A hill track under construction on Beinn Bhuraich at Gorthleck in Stratherrick

Outdoors campaigners say the Scottish Government must act now to control the spread of controversial vehicle tracks across the country’s wild lands.

The Mountaineering Council of Scotland and the John Muir Trust pointed out there is no planning control on these developments, which are appearing on Highland hillsides in wilderness areas.

The MCofS’s president Chris Townsend pointed out the Holyrood administration has been sitting on a report on the problem for more than four years. The council said there has been an increasing proliferation of hill tracks created in some of the most beautiful and relatively untouched areas of Scotland with no form of planning control to consider the public interest in the landscapes being damaged.

A report by former Environment Minister Roseanna Cunningham said in seven years up to 2009, the area of Scottish wilderness without visual human influence had declined from 41 per cent to 28 per cent.

And the Scottish Executive drew up a recommendation to tackle the hill tracks problem. A petition last year from the MCofS led to a debate in the Scottish Parliament but no action followed.

Chris Townsend said: “The Scottish Government has sat and looked at this issue for several years. It’s now time for them to get off the fence and control the worst examples of tracks appearing in the wilder areas of Scotland.”

MCofS access and conservation officer Hebe Carus added: “Surely construction of hill tracks in some of our most beautiful wild areas should require more, not less, planning control than a small conservatory in a street full of other conservatories or the new panda enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo.”

The council said Alex Salmond’s Government must find a way to control the most damaging hill tracks, which have a disproportionate visual and environmentally damaging impact to the actual area of land on which they are constructed.

“There is nothing special about hill tracks that mean they should sit outside a planning system that is designed to control the impacts of developments on Scotland,” the MCofS said.

And John Hutchison, chairman of wild land conservation charity the John Muir Trust, added: “Wild land is being eroded by the unrestricted development of new vehicle tracks.

“We recognise that many of these tracks are essential for modern land management, but unless more effective controls are put in place, the ad-hoc manner in which they are built and maintained will continue to have an unacceptable impact on our outstanding landscapes.”