Summer 2009 - Scottish Natural Heritage

Travel through time
The web has opened a new door to Scotland’s
history with a site that guides walkers to nearly
2000 km of historic paths around the country.
The Heritage Paths Project is an online resource
giving easy access to a wealth of information on
historic paths across Scotland.
The new website, www.heritagepaths.co.uk,
run by the Scottish Rights of Way and Access
Society (ScotWays), was funded by the
Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and SNH.
The Heritage Paths Project brings together carefully researched images, maps
and information on the traditional routes and long-distance paths used down the
generations for journeys such as trade, pilgrimage, travel and burial customs.
Internet users now have the tools to fi nd out about old paths all over Scotland
and travel along them. The website has a range of paths, from those that are very
accessible to those that are challenging. All of them give a new insight into the
purpose and methods of travel before the car.
This online database aims to encourage people to get outdoors by putting
these paths in their historical context and encouraging people to explore them
for themselves. Pictured are pupils from Ceres Primary in Fife, who walked
back in time along the famous local path ‘The Waterless Road’ and over the old
packhorse bridge in Ceres.
NEWS
Beavers back
Three beaver families have been released at lochs in the Knapdale area of mid-
Argyll as part of a trial release project. The return of the beavers comes after a
450-year absence of the species from Scotland after being hunted to extinction
here.
The beaver families were collected by a specialist team in Telemark, Norway,
last year and then shipped to Devon for six months in quarantine. This is the fi rstever
formal reintroduction of a (previously extinct) native mammal into the wild in
Britain.
The Scottish Wildlife Trust and Royal Zoological Society of Scotland have
been responsible for overseeing the release of the animals. They have radiotagged
the adult beavers and will run the trial over the next fi ve
years (2009-2014).
SNH will be independently monitoring the project and
are contributing £275,000 to the costs. The monitoring will
include the relationship between beavers and woodland, water
plants, river habitat, water levels, dragonfl ies, freshwater fi sh
and otters.
“We’re pleased the trial is under way,” commented
Colin Galbraith, director of policy and advice for SNH, “as it
provides the best opportunity to see how beavers fi t into the
Scottish countryside in a carefully planned and managed way.
“SNH have a key role in monitoring progress and in
reporting the outcome of the trial to Ministers in due course.
Importantly, the monitoring programme carried out by SNH
and others will be transparent and open. The public will be
able to read reports and other outputs on the SNH website
(www.snh.org.uk/scottishbeavertrial), so that everyone can see
how the trial has gone and how the beavers have settled in.”
www.snh.org.uk 27