Improving the view
The Sligachan electricity poles that have been the bane of photographers’ lives are gone.
For some 56 years the poles, that carried electrical cables across Skye, have frustrated landscape photographers trying to get that iconic image of the Cuillin. Yesterday, a team from Scottish Southern Electricity cut them down, having spent some months undertgrounding the cables. It was part of a project being undertaken by Scottish Southern to help ‘improve the views’ across Scotland. Other such schemes are taking place between Kingshouse and the devil’s Staircase on the West Highland Way and in upper Glen Feshie in the Cairngorms.
The removal of the poles is also part of a bigger local project. A community group from Sconser are trying to raise £400,000 to create a sculpture of Prof Norman Collie and John Mackenzie, the pioneering mountaineers, one a Victorian scientist and the other a local crofter, who first mapped the Cuillin and whose names are commemorated in two Cuillin summits. The appeal has now been launched and you can find more details at www.skyesculpture.com
The group have come up with an idea to help finance the project, which is unusual, if not unique. A scheme has been launched giving everyone the opportunity to get involved and donate a certain weight of bronze, to go towards building the sculpture. It works out about £1 per gram.
Certificates will be numbered, signed and dated, and bronze may be donated personally, or on behalf of a friend or relative, whose name will be handwritten on the certificate. This will be a chance for everyone to participate in a piece of history in the making on the Isle of Skye, and have it recorded for posterity.
One interesting point I put to the Scottish and Southern engineers was this. If the company is so keen to take down poles to improve the scenery of the highlands, what was it doing about the hundreds of wind turbines it owns? They were very nice people, and I felt bad about putting the question to them -they obviously had to give the company line answer about global warming, etc. etc