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As soon as the green fields of Galloway, in south-west Scotland, were selected as the preferred site for Britain’s first new national park in 15 years, Denise Brownlee sprang into action. The 64-year-old retired civil servant had served two seasons as a park ranger in Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, and knew a thing or two about the chaos brought by thoughtless day-trippers and campers. “The detritus!” she says. “I’ve seen a two-man tent used as a human litter tray. You think dog poo on the pavement is bad? Try wandering up any remote little area in a national park. Your faith in humankind gets lost.”
In July, Galloway was chosen as the frontrunner from a shortlist of five areas as part of the Scottish government’s pledge to designate at least one new national park – the country’s third – by 2026. The park’s creation, however, is by no means assured. The other areas in the running had faced varying degrees of opposition (especially Lochaber in the west Highlands), but no one could have predicted the ugly fight that was to tear through one of Scotland’s most picturesque regions, rip apart friendships and turn neighbours against each other.
“It’s been more divisive than the Scottish referendum vote,” says Brownlee, who co-founded the No Galloway National Park (NGNP) campaign, a Facebook page that has mushroomed into a slick, PR-oiled machine. The campaign has sparked warring missives in the press, and has led to community relations so fraught that one supporter of the park tells me she now seldom leaves the house for fear of an awkward run-in with the opposition. “I’ve had someone who I thought was my friend compare me to Donald Trump,” says Liz Hitschmann, 73, Brownlee’s neighbour and co-founder.
NatureScot, the Scottish government’s nature agency, has just concluded its consultation into the prospective park, the results of which will be released next month in a report to MSPs. Concerned about everything from poor road infrastructure to Lake District-style overtourism, local opposition to the park has been rife – and means that this proposal, eight years in the making, might not even make it to the next consultation stage.
The no campaign has accused those in favour of the park of employing “dirty tricks” – namely, removing its banners and blocking it on social media – to bring it down. The yes side, meanwhile, has said the no side is bankrolled by wealthy landowners, including James Jack, the owner of seven estates in Scotland – three of which are in Dumfries and Galloway, including the 916-hectare Hensol estate near Castle Douglas. (The NGNP denies this.) Local meetings have been fraught, Facebook groups are ablaze with vitriol and, during one particularly unneighbourly altercation, the police had to be called to defuse a shouting match in the street.
Most moderates don’t dare to wade in, for fear of being caught in the crossfire. “I just don’t bring it up with people,” says Fiona Hesketh, a cafe owner in Gatehouse of Fleet, the pretty town where Brownlee and Hitschman also live. “It’s difficult for us because a lot of the people that are very anti-park are friends, good customers. But, like the Brexit referendum, suddenly you’re on a different side to people you’re very fond of, and have known for a long time.”
Why is the ostensibly inoffensive issue of a national park ripping apart the genteel towns of Galloway?
Scotland’s national parks are relatively new compared with many of those in England and Wales, the first of which were set up soon after Clement Attlee’s Labour government passed the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949 to address fears of urbanisation. Loch Lomond and the Trossachs was established in 2002; the Cairngorms followed a year later, and was extended in 2010. Unlike those in England and Wales, where Guardian analysis from last year found that less than half of the land is “open access”, Scotland’s national parks are fully open to everyone because of its right to roam law.
The word “unspoiled” is overused but it is probably the most apt description of Galloway, where green fields bleed into the grey sea and sky. Rob Lucas, a 67-year-old retired environmental education worker, has been a member of the Galloway National Park Association (GNPA) for the past eight years. “Galloway needs a lift – it’s a really special place,” he tells me at his house, near the village of Borgue. Before I arrive, he has been watching the barnacle geese cavort in an adjacent field – their last hurrah before they head back to the Svalbard archipelago for spring. “We need putting on the map. Having a national park would provide a kind of blueprint for the future of the area. Very few people know about Galloway.” It doesn’t help, he says, that most people think it’s on the west coast of Ireland.
