WHAT THE JUDGES SAID...
Save Glen Etive is an excellent
campaigning website that makes
good use of its medium. Its
all-important home page sends
a clear message with well-
organised categories, concise
summaries, intuitive navigation
and clear calls to action including
newsletter signup. Its use of
blue-text links is eff ectively
integrated into text.
Judges Craig Wareham (founder
of Viewranger), Lois Sparling
(formerly of Cicerone Press)
and Jacquetta Megarry (OWPG
member and last year’s winner)
www.saveglenetive.co.uk
Allt a’ Chaorainn, just down from the planned intake
time to reduce image size. The entire build took around
36 hours, over one weekend, and we were very much up
against the clock. It needed to be ready for Monday AM,
ahead of a Highland Council meeting on Wednesday.
Our audience for the website was primarily
professionals but not expert, so we needed to cover the
planning implications and technical land designations,
the eff ect of industrialising a place well used and loved
by both locals, nationals and international visitors
(with pound signs attached where we had the data!), the
very small energy benefi t (less than a single off shore
turbine), as well as the environmental, wildlife and
safety aspects.
Tim and I are grateful for the award but it’s bitter-
sweet. We failed to convince the Councillors and they
approved all seven schemes at that meeting. The group
was devastated - the campaign collectively involved
thousands of hours of voluntary work; raising profi le,
talking to councillors and the press, researching the
impacts on visitor experience, wildlife and nature.
My personal feeling is that we lost, not because
of bad information, or even communication of that
information, but because we were portrayed by both
media and some in the glen us as meddling urban
outsiders... despite having lots of local support. We tried
repeatedly to reach out to the local community, but
were met with no quarter. In a BBC interview, where
one speaker was a slightly dishevelled man in a Páramo
jacket and the other was a posh gent in a deerstalker
hat, the former came to be seen as the outsider. The
Glen Etive case went to the heart of deep seated and
historical issues around landlord-ism, land reform and
more subtly felt issues in the Highlands around ‘centre
and periphery’. The press quickly turned it into ‘us and
them’. In my view, there is still work to do to develop
a language of landscape that works across interest
groups, and includes local communities without
descending into nativism.
The campaign group hasn’t stopped monitoring
the situation and unfavourable reports from SEPA, the
offi cial government body overseeing changes to water
courses and quality, have since emerged. It may be
therefore that the fate of these water courses amongst
world class landscape still hangs in the balance, despite
offi cially being approved.
The Digital Production Award is sponsored by Cordee.
Having started life as a sole distributor for rock climbing
guidebooks published by the largest climbing clubs in
the UK, the business now includes distribution of titles
encompassing all outdoor activities.
Owned and managed by brother and sister Richard and
Jane Robinson, Cordee has a unique and world-renowned
catalogue of books and maps.
www.cordee.co.uk
winter 2019 | Outdoor focus 23