A TINY charity that stepped in to save a community from being overwhelmed by social-media driven visitors is stunned after being told by the local council that it is to blame for the rush to the site – and must help pay for a disintegrating road to be fixed.
The declining state of the single-track road to Skye’s Fairy Pools is causing dozens of flat car tyres each week for the 200,000 visitors arriving each year, with the road blocked for hours on end by stranded vehicles.
Other vehicles get bogged down in the road margins, with tow trucks unable to reach them because of the blockages. This year’s soggy summer has made matters much worse.
Now the need for action has led to a standoff between Highland Council and the Outdoor Access Trust for Scotland (OATS) which runs a car-park and toilets at the Fairy Pools.
The attraction itself is a remarkable series of pools in a burn running down from the jagged Cuillin mountains which provide a stunning backdrop.
The single track C-road to Glen Brittle leads to the site, which in the past ten years has turned into a tourist phenomenon, with around 200,000 visitors a year, driven by posts on social media.
The access charity stepped in six years ago to create the Fairy Pools facilities when locals begged for a solution to the problem of parking chaos along the road, with access blocked to emergency vehicles and disgusting fouling and litter.
Now, with the road itself crumbling away under the pressure of visitors, a leading councillor says OATS must put its own cash into the urgently-needed repairs to the road, accusing it of making a fortune out of the car-park – and having created the problem itself.
Skye councillor John Finlayson chairs Highland Council’s Isle of Skye committee and the council’s education committee. He said: “We feel if there wasn’t the car-park, and facilities hadn’t been developed there, people wouldn’t be going there. OATS have got to take some kind of responsibility and work in partnership with the council and other agencies to fund improvements.
“They are creating the problem, they are making massive amounts of money but they’re not accepting any responsibility for the fact that the issue is folks going to see that particular tourist site.”
He said OATS was being hypocritical, and added: “They have tried to apportion blame elsewhere without putting forward any action in terms of resource given the massive amount of money they are making.”
But the charity has been stunned by the suggestion, saying it stepped in to help with a problem which the council itself could not solve. It says it is not allowed to pay for the road by law – and that OATS paying towards a public road to access the tourist site would set a dangerous precedent for other charities and businesses at tourist sites.
The charity has just four full time staff and five part-time and seasonal workers. Its annual turnover is less than £500,000, and this year is the first it has made any surplus on running the Fairy Pools car parks since starting work on the site six years ago.
It pays more than £30,000 in rent each year for the car-park site to a Skye community organisation which uses the cash to help local people.
The chair of OATS’s volunteer board, Duncan Bryden, said he had sympathy with the council’s financial position, but charity law expressly forbids charities from doing work that is the council’s statutory responsibility, such as road repairs.
He said the Fairy Pools surplus this year is just £18,000 – after OATS put in almost half a million pounds of its own cash along with grant aid to pay for the work. Bryden added: “It’s unclear where this idea has come from beyond some misguided preconception that OATS has some substantial surpluses being generated by the Fairy Pools.
“There’s a strikingly questionable principle here of businesses or charities being coerced into contributing to the roads’ upkeep, and that’s something we find quite disturbing.”
Any surplus is used to maintain paths, on Skye and elsewhere across the Highlands, he said. OATS has led the Skye Iconic Sites project, raising funds and putting its own cash into alleviating footpath erosion problems caused by mass tourism at the Old Man of Storr, the Quiraing, and the Fairy Pools.
This year has seen an upsurge in problems on the Glen Brittle road. Most are caused by vehicles trying to squeeze past each other and driving off the edges of the tarmac. That digs away the soft verge, exposing the sides of the tarmac and creating a steep drop off.
Subsequent drivers who drop over the edge either dent their alloy wheels – letting their tyres down – or rip their tyre walls on the sharp road-edge. The broken-down cars then block the road and passing places, with tailbacks lasting more than five hours.
The wet summer has increased verge erosion, and OATS staff say drains under the road have failed, causing floods and further damage, with drivers swerving to avoid potholes also going off the edges
OATS staff at the car park regularly help people with sorting out flat tyres, but say the problem is now out of hand, with as many as eight punctures in a day. Many modern cars have no spares.
They also spend large amounts of time directing traffic, pushing stuck cars out of the mud, and helping families.