Bringing a national park to the region has been a passion project of Lucas’s: last time he checked, he and the 11 other trustees on the GNPA’s board had spent about 25,000 hours campaigning for Galloway to be selected for consultation. “It’s a wonderful place, but in the decade that we’ve been here, we’ve seen how the number of businesses has reduced,” he says. “The council is effectively getting an ever-reduced budget – that’s partly based on population, and they’re currently looking at a proposal to close several schools with less than 25 pupils.” (According to analysis from the Scottish Labour party, £329m has been cut from Dumfries and Galloway council in the past 12 years. The region was one of seven local authorities in Scotland to see its population fall in the 2023 census.)
There are three conditions that an area proposed as a national park in Scotland must meet: that the area is of outstanding national importance; that it has a distinctive character and cohesion; and that designating the area a national park would meet its special needs. It is perhaps the last of these criteria that makes the strongest case for Dumfries and Galloway.
One in five people in the region live in poverty. Just 15% of its population are under 15 – one of the lowest percentages in the country. One teenager tells me that her home town is like a “ghost town”: the primary school has closed, and everyone her age is leaving. Phoebe Allan, a 28-year-old hospitality worker who moved to Gatehouse of Fleet from Australia, says there are very few job opportunities. “I really love it here, it’s a beautiful place, but there’s nothing really jobs-wise other than hospitality. Most people tend to go and stay away.” A 2023 study by the council’s youth work service found that more than half of the region’s young people aged 16-25 planned to leave when they got older.
All the aspects of the area that are a boon for retirees and young families – hushed streets, small communities, open spaces – aren’t exactly a draw for listless teenagers and twentysomethings. “I do worry that when our kids are teenagers there will be a lack of things to do,” says Benedict Please, a musician who lives in Wigtown with his wife, Beth, and daughters Molly, seven, and Emmy, two. The town has been bolstered by its designation as Scotland’s National Book Town, and its 10-day book festival has grown to attract more than 10,000 visitors (10 times its population) a year. Still, says Please, in the off season it’s all too quiet. “A park, which would open up not only places to go and activities for them to do, but also opportunities for them in the future to work, seems like a really positive thing.” Why, the yes camp ask, wouldn’t we welcome it?
Supporters of the no campaign are not hard to spot. On their car windscreens, pasted in the front windows of their homes and printed on their T-shirts is the white-on-red NGNP logo. The roads that run through the region’s small towns are bracketed with campaign banners – every few junctions there is another one, staked in a field or tacked to a trailer.
I meet the no campaign in Hitschmann’s airy kitchen in Gatehouse of Fleet, two days after the government’s consultation closed. In forms dispatched to houses across the region, NatureScot asked local people for their thoughts on details ranging from the park’s proposed boundary (they were given a choice of three) to what kind of people they’d like to see on its board. Everything about the form – from its lack of freepost return envelope to the mooted park name – rankled. “They want to call it the Kingdom of Galloway,” says Hitschmann drily, “which is ludicrous.”
Aside from fears of litter, overtourism and the very role of NatureScot within the consultation process – “It’s like they’re marking their own homework,” says Brownlee – the no campaign’s main bone of contention is that local people don’t yet know the full details of the park. “You wouldn’t buy a house without knowing how many bedrooms you’ve got, how much land comes with it, and how much it will cost to run,” says Hitschmann. The NGNP thinks the issue can only be fairly resolved with a referendum.
But it’s the question of how this scrappy campaign won friends in high places that has raised eyebrows. An investigation published by the Ferret in December found that the NGNP website listed the email address of James Pringle Jack – a landowner and businessman who is the brother of Alister Jack, a former Scottish Conservative MP and ex-secretary of state for Scotland – as the contact on its privacy policy page. (This was changed once the Ferret began making inquiries.) The website itself was made by Corona IT Solutions, a company owned by Alister Jack’s daughter, Emily Ann, and her husband, Baron Sweerts De Landas Wyborgh. The campaign is also backed by Media House International, a public affairs firm run by Jack Irvine, the launch editor of the Scottish Sun and a former director of campaign communications for the Brexit party. (Other high-profile PR campaigns led by Irvine include businessman Brian Souter’s campaign against the repeal of section 28, the 1988 law that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools as a “normal family relationship”, and the campaign against the introduction of low emissions zones in Scotland.)
