Max Baring -
When the residents of Garbh Allt in the Scottish Highlands were offered the chance to buy their land from the wealthy family behind the brutal eviction of their ancestors, many were initially hesitant.
But years of underdevelopment under the Sutherland Estate — one of Scotland’s biggest landowners — and the prospect of shaping their own future convinced them to take the leap, and in June the land was sold into community ownership.
“People were saying, oh I’m not really sure if we should take it on or not. And I was thinking to myself, my father would be spinning in his grave if we didn’t take up this opportunity,” said Anne Fraser, head of the Garbh Allt community initiative.
“I had to pinch myself the other day to actually remember we’re in ownership,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It gives me great delight when I’m walking along and suddenly think, oh, this belongs to us. It’s quite something.”
Memories of the evictions of poor tenant farmers by wealthy landowners during the 18th and 19th centuries remain strong in Scotland, and the
national parliament set land reform as one of its key priorities when it was established in 1997.
Thousands of people had to emigrate to avoid starvation in the wake of the Highland clearances and some of the worst abuses have been blamed on the then Duke of Sutherland.
Fraser said she did not see the deal as revenge for the clearances, but as a chance for the community to take control in an area that, like many in rural Scotland, has suffered years of underinvestment and depopulation.
It is among the latest transfers of private land into residents’ hands under the Scottish Land Reform Act of 2003, which gave communities first right of refusal when land was put up for sale.
“Scotland is characterised by having a very concentrated pattern of land ownership,” said Andy Wightman, a Scottish Green Party member of the Scottish parliament.
“Approximately 440 to 450 land owners own half of all the privately-owned rural land. Scotland until 2004 still had a system of feudal land tenure.” The Scottish government’s aim is to have a million acres of land in community ownership by the end of 2020. By June 2017 it was more than half way there, according to the latest available figures.
But not everyone agrees with its methods. As the Garbh Allt community completed their purchase earlier this year, another, much more contentious deal went through on the island of Ulva — this time largely government funded.
Scottish leader Nicola Sturgeon announced the planned buyout of Ulva at the SNP party conference a year ago, hailing it as a victory for community ownership.
Three decades ago, Ulva, a stunningly beautiful island off Scotland’s west coast, had 30 inhabitants. Now it has just six, and those behind the buyout say they want to revive local life.
But the island’s original owner Jamie Howard questions whether the £4 million ($5.2 million) the government put towards the purchase was a good use of public money.
When the community expressed its interest, he had no choice but to sell to them — even though he favoured another buyer who he said was better placed to give the island the long-term investment it needs to secure its future.
“They do say that the only way to make a small fortune from somewhere like Ulva is to start out with a large one,” said Howard, whose family had owned the island for generations.
“We had one person in particular who I think would have made an extremely good guardian of Ulva, with stacks of money and a very good track record as far as responsible ownership is concerned.”
That view is challenged by Ulva’s new owner, the North West Mull Community Woodland Company, which already had a track record of community ownership on the neighbouring island of Mull.
— Reuters
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