Culloden building

I have recently learned about plans approved by the Scottish Government to build luxury homes on Culloden Moor.

This proposed development by Viewhill Farm is within 400 metres of Culloden battlefield and actually within the inventory of the battlefield established by Historic Scotland. I am aware that

previous digs in the area in 1995 discovered no ‘significant’ artefacts, yet the area still holds the blood and tears of our Scottish ancestors and as such must be preserved.

The National Trust for Scotland has responsibility for maintaining Culloden battlefield and preserving the heritage.

A housing development of 16 houses on a dead end, single track road presently serving 11 homes is going to significantly alter the nature of the area from rural farmland.

The developers claim that they can build in the hinterland because they are replacing derelict farm buildings no longer in use, yet not increasing the footprint is not accurate.

This is in fact a working farm and these buildings are neither rundown nor unfit for use. Implying that these buildings are not in use or an eyesore when in fact they are still part of a working farm does not comply with Policy 35. Nine residents have written to the council with concerns for increased traffic on this single track road, flood concerns, as well as sewage and water concerns.

Highland Astronomy Society has a nearby observatory and the additional light pollution would definitely affect their work.

As an American daughter of the diaspora I am angered, shocked and deeply disturbed about these plans to build where my ancestors bled and died in the last battle on British soil, the Battle of Culloden Moor in 1745.

Please understand my concerns and those of many Scotsmen around the world, and do whatever you can do to preserve this historic ground for all of us who love it and for generations yet to come. MARTHA ALEXANDER

CLARKE Linden, North Carolina,

United States I see opposition politicians and some Tories are amazed there has been no assessment of the economic situation postbrexit.

It amazes me that no one considers that the predictions economists have undertaken in recent times were 99 per cent wrong about the financial crash in 2008.

They did not even predict a global financial collapse was imminent or give any warnings in the years preceding the actual meltdown.

Indeed, it has to be said even after 2004, a clear four years before the largest collapse of the financial markets in known history and greater than that of the 1930s in creating debt, when Alan Greenspan warned Bush, Blair, Brown and western leaders that the financial markets had to be reeled in or a global meltdown would likely happen, the economists and politicians took no notice. Economists are good at analysing the past, but they have not a clue in predicting the future.

History has recorded this over the centuries with so-called ‘bubbles’, not mere years.therefore people asking for predictions of how things will be economically in the future after Brexit are asking for pie-in-the-sky.

DR DAVID HILL World Innovation Foundation,

Huddersfield