Our Strathglass.
What next?
We live in a wonderful place, but it’s not without its challenges.
What should our priorities be for the future?
That’s the question everyone in the Strathglass Community Council area is being asked in Spring-Summer 2026.
Transport, community, public services, jobs, housing, nature, climate change, renewables infrastructure, or other things…
Your priorities will be the foundation of a new Plan for our community’s future - our Plan - which will be ready by Autumn 2026.
The Strathglass Plan will influence public services, guide how community benefit money & other funding is spent, and shape future change.
Read on to find out more…
Your place, your plan
Local community organisations have come together to help the local community to create a Strathglass Plan for our shared future.
What should go into the Plan is up to the local community - you, your family, friends and neighbours.
During the course of 2026, working together, we will prepare a new community-led plan for Strathglass. Nobody knows what will be in the Plan yet. The priorities it tackles will be the local community’s priorities, shaped by you. It’s an exciting opportunity to shape our community how we want.
You can find out more about community-led planning and see examples of how it has helped other communities on the About page.
The Plan will be prepared in three stages:
Ideas and aspirations: During Spring 2026, we’re reaching out as widely as we can to give everyone the opportunity to contribute. What do you like about your community? What could be better? The first steps included asking every resident to fill in a short survey, discussions with schools, community groups and businesses, and a community event on 29 March with music and a free lunch (really!).
Actions: later in Spring, we’ll share all the results from stage 1 and organise community conversations to explore what to do about the priorities that emerge from the first stage of work. More details about these events will follow.
Plan: in the Summer, everything will come together in an overall Plan - first a draft for you to check, and then a final version for Highland Council to register as our Local Place Plan.
Then comes the exciting work of making it happen!
Cannich Spring Session
Around 70 folk came along to a special Cannich Spring Session in March 2026 to enjoy tasty soup and cake, live music and plenty of creative chat about the future of the community!
It was an opportunity to help people complete the community survey, find out more about the plan, and enjoy chatting with other residents about the future of the community. With a giant map for ideas, using local photos old and new to make collages, model-making with plasticine, or sharing your greatest fear for the future… there was something for everyone!
Scroll down to ‘Our aspirations’ to see what people said at the event, together with responses to the community survey and young people’s ideas from work in local schools.
Community survey
The plan must of course reflect the aspirations of the whole community as a whole. So, to give everyone the opportunity to shape the plan right from the start, we organised a community survey.
During March and April 2026, surveys were delivered to every household in Strathglass and made available online. The survey was promoted through local social media, by community groups, through local schools, and at the special Spring Session.
Who responded?
The survey received over 170 responses, approximately 27-28% of our population of roughly 630.
The adjacent graph shows the ages of respondents and whether they lived in the area. To see more detail, see this interactive graphic.
The age profile of survey respondents is similar to that of the local community, except that a slightly higher proportion of people aged 30-44 responded and a slightly lower proportion of people aged 75 or over (see section 1.2 of the aspirations report).
The first main survey question asked people to say the relative importance of eight issues that the local community faces. The top three were facilities and services, which came out top, followed by housing and landscape & wildlife. The interactive graphic below shows the relative scoring for all eight of the issues.
Community issues
Strathglass has a history of renewable power generation from the hydro-electric schemes of the mid 20th century. More recently, increasing number of development proposals have come forward for wind power generation and associated infrastructure such as transmission lines and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS). Renewable power generation is a controversial topic, but it is just one of many important issues facing the community. To avoid other issues being obscured and to glean useful input for the plan, the survey included questions about renewable power.
The responses are summarised in the interactive graphic below. A number of people also left comments which can be seen in section 1.4 of the aspirations report.
Renewable power infrastructure
Survey respondents were asked: What do you like about Strathglass and your local community?
156 people answered the question. The graphic summarises the main “likes”, categorised by theme. Circles are proportionate to the numbers of people who mentioned each theme, with the number of respondents shown in each circle.
What’s good about Strathglass?
What could be better?
Survey respondents were asked: What could be better? [in Strathglass and your local community] Approximately 160 people answered the question.
The graphic summarises people’s main suggestions, categorised by theme. Circles are proportionate to the numbers of people who mentioned each theme, with the number of respondents shown in each circle.
The most popular theme, community facilities and activities, is broken down in more detail in the circle below right.
Brief explanations of each theme
Nature and the outdoors: especially wildlife, landscapes, walking, cycling
People and community: welcoming, friendly, inclusive, close-knit, supportive, great place to raise kids, positive
Local facilities & services: especially Cannich hall, primary school, shinty, shop, playparks, pub etc
Way of life: peaceful, safe, small size, unspoilt, relative lack of tourists
Cultural heritage: history & traditions
New affordable homes: recently built in Cannich
Explanations of each theme and transcriptions of responses can be seen in section 1.6 of the aspirations report.
Voices of the future
Our young people are our future. What are their aspirations for the local community?
During Spring 2026, local pupils in our catchment schools had the opportunity to say what they would like their local community to be like in the future. We used a big map to get them thinking and gather their ideas.
All of their comments are transcribed on the accompanying maps for Cannich, Struy and Tomich. The maps also contain comments made by adults at Spring Session in late March, colour-coded to differentiate them.
Click on the main map to download a higher resolution version. Click on the thumbnails beneath to move between maps.
For a full report of all the aspirations expressed through the community survey, Spring Session and schools activities, check out the aspirations report.
Our aspirations
The full report includes transcriptions of survey comments. That’s because we believe it’s important to publish as much as we can because it offer a wealth of information for anyone interested in Strathglass - a snapshot of the community in 2026. It will also help everyone to make informed decisions about what the plan should focus on as we move forward.
Remember: if you have any questions, please contact the independent planner/facilitator who is supporting the work, Nick Wright. His contact details are at the bottom of the page.
What’s next?
During summer 2026, the independent facilitator Nick Wright continue to have one-to-one conversations with local businesses and community organisations, to understand their aspirations and constraints and to feed into the plan. We’ll publish an anonymised summary of the main points on this website.
If you’d like to share some thoughts with Nick, he’d love to hear from you. His contact details are at the bottom of the page.
Watch out for a community event in early September the summer, where everybody will be invited to explore how to bring our community aspirations to life. Everybody welcome!
Then everything will come together in an overall Plan in the autumn - first, a draft for you to check, and then a final version for Highland Council to register as our Local Place Plan.