Like Eve, I chose the apples...

IT was a Saturday afternoon in Inverness, and I had a choice – go to Eden Court to hear First Minister Alex Salmond address the SNP conference or go to the Floral Hall, near Bught Park, to see what was happening there to mark Apple Day. Like Eve, I chose the apples.

It was actually national Apple Day, with events all over the country, but this was the first time anything had been organised in Inverness to celebrate our most common fruit.

I found a lively crowd gathered in the tent set up at the Floral Hall. Nearly 200 visitors had called by in the two hours the event had been open, said Highland Council biodiversity officer Jonathan Willet.

Folk were lining up to put questions to two experts drafted in for the day. Many of the visitors had brought specimens from their gardens for identification, and others expressed ambitions to start an orchard or make cider. Jonathan has been researching orchards and apple varieties across the Highlands and has come up with some surprising results. He has located, so far, more than 70 sites with, between them, over 50 varieties of apple. One orchard at Dunlichity in Nairnshire has 67 varieties.

Many of these were on display, laid out on the table in an astonishing array of different shapes, sizes and colours, with wonderful names. There was, for example, a Miller’s seedling – no relation, but an early dessert apple bred first in Berkshire in 1848.

The king of the apple growers in the North must have been Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, near Contin, who created five new varieties in the early 1800s.

As far as we know, said Jonathan, four of these have become extinct but the fifth, with the charming name of Coul Blush, is still around.

A large map hung on the flapping tent wall to show where the apples are growing. Most are found where the climate is fairly congenial, around the coast from Moray to Dornoch, but the map showed three sites in Caithness – in Thurso, Castletown and the Castle of Mey. I know there are more – most big houses had walled gardens –but the research is still going on and who knows what will turn up.

I DID go to the SNP conference at various times over the four days it lasted. Two years ago the SNP also held its annual shindig at Eden Court and I reported on it at the time in this column. It is a big event and contributes an estimated £3.5 million to the local economy.

This time I found much the same mix of stalls and campaigners, and the atmosphere – almost akin to that of a revivalist meeting – familiar from the previous conference. This time, though, the feelings were headier, boosted by election victory and majority government in Holyrood.

Before making his grand entrance in the opening ceremony on the Thursday, Alex Salmond visited Nigg to announce the acquisition of the yard by Global Energy Group. This carefully timed intelligence was supplemented by the news that Kawasaki has signed a contract with the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney to test its tidal power device off Eday.

Mr Salmond contrasted these advances with what he called the prime minister’s “almost throw-away line” in the Commons on the decision to cancel the carbon capture technology project at Longannet.

Westminster is taking £13 billion a year in oil and gas revenues but will not invest one tenth of that, declared Mr Salmond, but we will fight to save carbon capture technology. It is simply unacceptable to have fuel poverty amid energy plenty, he continued, to great applause.

The confidence of the SNP was palpable in the air at the conference. “We can make this generation of Scots the independence generation,” cried the first minister in the peroration of his opening speech.

Time will tell on that but the proceedings were widely reported as the firing of the starting gun for the campaign for the much-vaunted referendum.

THE media tends to ignore the fringe meetings that go on around the main programme at political conferences and in this the SNP’s do was no exception. I went along to a few.

One, organised by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and chaired by Alastair Allan, MSP for the Western Isles, focused on “high-nature-value farming” in the North.

This is basically crofting, low-intensity agriculture where wildlife thrives alongside the beise and the sheep and the tatties. It is often symbolised by the presence of the corncrake in the Hebrides where the machair is a textbook example of low-intensity farming.

Dr Paul Walton, of the RSPB, told us that £670m is invested every year in agriculture in Scotland, typical of the heavy subsidies paid to farming across the EU. Most of this goes to those we would call “e beeg fermers” – to them that hath, etc – but, argues the RSPB, a much larger proportion of this total should be given to crofters and small farmers who are active in promoting biodiversity on their land.

Dr Walton said the level of so-called agri-environmental funding in Scotland is now abysmally low. He called for better subsidies for the crofters who are doing us all a service in retaining the biodiversity of the countryside. “Pubic goods for public money,” said Dr Walton.

Also on the platform at this meeting were John and Lorna MacKenzie, from Westfield, who have implemented conservation measures on their land to cut erosion, encourage natural regeneration of vegetation along the Forss, and protect ground-nesting birds.

IN one of the lighter moments at the conference, Wick’s newest councillor, Gail Ross, appeared on stage with another four SNP councillors, all perched in what looked gey precarious positions on high chairs. The furniture prompted Drew Hendry, SNP leader in the Highland Council, to commend his party for recycling the chairs from Blind Date.

Asked about campaigning in Wick, Gail said it had been difficult to tell where recognition of herself ended and support for the party began. On the doorsteps, the voters said they knew her and her family, and one man told her, “I used til poach wi your grandfaither”.

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