The village of Plockton is on the horns of a dilemma.
Once a unique feature, in keeping with tradition and appealing to tourists, cows which in the past roamed the streets of the Highland town have been banned for 15 years.
The herd, a few dozen strong, was a feature of the TV series Hamish MacBeth in which Plockton stood in for the fictional village of Lochdubh, and which popularised the real village as a tourist destination.
An agreement between local crofters and the National Trust for Scotland has seen the former surrendering grazing rights and keeping cattle off the street and beach in Plockton.
But after the settlement – which included a financial payment – expired in November, crofters say they plan to return to using heritable rights over common land in the village, from later this month. Now the Plockton Grazings Committee has rejected calls to undertake an official assessment before allowing cattle back onto the common land.
Some locals are alarmed by the move, with concerns centring on issues of health and safety, although the integrity of window boxes and flowerbeds is also a factor for some green-fingered villagers.
The NTS, which owns much of the land in and around Plockton, which it manages as a conservation village, has argued permitting cows to roam freely its streets (all half dozen of them) could risk the health of locals, especially children and older people.
But a spokeswoman for the Grazings Committee said it will not heed the calls for it to carry out a risk assessment: “No, the National Trust have suggested to us we should, but we are not going to,” she said. “No other crofter or group in the Highlands has been asked to do one, so why should we?”
The stakes, if not the steaks, have been raised by leading bacteriologist Professor Hugh Pennington of Aberdeen University who said while cows often carry E coli 157 in their gut and bowels, they do not commonly show symptoms of the bacterial infection which can cause severe stomach pain, diarrhoea and even kidney failure in humans.
“The likelihood of a cow having E coli is low,” he said. “A farmer would not know and even if a cow was tested, there is nothing that can be done to cure it.” As a result, it is reasonable to work on the basis that any individual cow does have E-coli, he told Aberdeen’s Press and Journal. “As it will not have been proven it hasn’t... the risk of catching it from cow manure is reasonable, but low. It is a low risk, but a real risk.”
He said that if people trod in manure before treading it into carpets, children might touch it an put a hand in their mouths exposing them to danger.
Apart from the health risk from cow pats, those querying the crofters’ approach have cited levels of traffic in the village, the risk to private gardens, and whether there is much green space left for the animals to graze on anyway.
An NTS spokesman said: “We were disappointed to hear the grazings committee has decided not carry out a risk assessment. While crofters are well within their rights to graze cattle within the town, any liability arising from this will be theirs.”
The ban has lasted much longer than Hamish MacBeth which was cancelled after four seasons.
But were the fictional local bobby still around, this could have been a case for him.
Resident Ed Stanley said he was very concerned people might resort to the legal system.
“In the current litigious society people are constantly trying to reduce risk. In Plockton we are deliberately introducing an increased risk,” he said.
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