Parking ban imposed on section of NC500 in north Sutherland as puffin colony visits increase, creating road hazard and impacting on birds
A NORTH Coast community council has made some progress in its campaign to stop tourists from visiting a fragile puffin colony at Drumholliston on the NC500 tourist route.
Hundreds of tourists a year, many in motorhomes and campervans, visit Puffin Cove, which is mentioned in an NC500 guidebook, creating a road hazard and impacting the colony.
After pressure from Melvich Community Council and ward representatives, Highland Council put up clearway signs on a section of the A836 near Puffin Cove earlier this month to inform drivers they cannot stop.
A clearway is a section of road where it is forbidden to stop at any time, except in an emergency.
But community council chairman Peter Fittock is concerned that drivers may not know what the clearway signs mean or may even deliberately ignore them.
“Tourists continue to park there, possibly in ignorance of the meaning of the signs. We are still concerned about people, children and dogs wandering about on that section of road. Accidents are just waiting to happen,” he said.
The community council would like to see Highland Council go a step further and extend existing mounding at the side of the road near the Puffin Cove access point, which would prevent parking altogether.
Puffin Cove is accessed from the A836 on the Caithness and Sutherland border between Melvich and Reay, but there is no recognised parking area, with drivers instead stopping on the soft, roadside verge.
“We have had 10 vehicles parked on the verge on just one side of the road. There is an access track for peat cutters and it is sometimes blocked, so anyone who is cutting peat cannot get onto their land,” said Mr Fittock.
The cove is a kilometre walk from the road across open land to the north, but a number of tourists have slipped and fallen, resulting in three Coastguard rescues last year.
The puffins nest on a sea stack visible from the cliff edge of the cove, but Mr Fittock says the number of birds in the colony is decreasing year on year.
“The puffin colony is suffering badly; numbers go down each year, and their long-time survival is worrying,” he said.
He added the situation had worsened since Puffin Cove was included in the NC500 guidebooks. The community council has requested that the reference to Puffin Cove be removed from future editions of the guidebook.
Highland Council obtained a Road Traffic Order designating the section of road a ‘clearway’ and effectively banning parking in the area from April 1 to November 9, but the signs were not erected until May 2, meaning the clearway could not be enforced until then.
The clearway runs from a point 150 metres east of the junction with the U1807 Big Hill Road to a point 1000 metres west of the layby at Drumolliston which overlooks Dounreay power station.
Mr Fittock said: “Highland Council built a soft earth mound over the ditch on one side of the road, which stopped people parking there but moved the problem 100 yards along the road,” he said,
“Ideally, this earth mound should be extended for the length of the clearway. "Parking is available at a layby to the east. This is a much safer place for hikers to walk out to Puffin Cove, and we would encourage everyone to use this facility.”
