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Can You Help Find Tiggatoo ? On Saturday Jan 28th this happy wee dog was left tied outside the Co-op in Crail, that was when a woman took her from outside of the shop and then travelled across the country with her to the East Renfrewshire area. There appears to have been no effort to reunite the dog, which is spayed and microchipped, with its rightful owner who is bitterly saddened by this loss.

The events, which are subject to a police investigation have now revealed that the lady gave the dog to her sister who in turn has reported that it has run away and is now lost. The owner, Morgan Chalmers, spent two days in the Eaglesham Moor area looking for the dog last week and he has been heartened by the support from the many organisations and people in that area. Sadly the wee soul has not yet been found and may have perished during last weeks icy conditions. Morgan has asked Crail Matters to publicise the story once more just in case any of our readers from that area can help him understand why the woman chose to take the dog away from Crail, as, for that reason, she may be lost forever.

A substantial cash reward is to be made available for her return.

Planning Notices Request for Screening Opinion for Erection of Poultry Sheds with Associated Vehicular Access, - Airdrie Farm Lochton Crail Fife

Two storey extension to rear and external alterations - 17 Castle Street Crail KY10 3SJ and Listed Building Consent for two storey extension to rear and external alterations - 17 Castle Street Crail KY10 3SJ

Installation of replacement windows and roof tiles – 11 West Green, Crail KY10 3 RD and Listed Building consent to alter porch, installation of replacement windows and roof tiles and internal alterations at 11 West Green, Crail KY10 3 RD

w/c 13 February 2017 No. 2

Incorporating About Crail Free

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The Road Traffic (Temporary Restrictions) Procedure Regulations 1992

Temporary Road Closure

B9171 from the B940 to the A917.

Monday, 27/02/17 at 07.30hrs to Friday, 10/03/17 at 17.00hrs.

To allow carriageway resurfacing to be carried out in safety.

The alternative route for vehicular traffic is via A917 and B940. Access for emergency services and residents will be maintained up to area of works via

the alternative route. Access for emergency services vehicles, residents and landowners will be maintained at the discretion of the contractor on site.

Fife Council Assets Transportation and Environment are responsible for these works and can be contacted as follows:

Project Engineer: 03451 55 55 55 Ext 493673

Emergency/Out of Hours: 03451 55 00 99

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The Royal Burgh of Crail and District Community

Council Notes

Future development in Crail The proposals for the future development of Crail offered by the proposed Fife Council Local Development Plan have attracted enormous criticism. The sheer number of proposed houses, the potential effects on commercial activity along with the recognition that regardless of aspirational language, what will eventually be developed will be of poor design quality, has attracted most attention. What is notable, however, is that criticism has not focussed on the principle of further development in Crail per se, but on the nature of that development, and its destructive potential for the existing village. Given the experience we have of the new development at Carraille Green, this is a reasonable concern. But it could be different. One of the problems of current practise is the insistence on aggregating very different communities under one broad category – in our case, Crail is included within the St Andrews and North East Fife Housing Market Area. But the lived experience of the communities embraced within this very broad geographical area are very different. Such aggregations have more to do with bureaucratic convenience than reality, and as we all know, the experience of living in Crail is very different from living in St Andrews; the factors that contribute to our community life are very different from those in St Andrews (as is the case with all the East Neuk villages). But we should note that the capacity to change this aggregation lies with Fife Council - it is not an immutable given. The Scottish Government recognises there are weaknesses in current forms of local representation, and through encouraging local empowerment, presumably it is seeking to create a more open and sensitive society. What better way to achieve this than by creating a genuine local development plan for Crail and similar communities; this would seem an

obvious way forward. The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 in fact made provision for enhanced community planning – ‘Community planning is about how public bodies work together and with local communities to design and

