Glencoe Visitor Centre

Visitor Centre Entrance

Visitors to the Highlands have grown used over the years to the sight of the National Trust for Scotland Visitor Centre, on the north side of the main A82 in lower Glen Coe. This was built in the 1970s in a fairly intrusive location in the centre of this spectacular and brooding glen, and by the 1990s it was simply too small to cope with the numbers of visitors.

Interior Displays Workshop Welcome Sign Old (Demolished) Centre

In 2002 the old visitor centre was removed, and a start was made on returning its site and car park to nature. May 2002 saw the opening of the NTS's new £3m visitor centre on the south side of the main road and lower down the glen, nearer to the village of Glencoe.

The buildings are laid out as a clachan, a settlement or village. Together they form a spindly "H" shaped structure, built on stilts just above the ground amid a birch wood. The stilts are intended to ensure a light footprint that doesn't disturb the tree roots or groundwater. The green design of the Visitor Centre carries through to the use of filtered water from a nearby burn, and the on-site treatment of sewage.

The buildings are mostly made from timber, and all of the timber used comes from sustainable sources in Scotland. Energy efficiency is very high, with recycled paper insulation in the walls, and sheep's wool instead of foam around the windows. Heating comes from a boiler (which also provides hot water to the showers in the campsite) burning locally sourced woodchips, making the Visitor Centre CO2 neutral in operation.

Visitors approach the centre from the car park via an entrance set in the middle of the west side of the "H". A range of very attractive facilities are on offer. These include an excellent cafe and a shop. You can also view exhibits about Glen Coe and the mountains surrounding it and view the Glencoe Lookout Station, showing images from web cameras covering parts of the surrounding countryside.

Shop

Cafe

Admission to much of the centre is free, though there is a charge (see right) to enter the "Living on the Edge" exhibition. This tells you everything you could possibly want to know about Glencoe, and more. It includes sections covering the ecology and geology of Glencoe, the mountaineering heritage of the area, and the wider history of Glencoe.

Projecting from the east side of the "H" of the Visitor Centre is a walkway leading to a 3D model of the surrounding landscape and a lookout point giving panoramic views of Glen Coe.

No development of this sort can ever be uncontroversial, and the new visitor centre is no exception. In part the concerns have been on environmental grounds: and it is true that however green the centre itself, the visitors driving to it are not. But most visitors will be passing by anyway, and the new centre is certainly less of an intrusion into the landscape than its predecessor.

There was also considerable controversy when the National Trust for Scotland appointed as the first manager of the Glencoe Visitor Centre a man called Campbell. This matters to some because of Glen Coe's main claim to fame, or infamy, which took place here just over 310 years earlier, at 5am on the morning of 13 February 1692. You can read the story of the Glencoe massacre on our Glen Coe feature page.

The Glencoe Visitor Centre