Photo Gallery: Aberdeenshire Sand Dunes

These photographs of sand dunes were taken by Brian David Stevens in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, along a stretch of pristine Scottish coastline. The pictures themselves, while captivating and beautiful in their own right, also have political freight. For it is dunes such as these over which a long and ugly battle raged for several years. In one corner was the voice of conservation, including a stubborn fisherman who might have walked out of the screenplay of Local Hero; in the other, the multi-millionaire developer, star of America’s version of The Apprentice and prospective presidential candidate, Donald Trump.

The story of Trump's long battle for permission to build on a pristine stretch of Scottish coastline was told in the film, You've Been Trumped, shown on BBC Two earlier this week. A void between the land and the sea, Scotland's dune systems are among the most valuable of the nation's habitats. The larger systems may have more than one ridge, with depressions or “slacks” between the ridges that often flood in winter. Scotland contains over 50,000 hectares of dunes – 71 per cent of Britain's coastal sand resource. Stevens' photographs now stand as a memorial to dunes which have themselves been Trumped.

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