PLANS to build a controversial horse racing track on the Battle of Bannockburn field have been condemned as “fatally flawed” by Scotland’s largest conservation charity.
The National Trust for Scotland (NTS) said it is seeking to overturn the approval of the plans, while criticising Stirling Council’s assessment of the proposal which has been “called in” by the Scottish Government for assessment.
The proposals, lodged by H Muirhead of the Scottish Harness Racing Club, include the creation of a trotting track surface and a single-storey building that would house toilets, a bar and provide hot takeaway food.
The site is around 8.7 hectares in size – about 14 football fields – and is currently green field agricultural land which sits opposite the NTS’s Battle of Bannockburn visitor centre.
A report commissioned by NTS and published on Monday aimed to highlight the flaws in the proposals that made them “unacceptable”.
NTS director of conservation and policy Stuart Brooks said: “The report supports our contention that this is the wrong application in the wrong place with the wrong decision by Stirling Council.”
Glasgow-based landscape planner Douglas Harman led the study which has been submitted to a reporter, who is reviewing the application and its approval by the council in July.
The report stated there had been no landscape and visual impact assessment submitted with the application.
It went on to say the failure to provide an assessment of the effects of the proposals on the surrounding landscape was a “fundamental omission”.
The report also said photos of how the development would look “do not conform to relevant guidance” and were misleading, unreliable and “fundamentally flawed”.
Harman: “Given the large number of policy conflicts, there is no doubt that the proposed development is unacceptable in landscape and visual terms. In determining the application therefore, paramount importance should be afforded to the protection of this nationally-important landscape.”
The report also said there were flaws in the council’s handling of the application because it failed to provide a “comprehensive analysis” while also saying the local authority relied too much on information from the club.
Brooks told the Scotsman: “It’s more than a matter of protecting green fields - they are the location of the first day’s combat at Bannockburn, and are not just historically and nationally significant, but also form a core part of the setting and topography of the wider landscape that dictated the course of the battle.
“There is no doubt that the proposals, should they go ahead, would be wholly disruptive and compromise yet another part of the historic battlefield.”
Tony Pollard, professor of conflict history and archaeology at the University Of Glasgow, said: “I have not seen the original application in its entirety nor the report commissioned by the NTS, but the findings of the latter at the very least suggest this controversial planning decision was made on the basis of inadequate information.
“The battle was a key episode in Scotland's history and it will reflect badly on us if we are prepared to give up ground over which war horses might well have charged for a trotting track.
“Bannockburn is not the best preserved battlefield in Scotland, but that is all the more reason to preserve those elements of the undeveloped landscape which do survive.”
A Stirling Council spokesperson said: “The application has been called in by the Scottish Government and we are currently engaged in this process. It would be inappropriate to comment further at this stage.”