deliver better services that make a real difference to local people’s lives. Community planning is a key driver of public service reform at local level. It provides a focus for partnership working driven by strong shared leadership, directed towards distinctive local circumstances. Partners work together to improve local services, ensuring that they meet the needs of local people, especially for those people who need those services most.’ This element of the Act came into force 20 December 2016. Given this, why is Fife Council continuing to seek approval for the Local Development Plan? Implementation of the Community Empowerment Act offers a wonderful opportunity to wrest control over our lives from the bureaucratic insensitivities of Fife Council planners, through the creation of genuine local involvement, rather than someone speaking for us in our name. This surely merits a little administrative inconvenience any delay might cause for Fife Council. Furthermore, the Fife Council elections in May offer an opportunity for local residents to choose Councillors who genuinely share our concern with local issues and who are prepared to help us take control over our lives. Let’s make sure this opportunity is not wasted. ---------------------------------------------------------

Snow at Fife Ness? No, just foam from the sea!

Submitted by a Dog Walker.

4

Crail Table Tennis Regulars at Crail Table Tennis Club are seen here giving a huge thumbs up and vote of thanks to Michael Kavanagh, Sports Development Officer for Active Fife, after receiving delivery of a brand new Butterfly table complete with bats, balls and net. Local cafe owners Graham Anderson (Honeypot) and John Carlton (Julias) who initiated the club, have been delighted with the level of participation, which helped justify the investment from Fife Council. Thinking back they lamented " We are just so appreciative", the new table replaced a second hand, bent legged version that was purchased for £20.00p with proceeds from a collection at Greens in Crail, thats how we started, so thanks for every penny !" The club is also taking shape in its second year and most players have now purchased their own bats, worse still shorts are now being worn ! Play will continue until April and the club meets every Tuesday at 19.00pm in Crail Community Hall, everyone is welcome. Yours In Sport Crail Table Tennis

Crail Community Choir Crail Community Choir is now in its fifth year, and has gone from strength to strength, with a core of around fifty members. The choir welcomes all adults who enjoy singing. There is no requirement to read music. The evenings are relaxed, friendly and informal. The choir leader is Janice Nisbet. Janice prepares a wide selection of well known songs from the traditional to the contemporary which are always presented in a fun way. The first session runs from mid-February to the end of May. The second runs from mid-September to the beginning of December. There is no obligation to attend every week. The choir meets on Mondays at 7.30pm in the Town Hall and occasionally in the Kirk Hall. Everyone will be made very welcome. The dates for this session are as follows:- February: 13th*, 20th, 27th* March: 6th, 13th, 20th, 27th* April: 17th, 24th* May: 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd Please note: we meet in the Town Hall except those dates marked * when we shall meet in the Kirk Hall.

Please note: The first choir evening on 13 Feb will be held in the Kirk Hall.

5

WILD CRAIL Will Cresswell,

with Photographs by John Anderson

Last Sunday the 5th was another rainy morning but with a south-easterly wind bringing the seabirds in closer. There was a steady passage of razorbills and guillemots past Fife Ness and a lot of gannets. Their numbers will be picking up steadily now until there are hundreds, if not thousands, passing Fife Ness in an hour as they shuttle back and forth from the Bass Rock.

There are other signs of spring – several robins are singing during the night under the streetlights in Crail and I heard a blackbird tuning up at dusk last weekend. It’s easy to overlook pigeons. Like gulls relegated to seagulls, without specific names it is easy just to imagine that they are all the same and miss the variety. We have four species of pigeon in Crail: woodpigeons, rock doves (now relegated to “feral pigeon” after long domestication and then return to the wild), collared doves and stock doves. It’s not uncommon to have all four species in a Crail garden. The first three species most people can recognise if they bother to look beyond – “oh it’s a pigeon”. Woodpigeons are large and with a big white bar on the wing and white bars on the neck. Feral pigeons/rock doves are familiar to everyone as the archetypal pigeon with two black bars on the wing, a white rump and green gloss on the neck. And collared doves are small, pale beige and have a black ring about the neck. The joker in the pack is the stock dove. An intermediate between wood and feral

