Lack of accommodation in Darvel for tourists

Every year, the Darvel Music Festival and the Walking Festival bring people into the town from across Scotland and beyond. Every year, many of them leave again at night – taking their spending with them.
That was one of the more striking findings in the Darvel Community Action Plan 2014–2019. After the town lost both a hotel and a B&B, the plan reported, there was nowhere left to stay in Darvel itself. The excellent Gowanbank B&B just outside the town was the nearest option, but most festival-goers and walkers had to base themselves further afield.
The plan was blunt about the cost. Visitors who stay elsewhere eat elsewhere, shop elsewhere and spend elsewhere, and the benefit to Darvel's economy was not being maximised.
The accommodation gap was part of a bigger story. For generations Darvel lived by lace. By the 1920s, the Irvine Valley's lace furnishings industry was the largest in the world, and locals were said to be "Darvel bred and Darvel fed". The last power looms fell silent in 2007, and most of the town's workforce now commutes.
Yet Darvel's economy is far from finished. The plan's community profile counted many small businesses still trading in services, retail and the trades, along with 27 working farms in the surrounding area. In the household survey, 13% of residents worried about a declining local economy, pointing to few jobs and a narrow choice of shops.
The plan's answer was to make the most of what already brings people to Darvel – its music, its heritage and its walking and cycling routes – and to make sure visitors had reasons to stop, stay and spend. Its Local Economy and Tourism theme proposed to:
• identify the gaps in the visitor experience and work to fill them
• improve amenities such as public toilets, parking and visitor information
• back existing and new small businesses through a business directory and a local business forum
• lobby for better broadband
• bring local businesses into the plan's wider economic work
One idea was to turn a derelict industrial building into workspace for new small firms. The Community Council, the Darvel Improvement Group, local businesses and East Ayrshire Council were named to lead the work.
The plan's vision for 2020 was a market town with a good mix of shops, cafés and places to stay, known as a good place to run a business and welcoming to visitors. For a town that already gives people a reason to come, the missing piece was giving them a reason to stay.