BUILDER BIDS BRIDGE BYE BYE

One of the people who helped build Utsi’s Bridge near Altmore in the Cairngorms National Park has made a special trip to the area to be one of the last people to cross it before it is replaced. Bryan Chalmers, a partner with farm consultancy Allathan Associates, got in touch with Forestry & Land Scotland after reading about plans to replace the bridge, which has come to the end of its working life. As a student in the late 1970s, Chalmers joined the Edinburgh and Heriot Watt universities’ officer training corps, which got him involved in a summer engineers’ project to build the bridge, named after Mikel Utsi, who reintroduced reindeer to Scotland in 1952. forestryandland.gov.scot