Caithness broch build could be ‘a glimmer of light for the county’
Making plans to build a replica broch involves more than just designing the tower. John Davidson spoke to Dawn Maclean of Caithness Broch Project
Among the house extensions, new builds and wind farm applications, one form must have leapt out from the pile of paperwork on planners’ desks.
It can’t be every day a request to build a full-size Iron Age stone tower is submitted, after all.
Dawn Maclean is a volunteer director with the Caithness Broch Project and she has led the behind-the-scenes work on the application to Highland Council to build a full-size replica broch on a site two kilometres north of Latheron, a role which she describes as “not too exciting but necessary”.
More familiar with mundane submissions, Dawn (48) has worked for Knight & McDonald Architects in Thurso for 32 years.
She says the broch project is aiming to create an authentic experience in Caithness and hopes the broch build will offer something for the people of the county in the wake of more controversial plans for wind farms, powerlines and battery energy storage schemes.
“I’m used to putting in planning applications for houses and extensions and your normal sort of stuff that happens in Caithness, but I had never worked on anything like this before,” she said.
“Nobody has ever put a planning application in for a broch! But the broch isn’t really the problem – drawing elevations of a broch is fairly simple because it’s just a big stone tower, but it’s the other things that are involved in the site.
“There’s an access off the A9, so we need a new junction, and nowadays you’ve got issues with ecology and peat, so that all needs to be organised as well. There’s no water on the site, as well, so we’ll have to have a borehole, and drainage will need to be sorted out, too.”
It is hoped that the 83-hectare site will eventually be home to the broch and a visitor centre, but the initial plans are aimed at making a start on the infrastructure needed to get things moving. The broch is included in phase one, along with the road access and car park, and a camping area for volunteers to stay on-site during the work.
Dawn explained: “The application we put in is for about two hectares in a site of 83 hectares, so we’ll have 81 hectares with nothing on it!
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“But even after the final phase, the vast majority of the site will be untouched because we want it to be authentic. You don’t go to a broch and expect it to be surrounded with pavements and stuff. It’s really important to us that the majority of the site is authentic so when you’re at the broch you could be transported back 2000 years.”
The original idea for the replica construction came from Iain Maclean, who Dawn is now married to (she jokes that she had to get involved in the project after they met “otherwise I would never see him”). Iain set up Caithness Broch Project with Kenneth McElroy in 2013, and both are keen to see the broch start to take shape and for the attraction to benefit the county.
Dawn said: “At the moment there’s quite a lot of contentious discussion online about battery storage facilities, the wind turbines that are going up, it seems to be quite polarising; there’s this feeling that we’re being taken over by these huge companies.
“We are living in hope that this [broch project] will be a positive thing for everybody in Caithness, that’s not going to be contentious – it can only be a good thing.
“In amongst all these massive turbine applications, our little project might be a glimmer of light for the county – to feel like we’re getting something that’s for us, for Caithness; something that can actually add to the landscape rather than, as some people would see it, detracting from it.
“We would hope our project will be sensitive and will add to the character, so we just see it as something that’s really positive for Caithness.”
The group has taken advice as well as inspiration from the Scottish Crannog Centre at Loch Tay, while Dawn explained that the landowner of the site Jim Macgregor has been especially supportive and is really keen to see the broch built.
The project is intended to provide training in traditional building techniques, conservation and drystone dyke building, as well as, in the longer term, creating a visitor attraction that is unique to Caithness, which has the largest concentration of broch sites in Scotland.
The plans for the first phase of the site are now being considered by Highland Council, while Dawn continues to work on other permissions required, including building warrants and a de-crofting application for part of the site.