A legal challenge surrounding a football club's plans to build a new stadium has gotten underway at Scotland's top civil court.
The No Kingsford Stadium (NKS) campaign group is opposed to Aberdeen Football Club's proposal for the £50 million development around seven miles west of the city centre.
Work is already underway on the project, which bosses say is creating and supporting local jobs.
A judicial review hearing, brought by the NKS group, began at the Court of Session in Edinburgh on Tuesday.
The substantive hearing, at which NKS is challenging Aberdeen City Council's decision to approve the plans, is scheduled to run for a total of three days.
Lord Tyre, the single judge hearing the case, is expected to deliver his decision at a later date.
The legal challenge to the 20,000-seater development near the A944 comes a year after councillors in the city overwhelmingly approved the plans.
NKS said it has raised more than £100,000 from over 1,000 individual donations to get to the stage of the court challenge.
The group says it is working to protect the green space network and the environment of west Aberdeen.
It is also critical of the distance between the Kingsford site and the city centre.
In advance of the hearing, the group said: "The judicial review will bring impartial scrutiny of the decision made by Aberdeen City Council and whatever happens we can say we tried our utmost to stop this development.
"Just look what can be achieved when communities pull together."
Raymond Edgar, director of the stadium project, said: "Our proposal represents a £50 million private investment in the region, which will benefit the club, the local community and the region overall.
"We are committed to contracting local companies in its construction and those appointed for phase one are already supporting and creating local jobs.
"Work is well underway on phase one and will only stop if the courts find against the council following the hearing.
"The hearing will only look at the process by which the planning application was granted and we are confident that due process was followed, allowing councillors to vote overwhelmingly to grant consent.
"The hearing is an unwelcome distraction which is costing the club and the council, and therefore the taxpayer, but we are hopeful of securing the right outcome."
The council is not commenting while legal proceedings are ongoing.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here