Keeping Forth Valley right
A directory of small food businesses goes out of date quietly. Hours change in October. A van moves to a different village. Nobody announces it, and a listing that was right in spring sends someone on a wasted trip in autumn.
That wasted trip costs the shop more than it costs the visitor. Someone who drives to a farm shop that shut an hour ago rarely tries again. So when a local tells us when the butcher actually opens, it isn't admin — it's the difference between a customer arriving and a customer giving up.
No improvements yet. Nobody has told us anything we've been able to act on — which makes the first one genuinely useful rather than a drop in an ocean.
When there are some, this will count changes we checked and applied — never messages received.
What one tap does
Nothing you send changes a listing on its own. It arrives as a suggestion, a real person reads it, and only then does anything change. Nothing publishes automatically, and nothing anonymous can edit a business's details — not at any level, not ever.
That isn't caution about you. It's what lets us ask a stranger a question at all: if a wrong or malicious answer could go straight onto a business's page, we couldn't honestly ask anyone anything. You never need an account, and we never ask who you are.
Around Forth Valley, people have been getting on with the same job in different ways.
Gargunnock bought its shop back. Drymen owns its pub. Balfron planted an orchard. Carron Valley grows its own, because there's no shop to walk to. None of it is a competition — it's a lot of answers to one question: how do you keep the places that feed you open?
If your village is turning something similar over, it's been done near you. That's most of what this page is for.
Your village
10 villages have something listed, 14 businesses in all. Listed alphabetically for now. Open the one you know.
Aberfoyle 1 business listed · 1 confirmed recently
One thing here would help:
Alloa 1 business listed · none confirmed recently
One thing here would help:
Brig o' Turk 1 business listed · none confirmed recently
One thing here would help:
Buchlyvie 3 businesses listed · 3 confirmed recently
A food hub, a farm up at Upper Ballaird, a coffee kiln and the village shop.
A couple of things here would help:
Callander 2 businesses listed · 1 confirmed recently
Fintry 1 business listed · none confirmed recently
One thing here would help:
Gargunnock 1 business listed · none confirmed recently
The shop here burned in 2021. The village bought it, rebuilt it, and opened it again in December 2024.
One thing here would help:
Gartmore 1 business listed · none confirmed recently
One thing here would help:
Killearn 2 businesses listed · none confirmed recently
Kippen 1 business listed · 1 confirmed recently
Kippen lost its café and its butcher's counter from the middle of the village. The counter runs from The Woodhouse now.
One thing here would help:
Who's missing?
The gap we can't see is the business that isn't here at all. If you know one — a farm gate with an honesty box, a baker who only does Saturdays — tell us their name and we'll go and find them. It becomes something for us to check, never a listing.