Increasing rural crime means trust is disappearing from many communities in the countryside, local residents claim.
In particular, farmers and gamekeepers in the normally tranquil Angus Glens say they have been left sickened by a spate of burglaries and damage to property.
Earlier this month, NFU Mutual published its Rural Crime Report, saying early theft claims statistics for the first half of this year showed a sharp rise of over 20 per cent nationally, raising concerns a new wave of rural crime is hitting the countryside.
Now several estates in and around Glenesk have reported suffering break-ins this month, with the most recent incident last week seeing the daylight theft of tools from an outbuilding belonging to a tenant farmer.
“You don’t expect these kinds of things to be happening so far up the glen,” said farmer Mike Littlejohn, who reported a burglary to police last week.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here