Access & Conservation News
Paul Fentener van Vlissingen
By John Mackenzie.
Most readers of Scottish Mountaineer will know of Paul’s death from cancer in the obituary columns of newspapers. What many will not know is that Paul was the first major landowner to agree to talks with mountaineers regarding a voluntary access agreement to the vast Letterewe estate.
The Letterewe Accord as it came to be known was two years in the making and involved MCofS, the Ramblers and all the Estate staff. For my part I was asked to chair the meetings and from an initially cautious start we soon found that there was vastly more that joined us than separated us. Without Paul and his partner Caroline Tisdall the whole concept would simply have fallen flat at the first sign of major difficulties and it is a tribute to Paul and Caroline that the two years of negotiation brought about a concept of access so radical that it formed the basis of SNH’s Access Concordat. This in turn was enshrined in law to create the Access Bill which is, without doubt, the most favourable in Europe.
Paul was not just a far-sighted man when it came to access. His genuine love of wild places ensured that Letterewe remained wild and unspoilt. He was a long way ahead of most estates when it came to vision and, with the financial means to back this up, he extended that almost missionary zeal to preserve into other areas, both at work, where he ran the family firm of SHV, and in injecting both cash and zeal into Africa’s National Parks. His method of involving other people in decision-making and his approachability not only made the Letterewe Accord work but also extended this wise philosophy into the greater challenge of the outside world. His contacts ranged from Nelson Mandela to Royal families, from stalkers and ghillies, to sportsmen and climbers, from industrialists and conservation bodies, from naturalist and geologist. Any product or method or philosophy that could better the natural environment, whether animal, plant or mineral, was subject to his scrutiny and I cannot think of any estate owner at least in Scotland with such a wide ranging interest in a holistic, almost Gaia-based concept of nature. Darwin, I think, would have approved.
Paul was only 65 when he died and with him has gone a great champion of the wild and unspoilt. I will miss his company, his unerring taste in good wine (“when were you born? he asked my wife Janet on one occasion; “then we will have a bottle from that year to celebrate”) and his love of Scotland. I can only hope that his concept of running Letterewe will continue into the future and that that momentum will continue within the National Parks of Africa.