Hollywood made our tiny village world famous. But now we’re crippled by red tape… and forced to live in a museum

To travel down the steep and winding road leading to Pennan is to descend into a time between times.

Tucked up hard against towering red sandstone cliffs, a tangle of mostly whitewashed houses are strung out like fresh laundry along the Aberdeenshire coastal village’s single street.

Even visiting in the early spring sunshine, the buildings brace themselves for the constant battering from stiff winds and pounding seas.

The cliffs they cling to for protection are a treacherous friend, casting gloom and year-round damp over neighbouring properties. Winters are harsh, landslips are common.

Surrounded by nature’s hostility, life somehow endures. A dwindling band of inhabitants are still drawn to set up home in this stunningly beautiful spot despite the many hardships.

It doesn’t take long to navigate the place. At one end is the 19th-century harbour, a reminder of Pennan’s centuries-old story as a once thriving fishing port, sustaining 300 people at its height.

A five-minute walk brings you to the far end of the crescent-shaped bay and the brightly painted village hall – rebuilt from a First World War aerodrome accommodation hut.

Halfway along is the famous red telephone box and the Pennan Inn opposite, both instantly familiar to fans of Scottish director Bill Forsyth’s gentle 1983 comedy, Local Hero.

In the film, Pennan doubles for the fictional Highland community of Ferness, where residents seek to cash in on a US oil giant’s desire to buy their village – unaware that the Americans plan to wipe it out and build an enormous oil terminal in its place. 

Down the years, this tight huddle of 50 or so dwellings has assumed many different roles – some illusory, others long buried by history.

But that storied past is intruding like never before into its present.

For Pennan is a conservation village, a status bestowed on areas of ‘special architectural or historical interest, the character or appearance of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance’.

It comes with a welter of strict heritage rules, which are subject to a review by Aberdeenshire Council – the planning authority tasked with producing ‘specific guidance’ for Pennan and the more than 30 other conservation areas in its domain.

In its appraisal, the council describes Pennan as having ‘one of the most distinctive and recognisable views in Aberdeenshire’.

Homeowners’ views of the consultation document are less admiring – conservation red tape has left them feeling like they are ‘living in a museum’, trapped in an unrealistic cartoonish yesteryear over which they have little control.

Indeed, so fed up are they with what they regard as often costly and nonsensical conservation guidelines, that they have taken the unusual step of trying to de-designate their village’s conservation status.

‘They talk about conservation, but who’s it being conserved for exactly?’ said Shona Stephen, 53, one of just eight full-time residents. ‘We want more people living in the village, to boost the community, and if you’re not allowed to do things to the houses, the young crowd particularly won’t come as they want the modern conveniences of life.

‘Yes, the houses are old and we need to look after them, but why do we need wrought-iron guttering and wooden single- glazed windows?’

Ms Stephen also runs the Coastal Cuppie food shack at the harbour. On cold March days, she uses the village hall as a pop-up space where she serves up wonderful home baking.

She had to ‘jump through hoops’ to open the shack, forced to swap the original bright blue shed with bunting for a smaller one the size of ‘traditional’ Pennan sheds.

‘They wanted it creosoted black. Why? Nothing else is here,’ Ms Stephen said

There were further restrictions over shutters because it had ‘to look like a shed not like a business’. Even though it was clearly a business? ‘This is what you’re up against,’ she added.

‘They want tourism, they want folk to visit, but you’ve to keep everything looking like it was in nineteen-oatcake.’

Conservation areas were first introduced by the Civic Amenities Act 1967 and Pennan received its designation ten years later, but no specific guidance was ever written for it.

The council’s proposed new rulebook lays out strict planning rules for changes or repairs to safeguard the village’s ‘unique and remarkable’ character.

It details examples of bad practice around the village – uPVC gutters and downpipes are ‘not suitable’ and should be replaced with cast-iron alternatives ‘in keeping with the character of the historic settlement’.

Other unacceptable modern upgrades include uPVC windows, oversized box dormers and large roof lights. Fixtures such as satellite dishes and solar panels would also be frowned upon, it notes, were there any in Pennan.

People have been caught out placing the wrong colour and style of tiles on the roof, while even the village grit bin has been found to be ‘not complementary to the character and appearance of the conservation area’.

But it is not always clear which Pennan the conservation lobby is trying to preserve. The present village is a hotchpotch of change.

The harbour dates to the 19th century before fishing boats became too big to use it, while much of the present layout dates to after the devastating ‘Great Storm of 1953’ which washed away nearly all the buildings on the bankhead by the shore. Other modifications are more recent.

‘The houses were never whitewashed before, you know, that’s quite a new thing,’ said Ms Stephen. ‘It was just after Local Hero that they thought, “Make it look pretty”.’

The movie, which starred Burt Lancaster, Denis Lawson, Peter Capaldi and Fulton Mackay, sparked a programme of improvements in the late 1980s, including the burying of power lines and the retention of the red phone box. A modern anomaly, but a key tourist draw.

‘It is a fabulous thing because I’ve got a business from the tourist trade on the back of the film,’ said Ms Stephen, but she added: ‘We don’t want to live in a museum. We want to be able to maintain our houses and be able to afford to maintain them.’

Maintaining porous sandstone buildings built beside a damp cliff-face is a full-time task, requiring them to be heated year- round. Ms Stephen’s home had been lying empty for four years when she bought it and it took her two years to dry it out.

‘There’s no mains gas here, so it’s expensive storage heaters for us, which costs around £300-400 a month for electricity.

‘Somebody installed one of those air source heat pumps but it lasted two years. The salt killed it. Salt kills everything here.’

