Glencoe Visitor Centre, Highlands
A NEW CHAPTER FOR GLENCOE
Pic: The Pass of Glencoe (ScotFocus)
A new visitor centre in Glencoe was opened this week and as Lorraine Wakefield discovered it aims to tell the whole story of this most famous and indeed infamous of Scottish glens.
Its dark and foreboding atmosphere makes it easy to picture Glencoe as the scene of one of the most infamous episodes in Scotland's history when government troops led by members of the Campbell clan massacred 38 Macdonalds.
The massacre is inextricably linked with the glen but that bloody slaughter is just one of many chapters in Glencoe's history which continued this week with the opening of a new £3million visitor centre.
As the Glencoe Massacre is a topic of controversy and debate so too was the creation of the new visitor centre by the National Trust for Scotland as some locals and Macdonalds feared it was being built on top of one of the massacre sites at Inverigan.
Others objected to the building as they felt it went against the Unna Rules, the guidelines laid down in the 1930s by Percy Unna the mountaineer who raised most of the cash that enabled the NTS to buy Glencoe in the first place.
There was further uproar when the appointment of Roddy Campbell as centre manager was announced with some declaring it an insult to the memory of the Macdonalds to put a Campbell in charge.
Despite all the controversy the centre was given the go ahead, Mr Campbell is in his post and this week the centre was opened to the public in a ceremony by NTS chief executive Robin Pellew and VisitScotland chief executive Philip Riddle.
At the opening ceremony Dr Pellew said, "It has been a prolonged and bumpy gestation but after ten years it is splendid to be able to open this state of the art visitor centre at Glencoe.
"The old centre was woefully inadequate and situated in the middle of the glen. Designed in the mid seventies it was clearly unable to cope with visitor numbers that reached a peak approaching 200,000 (a year).
"The decision to replace it was taken ten years ago and it was the right one. This is the culmination of that vision, opening here today."
Pic: Buachaille Etive Mor (ScotFocus)
The new centre aims to tell the story of Glencoe from its beginnings as a volcano, through its shaping by the ice age, to the coming of man and the history of our inhabitation of this most spectacular glen.
Built on the former campsite at Inverigan the new centre has been designed to be environmentally low impact, reflect local building design and be less intrusive than the original centre.
The original visitor centre in the Clachaig area, which was in bad repair, had very limited space for interpretation displays and had long been inadequate for the 150,000 visitors who stop at it each year, was demolished last month.
At the new centre visitors will be able to discover more about the wonderful natural heritage and the cultural heritage and history of the glen, which is dissected by the main A82 Glasgow to Fort William road that carries a million vehicles a year.
Glencoe is important internationally in terms of landscape, wildlife, history and geology and is designated a Special Area of Conservation to help protect its rare habitat and species, in particular and groups of plants found on cliffs, scree and grassland.
Geologically the Glencoe hills are an important example of a volcano collapsing in on itself during a series of violent eruptions creating the dramatic looking ridges that bound both sides of the glen and are among the most photographed mountains in the country.
The mountains of Glencoe have not surprisingly played a large role in British mountaineering with more than 100,000 rock climbers, ice climbers and hill walkers visiting each year to challenge themselves on the tough terrain and huge rock faces.
Many thousands more visitors stop just to look at the glorious views all around and take in the atmosphere of Glencoe and the addition of the new visitor centre should encourage even more people to do so.
(2/5/2002)