Hydro schemes can offer an extra bonus

I’ ve been out west, before camper vans start clogging up all the single track roads, to inspect a friend’s new hydro scheme. Or rather schemes. I hadn’t quite realised that these days you don’t just dam a loch, but dozens of burns; join them all up with huge pipes buried underground and whoosh it all through Czech- built turbines – half the price of the British equivalent and each housed in a very tasteful little wooden shed. In a couple of years you won’t know they are there.

The generating output for all the money is pathetic compared to a wind turbine ( grrr) but it is all subsidised green energy for which the rest of us pay through the nose in our electricity bills.

Naturally, I am delighted for my host as it means he can now hang on to thousands of pretty bare and useless acres.

It means he can carry on the work his father started, of fencing off likely tracts of rock and scrub and encouraging regeneration of native trees, mainly birch, which will eventually create shelter for deer. It’s subsidised re- wilding although with temporary fences, which of course the professional re- wilders, who don’t have to manage the land, dislike intensely. They’d rather kill off all the saplingeating deer than put up a temporary fence. So, that’s the long- term plan. More money, more trees, happy deer and happy stalking. And believe it or not, better fishing.

Before the burns could be dammed for the hydro schemes, endless assessments were required to ensure no salmon used them, which they don’t. But behind each dam there are now huge deep pools. You can stand on the dams and see all the brown trout cavorting between sun and shadow. They are small, nothing above quarter of a pound, if that. But the odd dead deer at the head of each pool should generate all sorts of delicious nibbles for the captive brownies. ( They are now, in desperation, actually dumping deer legs in the upper reaches of the Dee to stimulate food growth for baby salmon.) So the brownies which might normally be washed out of their natural pools in spates may now have a reasonable chance of fattening up in relatively stable man- made lochans. Although no turbine- owning land owner is going to thank me, consider taking a “traveller” trout rod next time you head for the hills and come across a dam with a dead deer in the water.

The irony is that while it is popular to hate estate owners they are the ones who can/ should deliver the green energy we all demand, with a wildlife and sporting bonus on top. Not fair. n