Our team of specialist top roping contractors have been scaling cliffs across the project area to control giant hogweed
We have been working with ‘Blokes on Ropes’, our specialist top roping contractors, since the early days of the Initiative to control giant hogweed on cliff sides and difficult-to-access areas. This year they treated more sites than ever before, covering several locations across the Findhorn, Deveron, North Esk, South Esk and Tay catchments.
The Scottish Invasive Species Initiative follows a ‘top-down’ approach with invasive non-native plants – upstream sources of our target species are located within each river catchment and control work begins from there, working steadily downstream. This ensures that cleared sites are not re-infested and allows us to work towards eradication in the long term, both at control sites and across a river catchment.
For this approach to be fully successful it is imperative that no site is missed and, in the case of giant hogweed, no plants are able to set seed upstream of our control sites. This means that all giant hogweed plants must be treated – even those on cliff faces!
This year we revisited sites on the River Findhorn, where we have been controlling giant hogweed since the early days of the Initiative, and on the Deveron, North Esk and South Esk Rivers, where treatment has been ongoing for two or three years. A couple of new sites (first started in 2024) had to be controlled on the North and South Esk as well, due to landslips and winter floods spreading seeds to new sites.
On the River Tay we were very excited to have top roping contractors deployed for the very first time. The wonderful Blokes on Ropes team got to work on the cliffs just south of Stanley, which will allow us to move giant hogweed control further downstream on the main stem of the Tay. Find out more from Project Officer Mark in the video below.
A massive thank you to the Blokes on Ropes team for all their hard work on these sites!
