Pages

Pages

Friday, October 26, 2018

Who owns Scotland, again?

Memories of the evictions of poor tenant farmers by wealthy landowners during the 18th and 19th centuries remain strong in the Highlands and Isles of Scotland. 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.

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." 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 landowners own half of all the privately-owned rural land. Scotland until 2004 still had a system of feudal land tenure."

http://news.trust.org/item/20181025065833-3dv6p/



No comments:

Post a Comment