Glensaugh News 3 August 2010

Recently we hosted a weekend visit from the British Driving Society who arrived at Glensaugh with horses and carriages

Glensaugh has been enjoying a period of calm as staff take holidays and livestock graze peacefully on the hill during this time of plenty.

Recently we hosted a weekend visit from the British Driving Society who arrived at Glensaugh with horses and carriages and camped overnight before heading out for another drive the next morning (see photograph). Our facilities, which included temporary stabling in the calving pens, were reckoned to be excellent so we might have a repeat booking for next year.

Our biomass boiler grant application was recently approved, but unfortunately we then discovered that our preferred bidder had ceased trading. While we had a good tender for the installation of “no frills” Polish technology we had been told that this would not qualify for grant because the company were not accredited under the Microgeneration Certification Scheme. Having overcome this obstacle (because installations over 50kW fall outwith the MCS rule) we thought that the way was open to installing the Polish kit, when we were asked if the boiler in question was listed on the Carbon Trust’s Energy Technology List. Answer “no”; have you also read Catch 22?

The SRDP scheme has absorbed a huge amount of management time, but some parts of it are more straightforward than others. The replanting of the area currently called Compartment 2 (for which we also need to run a naming competition) has resulted in successful establishment and the grant payment has now been claimed. This will meet most of the establishment cost while annual maintenance payments will cover ongoing work like vermin control. A recent incursion by a roe buck required four men and two dogs to flush it out.