In a similar vein
this is a more than welcome honest tourist guide to Argyll!!!


You are in: Helensburgh & Lomond

This area is where Argyll all but borders on Glasgow. It stretches from the River Clyde south of Helensburgh, to the northern end of Loch Lomond, the largest inland loch in Great Britain and arguably the most famous. On its west side the area includes the Gare Loch, all of the east side and the top of the west side of Loch Long and the Rosneath peninsula lying between these lochs.

Much of the area is within Scotland’s first national park – Loch Lomond and the Trossachs. This includes the Arrochar Alps and the ancient Argyll forest at the head of the Cowal peninsula.

The conjunction of the complex Clyde waterway system, the inland waters of Loch Lomond and the great mountains around Arrochar – with the international golf course at Loch Lomond – make this area a sporting wonderland.

However, paradise traditionally has a serpent. The idyll of the area is subverted by the omnipresence of the British military machine. The Gare Loch has the nuclear submarine base of Faslane – twinned with the permanent peace camp across the road. This base has seen everything from the triumphalist to the embarrassing. The submarine that sank the General Belgrano in the Falklands War returned here flying the Skull and Crossbones. The submarine that managed to collide with the Isle of Skye limped back to laughs all round.

Large swathes of land between Loch Lomond and Loch Long and between the Gare Loch and Loch Long are military and naval bases, surrounded by high fences and razor wire and featuring hillsides spotted with reinforced entrances to arms silos. Loch Long, after all, was where Ark Royal came to take on ‘supplies’ before sailing to the Gulf.

Until the serpent is banished from Eden however, the rich natural resources of the area and the urban delights of Helensburgh with its Charles Rennie Mackintosh Hill House and its elegant houses are more than enough for real enjoyment and good memories.

Use the Business Directory to track down any information you need. There are shortcuts to some key information on the side menu and the pages here in this section will give you narratives on travel, activities and background.

 http://www.argyllonline.co.uk/index.asp?id=1

Machrihanish isn't the only site in Scotland the MoD are considering to dump these submarines. The nuclear weapons store at Coulport on Loch Long, the old naval dockyard at Rosyth (where seven of these submarines are already), and Dounraey (which is next door to HMS Vulcan, the MoD's test reactor site) are all being considered as well.
Only one site being considered (Sellafield) is outside of Scotland.

Over the last year or the MoD have been 'consulting' commercial companies, local communities and 'stakeholder' groups about what to do with the old submarines as part of Consultation on the ISOLUS Outline Proposals - ISOLUS stands for Interim Storage of Laid Up Submarines. More details of the sites proposed so far can be found at:
www.lancs.ac.uk/users/csec/isolus2/isolus-homepage.htm

So far most communities, local councils and 'stakeholder' groups have been highly critical of the proposals - especially since they seem to have been drawn up to benefit the companies involved more than any one else and in the absence of any government policy on the best way to get rid of the subs.

Critically the proposals are to store the Intermediate Level nuclear waste at one of these sites until the Government have worked out where the long term store for all the UK's Intermediate Level waste is going to be. The real fear is that if the MoD find a site to dump this military nuclear waste for the next thirty or fifty years, the Government will then decide that the site chosen would also be the best place for the permanent ILW store and all UK military and commercial ILW will be dumped there, for ever.

Of course, these proposals have provoked massive concern amongst the communities near the proposed sites. Ironically, for example, Liberals on Argyll & Bute council (which covers Coulport) have condemned any proposal to store Intermediate Level nuclear waste at Coulport but have nothing to say about the 200 or so nuclear bombs (the total of Britain's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction) which are already there...despite them being far more dangerous to their constituents!

And of course whilst the decommissioned submarines are a problem - they are not anywhere near as dangerous as the live nuclear powered submarines still sailing around the coast of Scotland and in and out of the Clyde - the hazard of a major nuclear accident involving one of these is far more serious than the dangers poised by the storage of the nuclear waste...