House after living in caravan for 10 years

Bloody Scotland established itself as the leading Scottish International Crime Writing Festival in 2012 with acclaimed writers Lin Anderson and Alex Gray at the helm, then joined by Craig Robertson and Gordon Brown.

An Aberfoyle woman is to be allowed to build a new home after a decade of living in a rundown caravan.

Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park planners have conditionally approved an application by Alice MacFarlane to build the two-bedroom, oneand-a-half storey house on land 125 metres east of Hill Cottage. The site is around two kilometres east of Gartmore and 130 metres east of Trossachs Holiday Park, and accessed from a shared private road.

In their decision, park planners said: “The applicant is employed as an art teacher and has also used the land at the site productively in connection as a

Based in Stirling, it has since brought hundreds of crime writers new and established to the stage.

Last year the international crimewriting extravaganza saw audience figures eclipse the 10,000 milestone smallholding in terms of goats, hens, ducks, horses, emus, bees, and growing of vegetables.

“Within the barn, there are plans to re-establish a pottery business at the site which was operated by the applicant and to use the barn for livery. It is accepted that there is an operational need to live on the land to carry out and manage these activities. Also, there are plans to plant juniper trees as a raw material for off-site gin production.

“Furthermore, a material consideration is that the applicant has lived in a substandard caravan to the north of Hill Cottage since June 2010 - a period just for the first time, as visitors enjoyed an exciting array of events and heard fascinating insights from bestselling authors, including David Baldacci, Ian Rankin, Alex Gray, Denise Mina and Alexander McCall Smith.

Highlights also included a torchlight process from Stirling Castle Esplanade through the city centre with a host of top authors, followed by a gala reception at the castle, plus a sellout interview of DI Rebus author Ian Rankin by First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon.

Dates for Bloody Scotland 2021 are currently scheduled as September 17-19. under 10 years. The caravan and adjoining timber shelter is in a dilapidated condition and significantly detracts from local countryside amenity, and so the caravan and shelter site, albeit small in footprint, is considered as brownfield.

“The proposal to relocate an established residential use and remove the dilapidated caravan, and allow the site to regenerate naturally is a material consideration in favour of this current planning application.”

The planners said a secondary consideration which had been taken into account was family circumstances relating to relatives living nearby.