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“We can’t just step back and say ‘leave it to nature,’” said Andy McMullen, a botanist commissioned by C4C. He calls the group’s approach to the dunes “holistic.”
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As for the elusive Baltic rush, the grass-like vegetation that forms a centerpiece of the opposition to the plan, McMullen said his team struggled to find any. That’s a point vigorously opposed by Not Coul, lobbying against the project.
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The group says its submission highlights that the Baltic rush is on several of the proposed course’s greens and fairways. It also maintains that the plant, while commonplace in the US, is only found at one other location in the UK. In a counter-submission that Not Coul filed at the end of July, the Baltic rush was mentioned on more than 100 occasions.
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C4C emphasized that land management may also benefit such plants. Its report points to how the flora thrive in the long, grassy rough and away from the tended fairways on the Struie course at nearby Royal Dornoch. A key part of the study also notes that the course’s proposed footprint would occupy only a minuscule fraction of the total protected site.
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The real question, McMullen said, is not about the different species which are at risk but rather, “whether or not it’s worthwhile having that small 1% loss to look after the other 99%.”
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It’s an argument given short shrift by Tom Dargie, an ecologist for Not Coul whose house overlooks Loch Fleet and who first surveyed Coul Links in the late 1990s for an earlier proposal. It never went to the planning stage.
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“I went down to Coul for two days to reflect on whether it would be a good site for a golf course,” said Dargie, who began studying Scotland’s sand dunes in 1971 while at the University of Sheffield in England. “I decided there and then that it was not.”
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The pile of submissions and counter-submissions bears more than a passing similarity to President Trump’s project farther down the eastern coast. The government rejected the official advice, and gave Trump its full approval to unleash his bulldozers on protected sand dunes. He called the site Trump International, and opened a second course last year. The Trump Organization didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.
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At the time, then Finance Minister John Swinney hailed the complex’s social and economic benefits as reasons to approve it. Now, he leads the government set to judge on Coul Links.
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But there’s one key political shift from when Trump’s Aberdeen course was approved in 2008. The Greens have a stronger voice in Scotland’s parliament after this year’s election and may play an integral role in helping the ruling Scottish National Party’s drive for the nation’s independence from London.
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It’s a conundrum for the SNP. Reject the plan and stand accused of undermining a fragile economy; back the project and wreck the party’s environmental credentials.
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Maggie Chapman, a Green Member of the Scottish Parliament for North East Scotland, has long opposed Trump’s developments in Scotland and said his second golf course near Aberdeen was “not welcome” after the original site lost its special status.
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“I see the same drive for economic profit and complete ignorance for the ecosystem,” she said of the plans for Coul Links.
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In Coul’s immediate neighborhood — a former fishing village called Embo with about 300 residents — support for the project isn’t hard to come by. There are no shops, no schools and not much else beyond a trailer park for vacationers. Many of the nearby roads are single track with passing places every 100 yards or so.
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