Saturday 21 November 2015

Highland Titles - Peter Bevis Caught Lying About Conservtion Work

Back in the day, Highland Titles MD Peter Bevis would from time to time weigh in personally to defend his dodgy enterprise. Nowadays these efforts are continued by the ‘anonymous’ site highlandtitlesscam.com, which affords a fig leaf of deniability if things are said that shouldn’t have been.

We are grateful to a reader who turned up the following on archive.org. Even if Peter Bevis had not published the blog in his own name (scroll to the end of the blog - Posted 17th August 2012 by Peter Bevis), the superior, patronising, unpleasant tone is quite unmistakable to connoisseurs.

An archive of the blog can be seen HERE, and there is a pdf file copy HERE.

There are a number of aspects of this piece that perhaps merit comment, but for the moment we’ll focus on just one.

We were impressed that in a relatively short blog the word ‘lie’ or ‘lying’ is used no less than 14 times (count them) in dismissing the concerns raised by Robin Cunninghame Graham. Could there perhaps be some message the author is trying to get across? (Other than that the author is hell-bent on fuelling a defamation suit.)

This typically pungent paragraph caught our eye: “Another naughty lie, Robin. … They [our customers] see for themselves the 10,000 trees that we planted last year and the thousands of trees planted in previous years. … You can tell lies on your web site. Everyone who reads your lies and subsequently visits Keil Hill will immediately have proof of your lies.”

Just to let us know that wasn’t a typo, Peter Bevis repeats essentially the same claim in different wording further on: “What you meant to write was “I have absolutely no idea about the 10,000 trees planted at Keil Hill last winter because I live in Spain. …””

Note, The article was posted 17th August 2012.

Which creates a problem, since in their 5 Year Plan published in 2014, Highland Titles wrote of 5,000 trees planted over the first 5 years.

This year, according to Highland Titles' local representative Stewart Borland, the figure has reached around 8,000 trees.


This figure of around 8000 trees planted is confirmed on a Highland Titles Facebook post from 17 September 2015. Archived HERE




All very commendable, except it means Bevis’s rebuttal of Cunninghame Graham’s concerns in 2012 was a perfectly shameless lie. After 8 years at Keil Hill, Highland Titles’ plantings haven’t totalled the number Bevis claimed were planted just in winter 2011/12. From Highland Titles’ own later figures, the actual rate of planting over the first 5 years was on average 1,000 trees/year. Bevis inflated this by a factor of 10, likely reasoning that no one was in a position to count the plantings and contradict him. At that time Bevis was in all likelihood making more money from his EHIC operation than from Highland Titles and didn’t give much thought to how his lie would hold up in the future.

This should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone tempted to take the word of Peter Bevis seriously. Sadly we know from past experience that it won’t – his advocates will continue to find excuses for him or otherwise turn a blind eye.



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