pigeon but characteristic enough when you get your eye in. And they are surprisingly common

around Crail when you do. The key thing to look for is a very neat looking grey pigeon without any distinctive features; it’s

bizarrely the lack of characters that

identifies it. In flight the absence of any white easily rules out wood and feral pigeons and a stock dove’s wing does have very black flight feathers making at least one presence character to use to identify them. Stock doves nest in holes in trees and there are a couple of pairs at least in Denburn and in every stand of trees in farmland around Crail. I hear them every time I pass Denburn at the moment – a hoarse, deep, quite fast repeat of “wher – hoo”. The winds continued from the south most of last week. There is still a good swell up and fishing will be difficult for the shags that feed close inshore in the cloudy, turbulent water. There were more rough seas in the south-easterlies last Wednesday. There was a steady stream of guillemots flying past Crail close in with the occasional red-throated diver. All heading out of the Forth – the wind will be blowing them in

Gannet

StockDove

HerringGull

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and then any trying to go north will be pushed against the Crail coast as they head towards Fife Ness. I wish I had been able to spend longer than just the 10 minutes I had to seawatch that day. Just perfect conditions for a great northern diver or two to lumber past. I was in England last Thursday attending a funeral in the town I was born. One bright thing of the day – was the number of buzzards (everywhere) and a red kite that I saw between Stansted airport and Royston.

Thirty-eight years ago when I started bird watching there were no buzzards in that area and indeed much of eastern Britain.

And I never even dared hope for a red

kite, which was then a critically endangered species in Britain barely holding on to a few remote valleys in Wales. Persecution had done for both species. But they are back. I saw my first buzzard in the area in the mid-1980s (and indeed sparrowhawks started to become relatively common then too) and red kites have appeared in the last decade after the phenomenally successful reintroduction by the RSPB and others. We have the buzzards back around Crail too and they are a common sight. I occasionally meet people who rather bizarrely talk about “too many buzzards” being about – I certainly know what no buzzards being about was like. And it was dull. As I have said before, bring on the red kites back to Crail too.

MondayClub

13February“ScottishTerrierEmergencyCareService”

IslaReid20February

“CanaryIslandsHopping”BobMitchell

Monday2.15pmintheCommunityHall

EverybodyWelcome

Down Your Way

Crail High Street in the nineteen forties or fifties where you can now find the Co-op and Smoked Fire Foods is still recognisable. Does anyone know anything about the Haven Café? Who owned it, when did it close, did you used to go there? Some of our readers may know so please let us know.

Anstruther Inner Wheel

Charity Coffee Morning

In aid of

FIRST RESPONDERS

Saturday 18 FEBRUARY

10.00 am Legion Hall, Crail

Coffee/Tea Cakes, Preserves and Large Raffle

RedKite

7

LetterfromAmerica

AlexFleming,WashingtonDC

IwasintriguedtoreadintheScottishpressoverrecentweeksadebateaboutwhetheritwould

bedesirableorpossibletocreateahardborderbetweenScotlandandEnglandifthelatterleft

theEUandtheformerstayed.Wellofcourseyoucan…..buildawall!TheRomansmanagedit

almost2000yearsago.AndourPresidentTrumpwouldbehappytoadviseyou.Hiswallwith

Mexicowillbeabout20timesas longasyourssoaBritishwallwouldbeadoddle. Hecould

evenhelpyoupressuretheEnglishintopayingforit. Afterall it’stheywhowanttoleavethe

safetyandprosperityoftheEUsotheyshouldsurelypay?

IambeingfacetiousofcourseandaBritishwallis

beyondcontemplationperhaps.ButnotsotheUS

version.Seriousconsiderationisbeinggiventoit

eventhoughtherearefivechallenges1,apartfrom

whofinancesit,thatwouldneedtobeovercome:

• The 2000-mile border features a variety of

climates and vegetation and is very rough in

someareas.

