Missive from the Dark Side

Heathery hillsides are good for tourism, they say. In many places concerted efforts are underway to try and avoid a wide array of endangered plants, insects birds and animals meeting the same fate as the wolf and the lynx.

One of the rarest species in the rural Highlands is the human being living sustainably on the land.

This is not because there’s a shortage of ground in the Highlands. It’s not because no-one wants to live and work on the the land any more. It’s because the free market makes it practically impossible for people of modest means to do so.

In scenic areas properties that come on the market are snapped up as holiday homes. People living and working locally can’t afford houses or plots on the open market and the situation becomes ever more desperate.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, here on the Black Isle there are 1,500 people on the list for social housing. Their chances of getting housed any time soon are pretty remote - only 44 homes were re-let last year. Although billboards for the ubiquitous ‘executive’ housing estates are still springing up across the Highlands, land for affordable housing appears to be in short supply. Property developers build large, expensive homes, with a minimal number of affordable houses reluctantly thrown in to satisfy the planners.

However finally, it seems, a chink of light may be on the horizon.  Innovative ideas on tackling the rural living crisis are beginning to bubble to the fore. Woodland crofts are being established on Mull. And in an exciting development in Argyll, a determined group of rural dwellers have come up with an exciting blueprint for the creation of a new crofting township.

The Acorn Co-op is a group of people who have clubbed together with the goal of buying a piece of agricultural land where they can make their home.

Chrissie Sugden, who currently lives in a caravan in Ardfern, has dedicated years to trying to find a way to help people stay in the area.  "There are an awful lot of people living in caravans, some of them legally, some of them illegally,” she explained. “It seems to be almost impossible to find affordable housing around here.

"However the Acorn Co-op is not just about affordable housing. It’s about livelihoods and helping young people stay in rural areas. The idea, building on new legislation which allows people to create new crofts, is that we could club together to create a new crofting township. That way people would have access to land that’s affordable on which to build a house themselves It’d be much cheaper than trying to buy somewhere - as well as giving folk the opportunity to create a livelihood.”

The group has set itself up as an industrial and provident society and now has 17 families signed up as members. The members come from Argyll and other parts of Scotland, England a a couple from abroad.

In summer members came tantalisingly close to realising their vision when a farm on the Kintyre peninsula came on the market. Located in a north south facing valley, with woodlands and good agricultural land, it seemed an ideal place for a new settlement. The Acorn Co-op would have created 15 crofts on the Kintyre farm, with each member putting up £30,000 to buy the land. But the farmer pulled out of the sale, and the group’s search for suitable land has resumed.

“We are looking for a farm or a piece of woodland of at least 150 acres. Much of Argyll’s forests are on poor soil - we need some decent land as well as a water source,” Chrissie said.

Members will fund the building of their homes and outbuildings, keeping cost down by using materials such as local roundwood timber or cob. The co-op is an entirely private venture and is structured in such a way as to allow for loan stock to be issued to help a proportion of families unable to afford the upfront costs of purchasing the land.

The core members live in the Ardfern area and currently know fellow members only though their online forum. The first face-to-face meeting takes place in February. Chrissie believes creating a crofting township makes sense in terms of practical living arrangements. “It will be very interesting to see how we all get on when we meet,” she said.  “What I like about the crofting model is it is well tried and tested. We will be neighbours with our own individual crofts, but we will have come land in common.”

A brilliant idea - but getting land is proving to be the toughest challenge. It seems that most people who own land want to hang on to it, and uncertain economic times are deepening that tendency.

Writer and campaigner Andy Wightman argues the time is ripe for some major political campaigning on this issue. “The Acorn Co-op is a really imaginative way forward but it is really quite sad that people are having to do these things for themselves,” he said. “People are struggling to find ways to address the fundamental need for somewhere to live.”

Andy has suggested that the Small Landowners Act (Scotland) of 1911 could be invoked by the Scottish Government to make land available.

In a recent blog on his website, he explains that this legislation was “designed to allow families to obtain landholdings across Scotland on the same basis as the crofters had achieved in 1886...

“Subsequent Acts of 1916 and 1919 provided greater powers for state intervention to acquire land in response to promises that had been made to men who enlisted for the Great War that they would receive land on their return...

“How is it that 100 years after an aristocratic Liberal Prime Minister finds the will to intervene in the land market in order to provide land to those who need it, a succession of Labour/Liberal coalitions and now SNP governments in Scotland have singularly failed?” Andy asks.

“How is it that the Russian Mafia can buy as much land as they want in Scotland and hold it secretly in offshore tax havens in the Caribbean but a group of enterprising people in rural Scotland who are looking for land to make a home for themselves and their families cannot?

“I think it is rapidly getting to the stage where we need to get back to the tactics of the late 19th and early 20th century in the form of land occupations, rent strikes and civil disobedience.  It’s not hard to distribute land more fairly and equitably. It just requires a bit of political backbone,” he concludes.

The situation is becoming critical and there’s just the tiniest sense of a shift. It will be fascinating to follow progress and see what unfolds.

By way of a footnote to this thought-provoking week on land rights I feel I should come clean.

I’m blogging from the dark side myself - a landowner, with no plans to sell.  My family roots in Ardnamurchan stretch back into the mists of time. Recently my sister and I inherited our late uncle’s hill farm there.  It's a beautiful place, 203 hectares of hill, rock, bog, oakwood, farm buildings and three arable fields.  We're still reeling from a tough couple of years in the family, illnesses, death, legalities and are only now starting to look forward.  It's both daunting and exciting.  More on that another time, if you're interested...     

Pictures: Hill land at Laga, Ardnamurchan. Chrissie Sugden of the Acorn Co-op; new landowners on the hill.