Byline: Rob Edwards;Environment Correspondent

AS the BBC drama series Monarch of the Glen reaches its romantic climax tonight, the real-life Highland estate featured in the drama has been accused of ''putting a pistol to the head'' of the local community in a bitter dispute over a derelict cottage. Local residents say the owner of Ardverikie estate near Laggan in the central Highlands is behaving in the same high-handed way as the fictional young laird of Glenbogle, Archie MacDonald, whose various dilemmas reach crisis point in the last episode of the series. Life, they suggest, is really imitating art. The Laggan Forest Trust wants to buy the dilapidated Feagour cottage and its surrounding grounds as the centrepiece of a new community woodland it has been working on for the past four years. But, as well as the #40,000 price of the cottage and its five-acre plot, the estate has demanded 400 acres of prime woodland from the Forestry Commission, a partner in the community woodland scheme. ''I regard it as a hostile act,'' said Roy Tylden-Wright, chairman of the Laggan Forest Trust. ''I am sorry that the estate doesn't have the goodwill and imagination to make this thing work.''

Laggan Forest Trust, which represents more than 100 people from the local area, is pioneering Scotland's first attempt at running a community woodland. For the last four years, in partnership with the government's Forestry Commission, it...