Cookies and how they benefit you
Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can.
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer, tablet or mobile phone when you browse websites.
The cookies we use help us:
- Make our website work as you’d expect
- Remember your settings during and between visits
- Improve the speed/security of the site
- Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
- Continuously improve our website for you
We do not use cookies to:
- Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
- Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
- Pass data to advertising networks
- Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
- Pay sales commissions
You can learn more about all the cookies we use below
Granting us permission to use cookies
If the settings on the software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
More about our Cookies
Website Function Cookies
We use cookies to make our website work including:
- Remembering your search settings
- Allowing you to add comments to our site
There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.
Visitor Statistics Cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what pages they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called ‘analytics’ programs also tell us how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before. We use Google Analytics on this website.
Cookies used by this website:
| Cookie name | Function | Expiry |
| __utma | Google Analytics uses this cookie to keep track of the number of times a visitor has been to the site, when they first visited and when they last visited. Google Analytics allows us to use information like this to analyse the numbers of unique visitors our site has, and when the visits were. The statistics we receive do not allow us to trace individual visitors. | 2 years |
| __utmz | This cookie is used to keep track of where the visitor came from. This could be from a search engine, a link clicked on from a particular site, link from an email etc. It also records the visitor’s geolocation. Information provided through Google Analytics allows us to see the geographical distribution of our visitors so that we could, for example, use that information to see whether news for a Scottish event gave us a corresponding increase in site visitors from Scotland. | 6 months |
| wp-settings-1 and wp-settings-time-1 | These cookies relate only to logged in users, who are the editors and administrators of this website. They’re used to customise the view of the admin interface, which is the behind-the-scenes interface for editing the website. | 2 years |
| wordpress_logged_in_… | Again, only used for logged in users – the editors and administrators of the site, while they’re logged in. | End of session |
| bid_1_password_protected_auth | This was used during development of the website, when the pages were password-protected. It records whether the visitor has successfully entered the password to view the website, so that they don’t have to re-renter the password on every page. | End of session |
| wordpress_test_cookie | This is used by WordPress to test whether cookies are enabled or not. | End of session |
Turning Cookies Off
You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our website, and a large proportion of the world’s websites, as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites. You can also disable cookies with the Cookie Control feature, available via the link at the bottom left of your browser window when you’re at this site.
It may be that you have concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.