Brechin news – Buccaneers scoop green award

TANYA ALDRED celebrates the first Scottish winners of The Cricketer/Ortus Energy UK's Greenest Ground prize

After the disappointment of the last couple of cricketing months in Australia and the doomsday turn in world affairs, time for a January pick-me-up. It comes in the shape of the 2025 The Cricketer/Ortus Energy UK's Greenest Ground winner – the Brechin Buccaneers.

In five years of the competition, Brechin are our first Scottish champions. The club, nestled in the east of the town, a gateway to the Angus Glens and baguetted between Aberdeen and Dundee, was the judges' choice, but not before much beard-scratching at another outstanding field of entries.

It is an unusual club, where cricket is almost a sideline to work as a community hub. Grant Hutchison is the community development manager and local 90mph force of nature. "The council moved lots of services out of the east end of Brechin, where we are based and where the deprivation indexes are poor," he says, "we wanted to change that.

"What do we do? We are that person to have a joke with, a shoulder to cry on, and for every other time. And because of what we do, we can get enough people through the door to run cricket. Without the charity side, the cricket struggles."

Related: Fillongley hoot with delight as they swoop on our award

^{Brechin are a genuinely multi-purpose coach (Brechin Buccaneers)}

The club was transformed seven years ago, when they raised £500,000 to turn a disused social club on the site into a hub – The Crickety. The building, which has a heat recovery system, radiator foils and solar panels, has seen a quarter of a million people through the door in the last seven years, and has delivered £25million worth of help to the community.

The list of activities the club runs is mind-blowing: table tennis, IT, literacy and numeracy workshops, drug and alcohol counselling, and theory driving tests. They have held a slipper exchange – "the average cost to the NHS from a fall is £36,000, and most of them are caused by poor footwear" – and an oodie night, to help the community reduce their heating costs. They've also just finished thermal imaging 400 homes to identify heat loss. Hutchison, it soon becomes clear, writes an outstanding grant bid application.

They run energy-saving projects, which has included hiring a bike that makes smoothies – "it helps kids realise how hard they have to pedal to keep that red light shining on the Xbox." And after being astonished by how many children couldn't ride a bike, they started offering electric bike hire (charged from their solar panels) to encourage parents to go on family rides, as well as giving away 200 refurbished kids' bikes.

On the back of Storm Babet, which swept into Brechin in October 2023 with a ferocity beyond living memory, breaching the flood defences and destroying hundreds of houses, the club are now a resilience centre, complete with sandbags and solar panelled radios. They helped lead recovery efforts. They also run a share shop, hiring out everything from disco lights to a rug doctor, charging just £5 a day.

A number of community growing areas sit around the ground, including poly tunnels and locally endangered fruit trees. Onions the size of footballs and explosively hot chillis compete with 450 strawberry plants. Fruit cages and raised vegetable beds provide produce for their projects, or low-cost food provision for the community.

"Not food banks," says Hutchison, "we have to teach people how to fish." This outside space has been transformed by volunteers Derek Traill, the retired Sussex groundsman, and Michael Crabb. There are also four paid staff, most were early school leavers or had been unemployed for a while, and all "do an amazing job."

In the summer, Brechin host an Aberdeen club every week, and in 2025 held 50 games between representative teams, including the Scottish women and regional T20 finals, as well as training sessions for Nepal and the Netherlands.

Related: Boundary view: Whalley Range are green pioneers

^{(Brechin Buccaneers)}

^{Brechin have hosted training sessions for Nepal and Netherlands (Brechin Buccaneers)}

Hutchison is not short of ideas. "The average age of a groundsman is mid-50s," he goes on. "In an area of high unemployment, the solution is there: employ six apprentice groundspeople who can look after the grass rather than spend the money on plastic pitches. But that is too high up the food chain for me."

And with that, he must go; he has a cardwriting workshop and a Father Christmas visit to organise for a club dedicated to helping people and the planet.

Away from Brechin, previous winners continue to evolve, whether planting more wildflowers or investing in electric tools.

Our 2024 champions, Filllongley, were featured in the UK's stand at COP30 in Brazil last November, as an example of how local sport can contribute. Cricket at its very best.

Click here to know more about Ortus Energy.

This article first appeared in the February 2026 issue of The Cricketer magazine. Subscribe here

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