHN PHILLIPS - Obituary

Farmer, biologist, country sportsman, moorland manager and founder of The Heather Trust

John Phillips, who died on 2^nd December, aged 82, was a countryman born and bred, who sought to reconcile the various uses to which uplands were put. He was prompted to do this because in the late 1960s and 1970s, the long-held concept of integrated land use was breaking down. Decisions on land potential and use were being made on an "either/or" basis fuelled by high levels of agricultural and forestry grants and subsidies. This was having a disastrous effect on biodiversity, landscape and sport-shooting; he devoted the next 40 years to doing something about it.

John Douglas Parnham Phillips was born at Largs in Ayrshire on 3^rd May 1934, the fourth child and only son of Douglas Phillips, shipbuilder and Sheila Wilkinson, his second wife. Home was on his half-sisters' estate, which was a well-established sheep-walk, where such game as there was, had to be worked for with diligence and field-craft. By the time the war ended in 1945, his school holidays were dominated by country sports and were also associated with "helping" the tenant farmer to carry out seasonal farm work.

He was educated at Harrow, where he spent almost all his recreational time on the school farm. He did a gap year as a "mud student" on the Cally Estate in Galloway before reading an ordinary degree in Agriculture at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Spells as a cattleman and hill shepherd, and then as a farm manager in Perthshire followed, before he bought a small sandy farm in Fife with the inheritance he received when his father died in 1958. Under-capitalised from the start, that came to an end in 1964 and, at the first Scottish Game Fair (held at Blair Drummond in July that year), he was head-hunted by the Eley Game Advisory Station (EGAS) at Fordingbridge to train as their field advisor in Scotland — a post he took up in 1968.

EGAS was the undisputed expert body on matters to do with low-ground game. In 1957, the Scottish Landowners' Federation had instigated a grouse research programme with Aberdeen University, which was located in Glenesk in Angus and later at Banchory where the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology (ITE) took it on and funded a specialist upland unit. In the early 1970s, moor owners in parts of Scotland, notably the Spey and Findhorn valleys and central Perthshire, were experiencing catastrophic declines in grouse caused allegedly by sheep ticks. With initial funding coming from Slater Walker Securities (the firm led by the late Jim Slater had bought Tulchan Estate from the Seafield Estates in 1972) and many other landowners, sufficient money was forthcoming to initiate research into the problem. This led to a fruitful link between a now self-employed Phillips, the ITE grouse unit and the Moredun Veterinary Research Institute in Edinburgh. It resulted in the publication of two definitive scientific papers on tick-borne disease in 1978.

Research into grazing effects on heather attracted further support, notably in 1989 from The Joseph Nickerson Heather Improvement Foundation. This led to the formation of The Heather Trust in 1994 and to substantial contracts with public and private bodies during the subsequent decade.

The prime motivation of the Trust was always to encourage traditional best practice and it became the brand leader in the provision, innovation, application and demonstration of sound field advice on heather conservation. It always saw itself as providing a link between the many and varied parties that had an interest in the way the heather moors of the British Isles were managed.

Under his direction, the Trust won the Exhibitors' Prize (out of 303) at the Gosford Game Fair in 1993 — the last CLA Scottish Game Fair - and joint 2^nd place in the Laurent Perrier Conservation Award in 1996. On his farm in Perthshire in 2004, he won the Alastair Lilburn of Coull's forestry award for best farm woodland in Scotland in the "below 150 acres category" - administered by the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland.

In 2012, 101 years after Lovat's "The Grouse in Health and in Disease" was published, Phillips's "Moorland Management —for Agriculture, Conservation and Field Sports" came out, verifying many points of management current a century before but in danger of being forgotten in the 21^5t century.

A keen fisher, useful shot, competent gardener and enthusiast of English setters, flatcoats and Lakeland terriers, he married first Diana Stratton (divorced 1981) — with whom he had two sons. He married second —Jennifer Braasch (neé Knight) who died in 2008. He is survived by his companion, Claire Rackham.