Big Broch Update

What have you been up to?

Hello. I’m Pete MacRae and I’m chairman of the Caithness Broch Project.

You know how it is. You’re busy getting on with life and then you bump into an old friend. “What have you been up to?“ they ask. “Oh nothing much” you reply and then you embark on a conversation catching up. By the end of it you realise that you’ve actually achieved a great deal since you’d last chatted to your friend.

And that’s how it’s been with the Broch Project team. We’ve been busy doing lots of activities since our last blog update taking small steps on our journey towards our main aim. Each step is important but not in itself worth telling you about. But when you stop and reflect on all these small steps, you realise that we’ve made a lot of progress on the way to building the first broch since the Iron Age.

Bringing you up to date

So we should start with our most important piece of news. We now have got planning permission to build our Broch at our preferred site just a mile north of the village of Latheron on the main A9 road. It’s also just a mile north of the famous NC500. Gaining planning permission was the culmination of an incredible amount of hard and meticulous work by one of our directors, Dawn MacLean. Without her expertise, patience and determination we would not be where we are today. Thank you Dawn.

The planning permission was also the cherry on top of the cake of a busy 2025 for us. That same year we signed a formal collaboration agreement with the Flow Country Partnership and the north division of the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) and moved our business address to the Latheron Community area in anticipation of acquiring the site. The location of our preferred site is across the main A9 road from the eastern edge of the Flow Country UNESCO World Heritage Site. It’s planned the Broch site would also become the official eastern gateway to the World Heritage Site and a location for environmental research projects for UHI.

We keep talking about “our preferred site”. Why? That’s because we haven’t yet bought it but we’re working hard to make this happen. Just after we signed the collaboration agreement with the Flow Country Partnership and UHI we launched our Crowd Funder campaign to start raising cash to help us buy the site which is also known as “Flygla”. The response from the community has been tremendous and we’ve had to raise our funding target many times. In addition we’ve applied to larger funding organisations and we’re waiting to hear back from them. Fingers crossed.

If you’d like to make a donation to help us buy the site, here’s the link:

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/...

We’ve also finalised our Business Plan which will help us in future discussions with potential funders. We did this in conjunction with heritage architects HHVJ and MKA Economics adhering to an official, formal business plan template to show potential financial backers that our planning and development processes are robust.

Provisional plans and concept images for what the site could look like have been created to give future funders a clearer idea of the proposed development. Here are some of the concept images. What do you think?

A lot of hard work

Of course all this didn’t just happen. It’s a result of years of hard work. We trudged through boggy tracts of land and up and down hillsides on over 40 sites by the time we finally found our preferred location. After we settled on Flygla as our earmarked site we then had to carry out lots of tests to make sure if it was going to be suitable for our replica broch plan.

We had to carry out a peat depth survey under the guidance of ERI PhD graduate Dr. Henk Peter Sterk. We’re very grateful to him for his expertise and advice. We carried out the survey to confirm that the amount of peat on the area of the site earmarked for our broch was not environmentally significant.

Then we commissioned an ecology survey to establish any potential impact of our development on local wildlife. That survey was broadly supportive of our plans.

After that we commissioned a traffic survey to establish if we could create a junction off the main A9 road onto our site which complied with all the safety and visibility regulations. That identified a location where we could have an entrance junction.

Once we’d established all that, we were able to go public with our preferred choice of location for our Broch. We followed this up with a community consultation exercise at the end of 2023.

This was an online feedback exercise combined with two face-to-face public sessions in the local area which has just over 800 households.

We received 513 responses in total, and the results were very positive:

When asked “To what extent do you believe that the project will positively impact the local community and economy?”

• 66.3% Strongly agreed
• 27.7% Agreed

When asked “To what extent do you agree that the project will create effective educational opportunities for all age groups?”

• 78.5% Strongly agreed
• 17.8% Agreed

When asked, “How satisfied are you with the proposed outline plans for accessibility and inclusivity at the project site, thinking about the range of people who will want to visit?”

• 40.7% Were very satisfied
• 42.9% Were satisfied

When asked “To what degree do you think the project will attract tourists to the area?”

• 69.4% Strongly agreed
• 25.5% Agreed

A slew of supportive comments were supplied to us from respondents, which was incredibly encouraging to see - your brochlove certainly helps to keep us going!

So what happens next?

Once we’d filed our planning application in January 2025, we were able to lodge a de-crofting application with the Crofters’ Commission for the site. We’re due to hear back on that in the summer. As I said earlier we’re also waiting to hear back from a major funding organisation to see if our request for money to help us buy the site has been successful. We’re continuing to talk to other funding organisations about helping us with developing the site after we’ve bought it.

And just for a bit of fund raising fun we’ll shortly be bringing out a Broch Project limited edition whisky. Watch out for more information about that on our social media posts and here on the website. When it comes out why not buy a bottle, help the Project and toast our progress with a dram. Thank you as always for your continued support.