Scottish Power initiative for auld Cockenzie Power Station augurs well for our community ..not least the battlesite!

Can this really be true? Here's believing the future looks bright!

The past six days have been buzzing with 'confidential' information, excitement and yes, anxiety. If the leaks are true, then Scottish Power is bowing out gracefully from the site of the auld Power Station and handing the land for a nominal sum to our community. That appropriately means East Lothian Council, as Willie Innes has accepted. And frankly that is potentially great news.



The community at large through the Coastal Regeneration Alliance and the 1745 Battle Trust have made clear there a number of local imperatives to be addressed. These include, as Iain Gray MSP points out in his statement to the press, getting Repsol/ Inchcape's putative SubStation off the 1745 battlefield and on to brownfield land to the north.



And our community is more than willing to discuss and agree how some of the area can be used for employment and indeed educational purposes - just so long as the Greenhills amenity is preserved indeed developed. Less well known, the CRA is also well advanced with research to honour and interpret the nation's first railway running from Tranent to Cockenzie harbour.

And it would be excellent if Scottish Power left its auld canteen facility intact for future conversion and use as an art gallery and even as an exhibition space for the Scottish Diaspora Tapestry.

Many great ideas. And if Scottish Enterprise fulfils its promise to stay with us all after it abandoned its earlier notion of an offshore energy park, East Lothian Council can take comfort that it has a great reservoir of goodwill to hand as it takes up the challenge.