In January, it emerged that a couple restoring a cottage roof face the prospect of tearing off all their new slates after it was found they did not match the old red pantiles. The work, which was necessary to make the house watertight, was carried out without planning permission.

The couple now face an anxious wait for retrospective approval.

For retired second homeowner Alistair Mackenzie, 73, it is evidence that the focus is all wrong.

‘I’m not proposing a building free-for-all, but I think there are enough controls within planning legislation to control that anyway,’ he said.

‘I want a sustainability plan, not a conservation plan, something that looks to the future, to protect Pennan for future generations, not something that looks backwards in the rear-view mirror to 1953. Because that’s the time-stamp on the current conservation document – the Great Storm of ’53 – and most of us weren’t born then.

‘There are significant threats to Pennan and they come from its geographic location – from the sea to the north and the potential for overtopping and flooding and whatever, and from the cliffs to the south, where we’ve seen some recent instability again in the cliffs.

‘These are the major risk elements to Pennan and meanwhile we are talking about plastic guttering and plastic windows and the size of skylights and what kind of tiles are on the roofs. That to me is just completely wrong-headed.’

The last major landslip happened on August 6, 2007, when a prolonged period of heavy rainfall brought hundreds of tonnes of mud and rock crashing down between Nos 18 and 53, leading to the evacuation by lifeboat of all residents while major stabilisation works had to carried out.

Evidence of the latest slippage a fortnight ago can clearly be seen behind homes in the middle of the village.

‘People love the chocolate-box, picture-postcard image of Pennan – it does look stunning and I don’t want to see that disappear. People who know me know I am very protective of Pennan,’ added Mr Mackenzie.

‘But the conservation argument really pales into insignificance with the challenges that Pennan could face in the future if some of the major risk events are not addressed.’

If they are not addressed, he argues, there may be little left to conserve. ‘God forbid, if there’s a major erosion of the cliff again, that could wipe out properties completely,’ he added.

‘We need to look at what are the major risk events and plastic guttering is not going to threaten the village. We need to protect Pennan by looking forward 50 years, not back half a century.’ There is recent precedent for de-designation. Planners have recommended that Aberchirder, also in Aberdeenshire, should lose its conservation status after it was found its historic core was no longer worthy of designation.

However, Mr Mackenzie admitted Pennan would face an uphill fight as heritage watchdog Historic Environment Scotland would likely object.

Others lament the conservationists’ emphasis on preserving ‘a perceived idea of a fishing village’ when they made site visits.

‘Well, a fishing village would have had boats and creels and nets and things,’ said Fiona McRae, who runs a photography business, SunshineNShadows. ‘That’s gone, not because of a decline in the fishing industry but an increase in boat size which has made this harbour unsuitable – it’s only leisure craft that come now.

‘So this is, dare I say it, the sanitised version of a fishing village. And one of the built heritage guys said we should have single glazing and I asked him if he had ever been here in the winter. His answer was, “It must be exciting”.’

Ms McRae plays a brief clip on her phone of recent bad weather.

It looks more unnerving than exciting with seawater flooding the street. Many houses have flood-boards protecting their front doors and preventing water from simply pouring inside.

‘Does me living in an 18th century village mean I have to have 18th century standards, or can it be brought into the 21st century and made suitable for modern life?’ she asked. ‘We are blessed with really good broadband, so there’s no reason why people couldn’t move here and work remotely.

‘And we have community events and get-togethers and we’ll have our annual screening of Local Hero in September followed by a ceilidh.

‘We are trying to live in the 21st century, but they are harking back to how it used to be – and yet, it looks nothing like it used to be.’

Ms McRae added: ‘If we lost conservation status, what would happen to the village?

‘Would it be any worse? We would still maintain our homes; between the cliffs and the sea, there’s nowhere for builders to develop.’

One ‘developer’ is David McRobbie, who is renovating the only stone house left by the Great Storm on the bankhead.

Like many second homers, he has a strong familial connection to Pennan, tracing his roots back to the 1700s with links to all the village’s three main families – the Watts, the Gatts and the Wests.

It used to be the old bakehouse but was turned into a home by a relative about 40 years ago. Mr McRobbie and his wife Karen, both 60, have stripped it back to bare walls.

It’s a labour of love and they are trying to do everything by the book, but there are compromises. No one makes the original roof tiles any more and even they have replaced a small window overlooking the sea with a small uPVC double- glazed unit.

‘If I put in single-glazing, it would probably crack when the first wave hit it, as they bring up stones as well,’ he said. ‘I wanted a composite front door too, more to make the house watertight at high water. When it’s blowing a gale, the house gets an awful pounding.’

In the end, he opted for a wooden door, but was lucky to find a skilled joiner to make it for him: ‘There’s nobody leaving school to be joiners. I’m doing all the liming of the walls myself too, but it’s trial and error – I’m learning it all off YouTube videos.’ Conservation, he says, simply assumes the skills and money are there to sustain our heritage.

Nevertheless, Mr McRobbie is more exercised by the requirement to pay double council tax on his second home. ‘If they want us to live in the past, maybe we can pay the poll tax from the 1950s too,’ joked his wife. ‘I’d be up for that,’ he added.

‘Anyway, it’s not just about the bricks and mortar for us. We have history and connections to this place and it’s for my children and grandchildren and to maintain a link.’

Leaving Pennan, a last look back captures a rogue wave crashing right over the old bakehouse, and for an instant, the property disappears from view, just as its neighbours did in the Great Storm.

Even conservationists cannot legislate for nature. Or, as Burns declared: ‘Nature’s mighty law is change.’