CITY chiefs were blooming furious after efforts to smarten up Dunfermline’s green spaces were jeopardised – by bees and butterflies.

The Press reported recently that an overgrown area of grass next to the Abbey was left to grow to attract wildlife.

But it happened just as Fife Council had appointed a new seasonal worker after getting flak over the look of the city’s historic areas.

Explaining the three-year appointment, the council’s area services manager Joe McGuinness said, “It’s mostly to carry out better quality maintenance around the Abbey.

“We were criticised last year by visitors who said it was a wonderful setting but they said the state of the grounds let it down.” The chair of the City of Dunfermline area committee, Helen Law, added, “To then discover they’ve got a bio-diversity area right across the road from the Abbey, all overgrown and unsightly, was too much but the parks department were very quick to go in, cut it back and tidy it all up once we explained it to them.

“It’s the centre of the town and our historic area, where tourists are particularly attracted to and where wedding groups come out of the Abbey, so you want to make it as attractive as possible.

“I’m fine with wildflower areas but not in such prominent places. There’s an area down at the bottom of the Glen and it’s in the right place.” She also said the new bin store next to City Chambers will soon get “those absolutely awful bins off St Catherine’s Wynd” and there are moves to make more of the City Chambers, improve its usage and make it easier for visitors to tour “by far the most iconic civic building Fife Council has”.