The proposed upgrade of a Highland trunk road threatens monastic life at Pluscarden Abbey.
Intended to speed up traffic between Aberdeen and Inverness, and improve the Highland region’s notorious road safety record by 2030, the proposed development of the A96 between Forres and Fochabers would take heavy traffic close to the Benedictine monastery near Elgin.
Brother Michael de Klerk described the plan, which Transport Scotland insists is still at an early stage of development, as “quite extraordinary”. He said that the valley of the Black Burn, where the abbey is situated, is “so quiet that frequently all you can hear is birdsong or a cow lowing; that would be replaced by a constant sound of traffic, day and night”.
Pluscarden was re-established in 1948 as a daughter house of Prinknash Abbey and the pre-Reformation Dunfermline Abbey. It was originally a Valliscaulian order, founded in the early thirteenth century by King Alexander II of Scotland and it is believed that the Black Burn glen closely resembles the original Val des Choux in Burgundy. It is understood that in the 1990s the former Abbot of Pluscarden, now Bishop of Aberdeen, Hugh Gilbert, campaigned [successfully] to prevent overflights of the glen by aircraft from the nearby RAF Kinloss. The air base closed in 2012 and is now an army base, home to Royal Engineers and RAF mountain rescue.
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