Council battling to save Angus town from ‘ending up in North Sea’

A town in Angus is at risk of “ending up in the North Sea”, councillors have said.

The Dynamic Coast report in 2021 predicted that Montrose will lose about three metres of its coastline each year.

During Storm Babet in 2023, its beach lost seven metres in one night.

Montrose Golf Links is the fifth-oldest course in the world, and it’s already lost 100 metres of land.

A report on behalf of Montrose Golf Links by EnviroCentre in December 2023 found that historically observed average rates of retreat range from just under three to seven metres per year.

The club’s former chairman, John Adams, said the entire town is at risk.

“We’re losing two metres a year, and that’s an average”, he said. “If we get a real high tide, spring tides and high winds like today you’ll be losing more than that. We lost seven metres in one night with Babet, and it doesn’t recover.”

“It’s not just the golf course at risk. There’s fears if something isn’t done, the entire town could end up in the North Sea.

“You can put rock armour all the way into the North Esk River, which is expensive, £100m, I guess.

“Or you can build an offshore reef which replaces the reef we originally had and stops the waves from hitting the beach but if you don’t do that the consequences are Montrose is under water.”

The local authority has plans for further measures to slow the erosion of Montrose’s coastline.

“We’re proposing to put in something like a hundred thousand square metres of sand”, it said.

Local councillor Bill Duff says the council has put in a rock groyne, aimed at interrupting water flow, in early this year, with plans for another to be installed next year.

But Cllr Duff says the prospect of losing the entire town to coastal erosion is still a “real concern”.

He added: “It’s just a question of doing all the planning, getting all the consents and doing that.

“And that hopefully should mitigate coastal erosion, I don’t think you can stop it but I think that would be mitigating it.”