Hello, welcome to the Hands Off Our Hills website, and finding your way to the Blog section. Here you will find articles of a more personal or in-depth nature than covered elsewhere and get a deeper understanding of the work of HOOH.
I’ll keep this initial spiel brief though, principally because we’ve got so much to do. We established this group because we’re so concerned about the truly unprecedented nature of the proposed developments in our hills. Nowhere else in Scotland under threat from industrial wind turbines has the combination of natural environments, archaeology and close proximity of people as our communities do, for these plans to proceed is unacceptable.
Protection of our area is a non-negotiable task for anyone who cares, and there are so many ways to get involved.
Please just ask, we’ll soon find you a job!
A couple of weeks ago I walked with friends onto the proposed site at what most sensible people and the Ordnance Survey know as Glenmalloch. Not RES of course, in their infinite wisdom and proprietorial manner it is called “Blair Hill”. Except it’s not, and I’ll tell you why I think that matters.
Glenmalloch, Glenshalloch and Drannadow are ancient and sacred tracts of our land, they’ve been occupied for thousands of years, and relatively continuously until the late 1600s and early 1700s. In those times the land was parcelled up and bought and sold by the rogues and scoundrels who were the architects of the enclosure systems and the Lowland Clearances. Prior to that it was an inhabited place, and the landscape of those areas today remains testimony to ancient peoples with their burial cairns, stone circles, settlements and corn kilns.
What we have today is another sketchy alliance between landowners choosing to make a profit from a landscape that belongs to all, and a global industrial company whose only interest lies in profit. All our roots, our connections to the ancient peoples of the land, their culture and history lie there. To facilitate their aims RES have renamed the land “Blair Hill.” For absolute clarity, that place doesn’t exist in that area, or anywhere close. We only have to recall the shady relatively recent history of colonialisation and how conquering powers renamed an area using their language to help gain control and assume ownership. To my mind RES are providing a textbook demonstration of how that process continues to this day.
It’s not to big an assertion that our role and for future generations sake is to know our landscape, it’s history and to ensure the history and the knowledge of those more sustainable ways of living are remembered, honoured and passed. And remember people still live on those hills today, not the numbers of old but Glenmalloch and Drannadow are their homes.
If you want to control and abuse a person you deny their history and remove and control their identity. We’re observing RES at the early stage of the process of attempting to do this to our land.
Kindest Regards,
Kenny Campbell
Hands Off Our Hills Coordinator
