Save our granite cathedrals

A funicular railway could bring thousands of tourists to the Cairngorms . We should spend the money on keeping them out, argues Jim Crumley

The Cairngorms massif is our mightiest landscape. It deals only in grand gestures, a red granite cathedral of a landscape with corries for cloisters, miles-wide plateaux for ambulatories, and four blunt towers that nudge through the 4,000ft contour. Susceptible mortals who walk quietly amid such architecture of nature emerge feeling physically puny and spiritually supercharged.

Once, walking far out over that undulating core of the plateaux called Am Moine Mhor - the Great Moss - with the writer David Craig on a day of rare calm, we were suddenly aware in the same instant that our feet made the only sound in the landscape. The wind had gone and its going stopped us dead. Then we heard it: nothing. No sound. No shred of wind, no fall of water, no bird call, no deer gutturals, no sheep, no footfall, no voice, no far vehicle, no dog bark, no aircraft drone.

We were too far out on the Moss to hear anything other than the Moss's own sounds, and for a few seconds it offered none at all. We have between us more than 60 years of wandering wild places. We could remember no such silence.

This week, a decision will be taken in Edinburgh that will determine whether or not pounds 17m of public money will build a funicular railway to take 250,000 people a year into this place of silences that I, and others like me, hold sacred.

The sanctity has, of course, been breached to some extent for some time. The massif was heaved up on to its airy pedestal 2,600 million years ago. There are few things any older with which we are likely to rub shoulders - lumps of Sutherland, perhaps, and Iona. The rubbing would begin about 5,000 years ago, since when things have begun to go irrevocably downhill for the Cairngorms, slowly at first but, like all downhill journeys, the pace can only accelerate.

In the past 40 of the 2,600 million, it has all got too fast for the mountains' comfort and we have fashioned an array of threats, of which the most potent was a skiing development on 4,084ft Cairn Gorm itself. This month, it gets dizzy. The Scottish Natural Heritage, Highland Regional Council and possibly the Secretary of State for Scotland, Michael Forsyth, will pronounce on the funicular project, which will replace the ageing ski tows and their tatty buildings. In the process, they will also pronounce on whether the mountain will be subjected to the kind of pressures from which, 2,600 million years old or not, it may never recover.

The Mountain Railway Company is adamant. Its management plan will restrict access from the visitor centre, at 3,600ft, on to the plateau: guided walks only. It is acknowledged there will be some "leakage" of "bloody- minded" individuals and that there is nothing anyone can do about that other than monitor, count the number of leaks, and possibly adjust the number of ranger walks to compensate.

Conservation does not believe it. It notes the determination to market the funicular as a four-season tourism lure (no one can deny its breathtaking potential), fearing that all the good intentions of professing green tourism are more likely to pave the way to a hell of a massive summit erosion on thin alpine-arctic soils and fragile vegetation. It thinks the predicted "leakage" will amount to a bloody-minded flood.

The main board of Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) sits down tomorrow to consider the 55-page fourth draft of the Cairngorm Railway Company's management plan; it must decide whether to sustain its existing objection. If it stands, and Highland Regional Council passes the planning application later this month with SNH's objection unresolved, the result will be a Scottish Office decision to call a public inquiry. There will then be a delay of three years, at least, time enough for the conservation lobby to gird its considerable loins.

But should we really be listening to such an argument at all? The Mountain Railway Company says its plans "will develop the full potential of the site in the best public interest", and if you consider the number of people that will please, you could argue it is right. But who is considering the best interests of the mountain?

SNH is clearly agonising, which can only mean that somewhere within earshot of chairman Magnus Magnusson's desk is a powerful voice raised in favour of the scheme. Because if all they had to consider was Scotland's natural heritage, it would be obvious, even to civil servants, that a mountain railway is a hideous prospect in the sanctity of nature's cathedral landscape.

Emotive language? You bet! If you are the guardian of the natural heritage and you do not become emotional about the Cairngorms, you should clear your desk and go.

While SNH mutters to itself in darkened rooms and makes only the blandest of even-handed public pronouncements about the one mountain landscape in the country that truly merits the overworked word "unique", the loudest voice raised in the mountains' defence is that of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. For, if the mountain railway "leaks" in big numbers, it will leak across the Cairn Gorm-Ben MacDhui section of the plateau, which in turn is part of the RSPB's 31,000-acre Abernethy estate - its biggest by far, and one bought with its members' money.

Which public interest is being served if the leaking obliterates dotterel breeding grounds: the railway passengers or the RSPB members, who outnumber them four to one?

We should be asking far more searching questions and contemplating far more daring decisions than whether or not ski tows should be replaced by a railway. I have known the Cairngorms for 30 years and I have seen them wither. My questions are the following.

Now that we have seen the impact of skiing development on the Cairngorms and its arctic-alpine nature, why are we not contemplating its complete removal?

Why, given that the 1989 Habitats and Species directive of the European Union identified the Cairngorms as demanding special protection, is it now proposed to spend millions of pounds of European money to achieve the opposite?

Why does SNH prevaricate when the supreme example of Scotland's natural heritage is under the most blatant of threats which, however you cloak it, is ultimately a commercial enterprise?

Why don't we redistribute the pounds 17m thus: half to improve skiing facilities at Scotland's other skiing developments and half to embark on a Cairngorms- wide programme of conservation, employing local people and teaching their children respect for the landscape on their doorstep, rather than the idea that it is endlessly exploitable?

Why don't we acknowledge that just as we have the technology to put a railway up a mountain, we also have the technology to clean the mountain, set it aside and let it heal? That, after all, is what we would do if the heritage under threat were a cathedral.

The author has written 12 books on the Scottish landscape and wildlife, including 'A High and Lonely Place - the Sanctuary and Plight of the Cairngorms'.