This, I admit, was not a hard choice. We had been there before, some 20 years ago, with our children. Now, we would be taking our grandchildren and it would be their first exposure to the grandeur of the Highlands on the banks of Loch Awe in Argyle.

The memories of that first trip still lingered for it was here that the Forestry Commission were pioneering a type of holiday common in America and parts of Scandinavia but new to the UK: a forest holiday with impeccable "green" credentials for those interested in walking, climbing, bird-watching or fishing for monster wild brown trout.

It was based on a small village of log cabins at Dalavich. There was no disco, no supermarket, no cinema and the best means of transport was by boat on the loch. Even the nearest pub was seven horrendous miles away by one-track road where one was more likely to collide with a stag or a low-flying buzzard than another car.

There was, however, a small community centre, with a bar, café and sports hall to serve the 60-odd local families who ran the huge forestry plantation, tough, tanned, timber-hard Highlanders who made visitors welcome of an evening.

That was then. Now, I report with the heaviest of hearts, the whole lot is up for sale. The Highland Clearances are alive and well and still destroying once-vibrant communities 200 years after Red Coats began to clear the glens.

You see, the site needs expensive refurbishment after 20 years facing the Highland weather. Only a handful of the locals still work "on the forestry" - machines have seen to that. And Forest Holidays, set up as a sub-division of the commission to encourage green holidays, doesn't have the cash.

So you could buy the lot - some 40 cabins, the community centre and the rest - for a figure rumoured to be less than £1 million, which wouldn't buy you a lock-up garage in some parts of London.

Now this is not just sad. It is devastating in the 21st Century when everyone agrees - in theory at least - that green tourism is the future for the remoter areas of the UK. That's what people say. What they do is different.

I don't expect politicians and civil servants in Whitehall to take much interest in the Scottish Highlands - they don't take much in the Yorkshire Dales either - but Scotland now has its own parliament.

That can't find a few hundred thousand to save a whole community from the new Highland Clearances. But it can afford to lavish tens of millions on a lavish new parliament building.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?