• A significant amount of borderland in Arizona and Mexico is owned by the Federal

governmentbutmost of it inTexas is privately owned. Therewill be resistance from

theselandowners.

• ThesouthernborderofTexasistechnicallyinthemiddleoftheRioGrande. Thisriver

haschangedcourseinthepast,creatingboundarydisputesbetweentheUSandMexico.

• Securityexpertssaythatborderbarriersaremerelyobstaclesandawallwouldneedto

beconstantlymonitored.

• Migrants are very determined and often have few options as they seek to flee from

violenceintheirhomecountries.

One comment from a former homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, adequately

summeditallup,Ithought:“Youshowmea50-footwallandIwillshowyoua51-footladder!”

1Source:TheWashingtonPost,20Jan2017

StainedGlassEveningClasses&WeekendWorkshops

Tuesday&ThursdayEvenings6pm-9pm

Aselectionofcoursesaimedatbeginners,runbyKennyDrewofEastNeukGlass.Comealong

and learnhow tomake your own stained glasswindow from scratch.All tools andmaterials

included.

Formoredetailspleasevisitthewebsite:www.eastneukglass.com

Coursesrunallthroughtheyear.Comielaw,BalkaskieEstate,PittenweemKY102RE

07812740827 www.facebook.com/eastneukglass

Hadrian’sWall

Material for inclusion in Crail Matters should be sent to crailmatters@gmail.com and received on Friday midday before publication.

© Crab Publishing 2017: Editorial team this week Graham Anderson, Julie Middleton, Isla Reid, Valencia Sowry, Max Taylor, John Wilson.

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The Crail Seagull

An eye on our world

Oh dear – armed vigilantes targeting seagulls!!! It seems that people in Berwick-upon-Tweed really don’t like my cousins who live there, and there are reports of people wandering the streets with firearms. In Aberdeen, apparently, there are ‘giant seagulls’ according to an SNP MP. I’ve never seen a ’giant’ seagull, but would quite like to! Let’s hope all this aggression doesn’t happen here - I know I’ve been a bit critical of Fife Council, but might this mean they’ll set vigilantes on to me? This seems a bit excessive. Speaking of Fife Council, their latest wheeze to save money is called ‘Enabling Change’. Apparently, this is designed to enable staff to work remotely, with increased use of online and phone services for public interaction. I wonder if that extends to making managers even more remote from the services they offer? I would have thought a better solution is to move the administrators out of their offices and give them more contact (and work) with the public they allegedly serve. That might have a better chance of saving money, as well as improving service. And Council Tax is going to go up as well!

Crail Guild

Thursday, 16 February

Kirk Hall at 2.15pm.

Speaker: Gilford Bradley on MacMillan Cancer Support.

All welcome.

Keeping to a Fife Council theme, I went to have a look at what they have done (or rather not done) to St Ayles Crescent in Anstruther. A resident has written a poem including “Fife Council get the finger out and fix the bloomin’ hole” about an 8 year delay in making repairs. Whatever the rights or wrongs of that are, what adds insult to injury to Council Tax payers is the bizarre road markings the Council have put there. This is as good an argument as any for getting the administrators out of their offices in Glenrothes. I had a disturbing experience on Tuesday morning while taking a low flight to Kingsbarns – the rain was coming upwards! I was reassured by the gossipy sparrow that it wasn’t rising rain, it was splashes from motors going through the deep dubs at the roadside. I hope Fife Council didn’t pay too much to fix the drainage problems 2 weeks ago, it either hasn’t worked or someone forgot to switch on the drains. Can drains be turned on and off? I’ll ask that know it all sparrow.

Scotland'sGardens

Weneed2litreplasticpotsfortheKellieCastlePlantSaleonMay7th.

Pleaseleaveatfrontdoorof2CastleStreet.

ThankYouinadvanceforhelp.