Tree Planting at Glen Arklet

That the Parliament expresses concern about plans by Forestry Commission Scotland to plant trees in Glen Arklet as part of the Great Trossachs Forest despite the fact that this landscape of loch, heather, moorland and blanket bog has lasted for almost as long as human life in Scotland; notes that the open moorland with its spectacular views across Loch Lomond to the Arrochar Alps has been valued by the local population, tourists, photographers, historians, filmmakers, artists and writers, from Sir Walter Scott to Jules Verne, and that the glen, the loch and the burn that flows out of them to Loch Lomond also flow in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Inversnaid, one of the greatest nature poems in the English language, graven on the walls of Holyrood and as iconic as Wordsworth’s Daffodils at Grasmere, “O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet”, and hopes that other ways to manage the land and control natural regeneration will be explored fully and used at Loch Arklet to preserve the views and natural environment.