A bad attack of the DTs all round

THERE is something compelling about Donald Trump. It is partly the hair, partly the flisting, partly the gall. He makes you think of the bad guy in a superhero comic.

The story of his plans for his golfing resort has been equally compelling. We all know how, like a caricature of the rich Yank, he descended on Aberdeenshire, flashed his chequebook and had everybody falling over themselves.

He has emphasised his pride in his mother being Scots. She was a Macleod, a Free Kirk lassie from Tong on the west coast of Lewis, and no doubt she would have understood how souls could be traded for a mess of potage.

Trump bought the Menie Estate, just north of Aberdeen, in 2006 and began the planning process to build on it a world-class golfing resort. The estate includes coastal sand dunes, part of which was a unique habitat designated a site of special scientific interest.

Anthony Baxter, a film-maker and journalist in Montrose, felt that what Trump’s people were doing on the estate was not being properly explained. He became an investigator, producing a documentary film. I saw it last weekend at Eden Court.

The film is called You’ve Been Trumped and it contains obvious and strong allusions to the Bill Forsyth movie Local Hero. Except this time there was no happy ending. Some in the audience were shocked by the bullying and intimidation allegedly inflicted on the handful of local residents who have bravely refused to flit to make way for rich golfers.

Baxter said he did not understand why protests against Trump’s plans were not greater than they have been. Even the small demonstrations have not been widely reported.

Clearly some applications for planning permission, because of their scale and the personalities involved, are fundamentally different from others.

This must be why elements of the local media turned on the elected councillor, Martin Ford, whose casting vote first threw out the Trump application. In the film Ford protests that he was merely doing his job and upholding the criteria for sustainable development that the council itself had laid down.

This must also be why the Scottish Government called in the Trump application and reversed the decision.

Mr Trump has now renamed the Menie dunes the Great Dunes of Scotland, the first of the two golf courses has been laid out, images of the clubhouse have been released, and you can apply for membership.

The Menie Estate falls within the constituency of First Minister Alex Salmond. You can understand him being attracted by economic development in his home territory, but he too may be reconsidering Trump.

The golden-coiffed magnate has spoken out strongly against the prospect of wind turbines offshore spoiling the view for his rich customers. Grampian Police have been put under pressure to act as a private security force for his project, according to a story in the Sunday Herald.

A bad attack of the DTs all around.

A MONTH ago, I wrote about fishermen’s ganseys. Last weekend, as if I could not get enough, I went along to the Ganseyfest at the Centre for Health Science beside Raigmore which, despite the miserably wet weather, was buzzing with activity.

This international conference with a programme of talks, workshops, exhibitions, fashion shows and piles of wool for sale included a competition for a new gansey pattern. The winners were a couple called Briggs from Lincolnshire who had named their new design "Moray Firth".

Caithness was well represented. Several knitters entered the competitions and George Bethune, from Dunbeath, gave a well-attended talk about life in the fishing communities.

Malcolm Smith, an anthropologist from the University of Durham, described research on gansey patterns as an example of cultural evolution. Knitting began in the Middle Ages, he said, but it was not until the late 19th century that ganseys came on the scene. The hand-knitted gansey, therefore, has a fairly short history.

There are references to Guernsey frocks being worn by seafarers and fishermen before that and the term became shortened to guernsey and, in the north, gansey as time went by.

Malcolm Smith has begun a statistical analysis of patterns, a complicated mathematical process that is aimed to show which patterns are linked to others and to different places.

SCOTTISH Natural Heritage has just published a fascinating report on investigations into the nature of the seabed around parts of the coast.

The aim was to help define locations for new Marine Protected Areas but a spin-off has been information about the seabed that has not been widely available before now.

For example, we now have an image of the Southern Trench, a giant groove – on land it would be a glen – running roughly parallel to the shore from Banff east to Fraserburgh.

This trench, in places five miles wide and 800 feet deep, cuts through the seabed for 36 miles. I’ve converted the metric measurements in the report.

It is one of a group of similar trenches. Geologists are still arguing over how they were formed but they were carved in some way by meltwater rushing from glaciers at the end of the Ice Age when the sea level was much lower than it is now.

Also under study has been the Sandy Riddle, the bank lying east of the Skerries at the mouth of the Pentland Firth.

This is a long, thin tongue of sandy gravel extending for about six miles from the Little Skerry to the south-east, a shallow strip rising nearly 200 feet from the deeper seabed on either side, sculpted and kept in place by the fierce currents.

Although the shape of the seabed, as varied as the shape of the land, is becoming clear to us now, there were people in our community who knew its key features through hard-acquired knowledge – the fishermen. Many of the names that the scientists use were coined by fishermen years ago.

I looked into the subject of fishermen’s names for their grounds and banks when I was writing Salt in the Blood, and I can recall sitting fascinated in a Wick kitchen listening to three men talk about some of them.

Thus I heard off the Genoa ground and the Burma Road, and Ma Kelly’s and the 55 Minutes.

The whole coast of Scotland and probably out offshore for some distance contained places named by fishermen.

I do not know how many of these have been recorded but there is a project there for somebody with a keen nose for place-names and the time to investigate them before their existence is forgotten.

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