East Ayrshire

Not all

the Ayrshires, you think, but just one Ayrshire authority rather than East Ayrshire.

That's the

next point I was coming up to.

West Hermiston, Chapelcross and Dumfries and Galloway.

Harlfred in East Ayrshire, Ochiltree in East Ayrshire.

Bishop Briggs, Dunbar in East Lothian, Corkenzie.

Larbert, Ochtertoole.

So I disappear 'cause I had to go and see somebody at the cottage, and then I return.

Yeah, we had, um, East Ayrshire Council, was it?

Yes.

Out to do-

[laughs]

Um, so, so when I was first called to be bishop is to, to, to enter into my ministry and then go to, to, to the, the people down in Galloway, and actually that covers an area of South Ayrshire, East Ayrshire, um, North Ayrshire, and Dumfries and Galloway.

So to, to get to know that, um-

And that's a really big patch

I'm trying to remember the presenter's name, but it's irrelevant.

Uh, and, uh, you think, "Oh, this is a terrible job." But cut to the, cut to the other side of the coin, there was a team who were tasked with going to the, the, the refuse site for the whole of East Ayrshire, which was close to where the...

And they raked through meters and meters of, of r- 'cause we were trying to find what, uh, sort of evidence that he had, he'd potentially thrown in his bin, and, and it had then been taken away by the council and put in a, put in a refuse site somewhere up the, uh, in the middle of nowhere.

And these guys, all, all detectives, uh, had to go up there into white suits and rake through the, uh...

So, you know, over that 30 years, we've probably planted a quarter of a million trees and things like, you know, school orchard trees, parkland trees, riverside trees for shading of the river, because that's a big problem to us.

The river Tweed is very much a salmon river and it's heating up and we're trying to cool it down so the fish... can survive in the river so if you plant native trees along the river if you can plant trees around field margins and field corners little copses things that are smaller than Scottish forestry type applications very very popular we do 70 or 80 of these a year so really proud of that little scheme and it was the first one in Scotland going back all these years and now Dumfries and Galloway have got their own scheme on the back of our one if you like and then I think East Ayrshire's got one going and I think Aberdeenshire's looking at one now so it's had a slow development but it's gaining ground right across Scotland now so we're very proud of that and I think it'll continue because it's so popular it's very easy to administer from our perspective you know

Yeah, we had Dumfries and Galloway Woodland on the podcast in the last episode.

They are talking about their woodland creation scheme and a nod to you guys.

From the National News Section Thursday the 17th of September King Charles condemned over secretive AI summit in Scotland Written by James Walker A summit organised by King Charles in Scotland, where the world's biggest AI companies in attendance, has been condemned as a secretive meeting that excluded local communities.

The monarch hosted executives from NVIDIA, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI at Dumfries House in Ayrshire on Thursday to discuss the future of artificial intelligence.

But the gathering has been criticised by the Scottish Greens, who said people in the south of Scotland were already concerned about plans for huge, hyperscale AI data centres, and hit out at the closed-door nature of the event.

Scottish Green's MSP Laura Moody, who represents South Scotland, said, Scotland's AI strategy needs to be shaped with openness and transparency, not by secretive meetings between an unelected and unaccountable monarchy and tech giants.

AI is here to stay and we need to respond to it.

We need a strategy that puts local people in the room, protects our environment and makes sure the benefits of this technology are shared rather than a big tech carve up.

The event at Dumfries House in Cumnock, East Ayrshire, was also attended by guests including the Chief Advisor to the Vatican on the Ethics of AI and Technology, the UK's AI Minister, Government Advisors and others.

Giving his opening address, Charles told the audience the development of AI is both intriguing and deeply concerning in equal measure.