We have been very busy this year on a series of land management and improvement projects supported by Scottish Rural Development Programme grants. We completed the last major capital project today with a large scale attack on the bracken which has been encroaching on more and more of the estate. The sun shone and the weather could not have been better for the helicopter-based attack. It is a very quick way of spending large amounts of money!

We shan’t see any real effect until next year but I’m hoping that it will have a serious effect on bracken and we shall follow up with supplementary spraying over the next few years to ensure that the Asulox we sprayed today has maximum impact.

We did this about six or seven years ago and the effect was fantastic, but it doesn’t last for ever and bracken is starting to re-encroach where it had been previously sprayed. So like most things, this is a pretty endless battle, but necessary if are to have more then simply bracken-covered hillsides.