Published: Thursday, 2nd October, 2008 8:30am

Developers should do more for landscape

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Being one of the indigenous Dunbar folk fitted with the homing chip, I returned with my new family. How things have changed: the quarry is moving south, overtaking the landfill site on the way, and we have a couple of new ugly ducklings, in Asda and the sewerage processing site.

No matter what direction visitors take to approach Dunbar, they are visually assaulted by something.

Approaching via the A1 from the south, a giant fridge appears to have fallen next to the Spott roundabout, exposing ugly storage vessels and various utilitarian structures. The store"s front elevation has nice vertical stone features at each corner to add some interest, and interact with the very nice red sandstone boundary walling. The rear has each corner painted in a colour not quite matching anything.

The A1 from the west gives us a light blue mega-barn, with even less attention (none at all) given to landscaping than Asda.

What aesthetic joy awaits the lucky visitors who choose the tourist route on the old A1 from East Linton; some wag has taken a mould of the Pompidou Centre and dropped it into the East Lothian countryside, having polished up one or two of the pipes and added floodlights to enhance its attraction. In fairness, there are some fast-growing conifers and a bit of low mounding but they"re not really doing it for me.

Walkers on the John Muir trail have the newly relocated Barns Ness caravan site to admire, fully appreciating the measures taken to lessen its visual impact on the skyline. I used to love telling the story of how, when the quarry was in that area, the wee look-out tower had been preserved and worked around. It now has, to all intents and purposes, a large travellers" community surrounding it; an invading army of caravans ready to assault the senses of anyone unfortunate enough to look over from the coastal walk or golf course.

I really do like the mix of sensitive and firm control that the East Lothian Council Planning Dept applies to domestic developments; I am actually quite confident that Gin Head will, as Dunglass said last week, be sympathetically landscaped and designed to provide an improved addition to the landscape. In the case of Asda and the sewerage works (and, to a lesser degree, the barn), I feel that the commercial developments around here were not pushed far enough by our planning authorities to mitigate their impact on our beautiful landscape.

Andrew Allan

Murray Court

Dunbar