“It is a real open question as to where on earth all this money is coming from,” says Kat Jones, the director of Action to Protect Rural Scotland. Hitschmann is indignant when asked. “This is a grassroots organisation. We will keep leading it. We want it to be community-led. We don’t want it to be farmer-led. People are saying that we are being paid for – bankrolled, basically – by these people in the background. It’s just not true.”
Isn’t providing services such as a website and PR a form of bankrolling? “It’s a donation – the same as any other donation. We’re being sponsored by hairdressers, housewives, pensioners. Highlighting one aspect of it is just wrong.” She estimates that the campaign has received £20,000 in donations so far. As for the banners that line the roads of Galloway, most of the farmers who own the land have printed them themselves, she says. The NGNP insists that there is no single major donor.
Farmers have been against the park from the off, with Scotland’s National Farmers Union describing it as “unacceptable”, given existing parks’ failure to “make a positive contribution to farming”. According to internal polling, 76% of its members agree. Michael McCreath, a dairy farmer in the coastal village of Garlieston, is in the 24% minority. “Farmers are great,” he says. “They just don’t like being told what to do. The term ‘national park authority’ probably sends shivers down their spines.”
Farmers aren’t the only ones with questions about national parks’ governance. A Campaign for National Parks (CNP) health check report from last year found that there were “too few people” on national park boards and “in dedicated roles on the staff body, with expertise in nature recovery or related fields”. In the Galloway national park consultation, respondents were given the option of a park board of 13 or 15 – divided equally between directly elected representatives, appointments from the local authority and from the Scottish government.
“I understand that GNPA and other proponents of a new park have developed a narrative that our campaign is a front for landowners and the rightwing media to undermine an ethical environmental initiative,” says NGNP member Ann Purvis, 62, a retired social researcher. “From my perspective it feels our campaign is deemed reactionary and unethical, as it questions an environmentalist orthodoxy that national parks are a good thing.” She says she has legitimate environmental concerns, pointing to research from the same CNP report which found that just 26% of sites of special scientific interest in England’s national parks were found to be in “favourable condition”.
The UK’s national parks do not meet the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) definition of protected areas, which are largely wilderness areas with limited human activity. Rather than prioritise nature, the UK’s parks walk a tightrope between conservation and cultural significance, people and planet. “National parks in Scotland are never going to be like a North American refuge for nature, because in Scotland, we’ve got people who live and work in our landscapes,” says Jones.
Campaigners have accused the UK’s national parks of being designed for a different era, such is their ineffectiveness at protecting nature in an era of intensive agriculture. “By and large, national parks are agricultural landscapes that don’t actually deliver much for nature conservation,” says Thomas Starnes, an expert on protected areas with the IUCN. He says that the agricultural uses of national parks are the main hamper to conservation. Should we be designating new ones, given the state we’re in? “I think what would be far more useful would be to make the national parks that we’ve got more effective,” he says. “That’s not an outright no, but protected areas only mean so much if they’re not well managed.”
At this stage, it’s not clear whether the Scottish government will move forward with the park. A report will follow this initial consultation, which will set out how – if at all – the Scottish government will proceed with designation. MSPs will then vote on the draft legislation. “I don’t know if the government will come up with a proposal now – I think it’s at risk because of the backlash,” says Colin Smyth, a Labour MSP for South Scotland.
The GNPA’s Rob Lucas, though, is optimistic that his years of toil might yet pay off. “If we don’t get a national park, I will be disappointed,” he says. “If we don’t get a national park because of the fact that the no campaign has disrupted the process in a way that is not, in my view, ethical, then I should be very annoyed. I have no doubt that if we get to the next stage of this process, things will get even more vitriolic.”
