Badenoch estate 'shell

Alvie Estate is counting the cost of last night's devastating blaze which destroyed its woodchip plant.

Fears are that the cost of the inferno could be in the region of £250,000 for the estate between Kincraig and Aviemore.

"We're insured but then, buying second-hand equipment to be economical only means that the machinery depreciates so it all has to be assessed yet," said Jamie Williamson.

He and his staff were 'shell-shocked' at the speed with which it had all happened.

This afternoon he told the Strathy: "At 4pm everything was fine. By 6pm the fire had started and by 6.30 the shed had gone."

The 288 square metre timber-built, metal-roofed structure had gone up in smoke, taking with it a bank of solar panels which had powered the process which extracted the moisture from the pine and larch trees which the estate chips for its customers' biomass systems.

Those include Glenfeshie Estate, Kingussie High School and Rothiemurchus among a dozen others.

"We will be able to carry on supplying their boilers for this year, but we have work to do to take things much beyond that. We can carry on drying wood in the round meanwhile and the weather, at least, is on our side in that."

Fire crews came from a wide area after the alarm went up. The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service first sent appliances from Aviemore, Kingussie, Grantown and Elgin.

As the blaze continued the service sent up a special unit from Balmossie in Fife.

"It was a welfare pod, for the firefighters," a service spokesperson confirmed at Dundee HQ.

Last watch and damping down was taken over by teams from Aberlour and Tomintoul and it was past 2am when they finally departed.

This morning the job of establishing just what had happened began and initial suspicions were that a problem had occurred at the boiler, with cooling fans instead blowing flames through the building, although this has not been confirmed.

Mr Williamson has spent 18 years pioneering biomass in the strath and intends to continue providing what he argues is some of the greenest energy available, with local timber producing local supplies for local biomass heating systems.