Last updated 05:14, Friday, 24 October 2008

LAURA McDairmant’s death on an adventure holiday in Galloway was a tragedy her family and friends will never be able to accept as anything other than avoidable.

Laura was 15; a beautiful, lively, popular, bright girl, on the threshold of womanhood. She died after taking part in an organised activity known as “gorge-jumping” – leaping into a deep pool on the Grey Mare’s Tail burns near Black Loch in the Galloway Forest Park.

The Inverness-shire based Abernethy Trust, which runs the activity centre at Barcaple, yesterday admitted failing to ensure Laura’s safety and was fined £16,000 at Kirkcudbright Sheriff Court.

It could – and no doubt will – be argued that the amount is a paltry sum, when measured against the potential of Laura’s promising life. But Sheriff Kenneth Robb said: “The fine is to mark the revulsion from the community to the criminal and culpable death. I accept that this not a willful disregard for Laura’s safety but a systematic failure which led to the death of a young woman.”

The distinction is not easily made or accepted by close loved ones who grieve or others, more distant, who remain shocked at the awful waste of youth in what should have been a healthy, safe, enjoyable leisure pursuit. But the distinction does have to be made, as does careful, measured judgement about how and when our children should be exposed to necessary risk.

Laura’s death was a terrible tragedy. Promises that it will teach lessons to make other youngsters safer in similar circumstances have been made.

Responsibility of failure to properly assess and manage the risks to which she and other children in her group were exposed has been accepted and that culpable failure has been properly punished.

But to set Laura’s tragedy into some kind of perspective, mercifully few children suffer such heartbreaking misfortune and there remains a place for adventurous outdoor activity in youthful life development – growth which should not be stunted by irrational parental fear.