Return of the Natives

If Scotland’s parliament has no stomach for radical land reform is it a parliament worth having?

James Hunter

Those Scots who expect their parliament to make land reform a priority will find little to reassure them in the December issue of The Field, house magazine of the hunting and shooting set. Scotland may have voted for devolution, The Field observes, but our country remains the last place in Europe where a rich man can buy a large chunk of wilderness to act out his dreams of owning a kingdom.

Capital values of Highlands and Islands estates, the magazine continues, are soaring as a result. And The Field does not expect the Scottish parliament seriously to interfere with this happy situation.

Not the least of Scotland’s attractions, The Field goes on, is that one doesn’t have to be seriously rich in order to buy a piece of it. Readers, who like the idea of finding a remote property to commune with their thoughts amid spectacular scenery the magazine advises, should make for the 4,600-acre Orbost Estate in Skye. At offers over Ł400,000 it won’t cost much more than a small hose in Fulham. So don’t delay, get there fast.

But thankfully for Skye, if not for subscribers to The Field, this is one snip that prospective commuters with nature have missed. Orbost has been bought by Skye and Lochalsh Enterprise (SALE) with the backing of the Community Land Unit which SALE’s parent body, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, has established at the request of Scottish Office minister, Brian Wilson.

When Wilson visits Orbost this week, it will not be to inspect the estate’s rough shooting potential - which The Field thought its greatest attraction. Instead Wilson who has personally been associated with the land reform cause for many years, will be looking to hear from those of us involved in SALE how we aim to take forward at Orbost a nationally significant experiment in rural regeneration.

Here and there on the Orbost estate-located just south of Dunvegan - are the remains of long-abandoned homes. These housed families whose connections with Orbost, though they had endured for generations, were terminated in the course of the Highland Clearances. Having thus been emptied of people, of course, does not make the estate in any way unique. The Highlands and Islands contain innumerable places where far fewer folk live today than in the past. But Orbost, since SALE’s purchase of it, is distinguished by one cheering - if challenging-fact. Here we now have a chance to reverse the processes, which stripped so much of northern Scotland of its population.

Presently home to just a handful of people, Orbost has been run as a hill farm. Our intention is to break up that farm. We aim to convert the greater part of its arable acreage into a dozen or more croft-type smallholdings of the sort that enable their occupants to combine agriculture (nowadays an increasingly unreliable resource) with non-agricultural sources of income. Each smallholding will have its own house.

Further houses - to be built by our local housing association, by private builders or both - will go up elsewhere on the estate. Various commercial, environmental and other possibilities will be explores. And the cumulative effect ought to be that Orbost in the 21st century-like Orbost in the 19th - provides for a community whose numbers approach, maybe even exceed, a hundred.

Circumstances make that an attainable ambition. Skye has ceased to be the deprived and depopulated locality, which it used to be. Today the island has one of Scotland’s most rapidly increasing populations. Partly because this increase is most marked in those age groups which tend to be most active economically, Skye’s demographic upturn has helped produce an expanding and diversifying economy - which this autumn turned in, at 5 percent, the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded in the area.

Given the sheer extent of our land resource, it is ironic that the biggest brake on Skye’s progress is the tremendous difficulty experienced in obtaining the land so badly needed for housing, for commercial premises, for developments of every kind.

Demand for crofts and for homes, in particular, is far in excess of supply. The consequent upward pressure on prices - together with the absolute unavailability of houses in some of the places where they are most urgently required - has choked off growth, left people homeless and generally held back communities which, for the first time in ages, have a real chance of bettering their people’s prospects.

There are those, of course, who think that localities like Orbost should not be repopulated. SALE heard from some of them last week in Dunvegan when the local enterprise company staged the first of what will be a long series of engagements with the wider public to whom we are responsible. But opinion to the effect that SALE should never have bought Orbost was countered, reassuringly, by statement after statement to the opposite effect.

The most eloquent and impassioned such statement - came from Sally Montgomery, a local woman in her early twenties. What was happening at Orbost, Sally said, had given her some hope, for the first time in her life, that she might be able to obtain a home and a piece of land in her own community.

The Scottish countryside contains many people similar to Sally Montgomery - enterprising and talented young people whose ambition to make their own way in their own place is being stymied and frustrated by one of the most outmoded and inequitable systems of land ownership in the developed world. Our Orbost experience, sadly, will assist only a few of these young folk. But that experiment, if it is at all successful, must surely be repeated and not just in the Highlands and Islands.

Right across Scotland, the current crisis in hill farming is raising the possibility of more and more land passing into the hands of the sort of rich man who, as The Field so pleasingly puts it, is looking to buy a large chunk of wilderness to act out his dreams. Our prospective parliament, The Field expects, will do nothing to impede this process. But The Field, I trust, is wrong.

Rather than making life easy for those individuals who would like to swap their small houses in Fulham for Scottish estates, the Scottish parliament, I hope, will help Sally Montgomery’s many counterparts attain their perfectly reasonable - indeed laudable - ambitions. Land reform of this sort need not cost a lot of money-in that the breaking up of large estates, if handled imaginatively, could readily be self-financing. But land reform will take political courage - in that its proponents will have to take on the present system’s highly influential beneficiaries.

So will the Scottish parliament have the guts to do what has to be done if we are to provide Scotland with the more diverse, more thickly peopled, more prosperous countryside we could so readily create? I don’t know. What I do know is that a Scottish parliament with no stomach for land reform will be a parliament not worth having.

Source: Scotland on Sunday, 14 December 1997.

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