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Whose Land Is It Anyway?
Ian Bell, 13 July 2003
Sunday Herald
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John MacLeod may have gifted the Cuillin of Skye to the people of Scotland - in
exchange for the upkeep of Dunvegan Castle, of course - but why be grateful for
something that should belong to us in the first place?
Perhaps you have a fine old house worth £50,000. Perhaps that house has a
spacious and delightful back garden. Perhaps, for argument's sake, the dear old
family house is in a bad way and needs £200,000 worth of repairs. What do you
do? The chances are that you do not nip off to the local building society, talk
them into paying £200,000 for your £50,000 house, and then persuade them to
allow your family to occupy the place in perpetuity.
Your cherished backyard might be one of the highlights of the neighbourhood, but
a building society manager is likely to point out that it isn't worth much
actual money. As for your fine, distinguished, but sadly leaky old house, in
perpetuity is a very long time indeed, not least when the only alternative is
wrack and ruin.
Bump up the numbers a bit, nevertheless, and you have the latest episode in the
tale of the Cuillin of Skye, Dunvegan Castle and John MacLeod of MacLeod. Three
years ago the chieftain announced that he was selling his part of the mountain
range for £10 million in order to keep a roof over himself and his guests at the
ancestral home. Outrage ensued. Some people said MacLeod had no moral right to
sell off part of Scotland's natural heritage; others said he had no legal right.
Prospective buyers - the numbers varied - were nevertheless supposed to be keen.
On paper the laird had it made. In strict commercial terms a 23,000 acre estate
with little to offer in the way of agricultural or sporting income would not
have been worth much more than £2.5 million. The Cuillin, however, is not just
any old piece of landscape. But with £10m to hand MacLeod could fix Dunvegan's
sieve-like roof, create a hotel and leisure complex, and develop the gardens,
the better to entertain 145,000 visitors annually.
Three years on, things have come unstuck or gone beautifully, depending on your
point of view. Whether because of adverse publicity, falling stock markets or
sober reflection, Cuillin-buyers with £10m to spare appear to have become thin
on the ground. Dunvegan meanwhile continues to show the effects of its 800-year
existence. And MacLeod, suddenly, is "delighted" to do his bit for Scotland's
national heritage.
Which is to say that if Highland Council, Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE),
the John Muir Trust and anyone else prepared to help can find approximately
£10m, and possibly more, for Dunvegan's restoration, "the people" can have the
so-called Black Cuillin, the heartland of Skye.
All the chief requires are residence rights for himself and his family for as
long as the family endures. His gesture is, in the language of the landed, "a
gift".
Most people appear to be happy with that. Jack McConnell, First Minister,
believes a deal would be good for Scotland. Jim Hunter, chair of HIE, sees an
opportunity to create Scotland's first real national park. The leader of the
council's Skye and Lochalsh committee thinks the idea of public ownership is
"fitting". Nobody seems to have noticed that MacLeod, in the apparent absence of
any viable alternative, has struck an excellent deal for himself.
First, Dunvegan is renovated at public expense. Secondly, the tricky question of
whether he actually has any legal right to the central part of the Cuillin is
made to go away. On one interpretation he surrenders control of an estate he
could not manage to sell or afford to maintain. On another reading he and his
family gain permanent rights to a very decent residence maintained at public
expense in exchange for a tract of economically-negligible land to which he has,
it is said, questionable title.
A royal charter exists: of that there is no doubt. Issued in 1611, it granted
the Barony of Dunvegan to the MacLeods, but it did not actually mention the
Cuillin specifically. Equally, three years back, the Banffshire-based Land
Reform Scotland, Ramblers Scotland and the Scottish Office nagged the Crown
Estate into investigating whether the holders of Dunvegan had in fact fulfilled
all the legal obligations set out in their title deeds.
No-one seriously expected the Crown to open up the can of worms that is land
ownership in Scotland - just how many ancient deeds are actually valid? - but
some thought the legal opinion might be interesting.
So it proved. Acting with legal counsel's advice, the Crown Estate "found no
evidence to support a legal challenge against John MacLeod's title" to the Black
Cuillin.
After questioning by Land Reform Scotland, however, it turned out that in
counsel's opinion MacLeod's title was merely "capable of including the Cuillins".
In plain language, this boiled down to saying that because the claim of lordship
had not been challenged in 20 years, MacLeod, the former John Wolrige-Gordon,
was secure. So there.
Legalese was incapable, of course, of expressing the idea that the ancient
fabric of Scotland might not belong to anyone in any real sense. The country's
self-selecting deed-holders, as opposed to its long-dispossessed people, do not
think in those terms.
Having made an almighty stink in the run-up to the Land Reform (Scotland) Act by
turning a simple argument over access - the right to cross land; the "right to
be on land for recreational, educational and certain other purposes" - into the
main issue, they yet again deflected the demand for proper reform.
True, the spectre was conjured of communities and crofters seizing control of
any estates they chose, like so many bucolic Bolsheviks, but even a glance at
the act showed this to be nonsense. Meanwhile, it has been left to the likes of
the redoubtable Andy Wightman and the Who Owns Scotland website project
http://www.whoownsscotland.org.uk
to continue to spell out the facts.
Take 19-and-a-bit million acres and call it Scotland. Of that total 18.5 million
acres are classified as rural. Of these, 2.275 million acres are owned by public
bodies. The remaining 16.2 million acres - four-fifths of the landmass - are "in
the ownership of private interests".
Break private holdings down further, as Who Owns Scotland does, and the results
are both fascinating and all too familiar. One quarter of private land in
Scotland is in the hands of 66 landowners. One third is shared between 120
owners; one half by 243; and fully two-thirds of 16.2 million acres is shared
between 1,252 individuals or other private interests.
But these are custodians, are they not, of our heritage? Either that or they are
the sort of selfless people prepared to carry the burden of maintaining
economically worthless land. Possibly they are counted among those who have just
signed up for Scottish Natural Heritage's "good practice guide" to heather
moorland, what with generations of experience they bring to the art of the
muirburn and the like.
Possibly they haven't noticed the 10 percent decline in half the bird species
associated with moors and uplands over the last three decades; possibly the 25
percent reduction in heather moorlands between the 1940s and the 1980s was
overlooked. Possibly; possibly not.
Estate, shooting estates in particular, are the best argument ever devised for
public ownership. Their proponents talk a lot about conservation; what they mean
is the conserving of huge, treeless tracts - and there is nothing natural about
those - for witless sport. Sheep farming, deer stalking, fishing and
grouse-shooting are encouraged - even as grouse disappear from their natural
range; even as salmon numbers decline - but bio-diversity is dimly understood.
Wild native mammals, like native plants, have continued to die out and
commercial forestry has been grotesquely mismanaged. The economic returns have
meanwhile been slight, where they have existed at all.
Even these truths are not the heart of the matter. Whether MacLeod of MacLeod
understood it or not, the idea of him flogging off the Black Cuillin just to fix
the roof of the big house touched a very old Scottish wound.
Equally, the continuing annexation of 16 million of Scotland's 19 million acres
by a handful of people is the most eloquent of symbols: the old Scotland, with
all its ancient injustices, is very far from dead, and the Land Reform Act is
scarcely worth the name. A nation without its statehood; a country robbed of its
land and its rights. This is the 21st century, right?
Sometimes I wonder. The first proposal for a (public) national park in Scotland
was made in 1931. We are promised one very shortly.
Further Information
The Sunday Herald website can be visited at:
http://www.sundayherald.com/
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