Rohan Beyts first visited the dunes overlooking the slate grey North Sea at Menie, Aberdeenshire, as a teenager. Later she brought her own children to play across the spectacular landscape of dunes and slacks, vibrant with butterflies and wildflowers.
Rohan Beyts first visited the dunes overlooking the slate grey North Sea at Menie, Aberdeenshire, as a teenager. Later she brought her own children to play across the spectacular landscape of dunes and slacks, vibrant with butterflies and wildflowers.
Beyts attended the initial meeting called in 2006 to galvanise local resistance to the then business tycoon Donald Trump’s plans to bulldoze this legally protected site of ecological rarity to make way for his first Scottish golf resort.
“I’ve been at this for 19 years,” she says, ahead of the now US president’s expected Friday evening arrival in Scotland. “I’m still disgusted by what Trump did at Menie and now what he is doing across the rest of the world.”
After a bitter and protracted dispute with local people and environmentalists, who fought to save the dunes and the dwellings around them, Trump eventually won planning permission to build “the world’s greatest golf course”. At the time, he promised a £1bn coastal resort including expansive courses, luxury housing and high-rise timeshare flats – promises Beyts points out have yet to be fulfilled.
“Where’s the huge development that was heralded as replacement jobs for the oil industry? I don’t understand how the politicians were so taken in,” she adds.
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