Colin MacDonald

Colin MacDonald is the Project Supervisor for the Coalfield Community Landscape Partnership. The CCLP was formed when East Ayrshire Council Planning Department was looking at ways of improving the area after the collapse of the mining industry. The idea was to look at more than just the environment but through culture, history and any other such approaches.

The department applied to the National Lottery Heritage Fund to form a landscape partnership.

“I came in at the point of developing the CCLP project. The partnership was set up like others as a seven year scheme. Two years for development a five years worth of funding to implement the projects.

I came on board and started setting up the projects and partnerships we are taking about in the time capsule.

The team was originally myself, Carolann and Cynthia. When Cynthia left it was Carolann and Kate.

Between us we worked with the delivery partners to deliver the projects.

My role was helping develop the project, putting it together and managing the finances. Passing the finances to the appropriate partnerships, reporting to the Lottery and managing the project officers who helped the partners deliver the projects.

We are now coming to the end of the five years, and we are tying up the project.

Overall, I'd say it has been quite successful. Unfortunately, we were hampered by the onset of Covid. As soon as we got permission to start Covid hit and we had to do all of our interviews for posts online.

All of the projects were delayed for eight or nine months in terms of delivery. In effect we delivered a five year project in four years.

The area of the partnership was two hundred and thirty square kilometres from the Doon Valley, across North Kyle to the Lugar Valley and Cumnock.

There were twenty two projects, two were footpaths and the rest were history, culture, tree planting etc. We had eighteen delivery partners delivering those.

As part of the process the partners had to design their project and deliver match funding as well. The partners had to put in a lot of hard work to get the plans to a point where we could submit them. Then they had to work very hard for the next five years to deliver the project while obtaining match funding that was needed.

One of the reasons why the partnership was such a great success was the partnerships coming out of it. The legacy is that they are now within the community and they have taken ownership of their projects, that's very important.

Hopefully in ten years time we will be able to look back and trace projects that have come out of the landscape partnership. Not only the original twenty two but new ones that have spawned from the connections and others that were not able to take part originally.

One of the drawbacks of the CCLP is that it is time limited and we had to have a certain number of projects involved. If they were not ready at that particular time then they could not be involved.

Hopefully through the five years with our Connecting Communities Project we have drawn in more delivery partners and more funding for the groups and villages that were not originally involved.

The original budget was six point four million pounds in total. The funding for that came as two point two million from the Lottery, just over one million from East Ayrshire Council themselves and the rest was brought in by the partners raising funds through grant applications.

Over the five years we have been underspent because some of the projects did not quite work out. The Kirkyard project for example was quite a large capital project that didn't work out as planned so there was some capital underspend there. Over five years projects change and the price of materials goes up.

We will be underspent but the main thing is that the projects have been delivered and community capacity has been built up. They now have the experience of delivering some quite large scale projects such as the Inclusive Cycle Track or the Doon Valley Railway Heritage Shed.

Communities are now in a position to take advantage of all they new community benefit money that will be coming in over the next few years from the wind farm developers.

One of the legacies of the CCLP is that the communities will be more geared up in terms of working together and able to show that they can deliver projects in the area.

The projects all have to be managed and maintained for the next ten years. That itself is a challenge. There is five years of funding in place for that through the groups themselves. Hopefully the groups will support each other in doing that in order to access further community money from the wind farms to allow more projects that will have a lasting impact in the area.

It won't just be the hard things like websites or the Lost Villages Book that will endure but the experience that can be taken forward."