Skip to main content

The Friday Review - WHO OWNS SCOTLAND



You would be mistaken for thinking that Scotland was the land of enlightened land access and ownership for all, given the high profile success of community-spirited buyouts such as Eigg, Gigha and the recent campaign against Donald Trump's Despicable-Me impersonation (if only it were impersonation). 

But things are not as they seem and a new book which has opened my eyes to the deep land injustices of Scotland (not just the Clearances) is Andy Wightman's 'The Poor Had No Lawyers - Who Owns Scotland And How They Got It', published by Birlinn.

Andy is a longstanding campaigner and investigative journalist who runs the excellent website Who Owns Scotland, dedicated to a transparent listing of all the landowners in Scotland and how they got the land. The book to accompany this campaign is a follow up to his 1996 book Who Owns Scotland and goes a lot deeper than many landowners would feel comfortable with. It  is refreshingly polemic for such a detailed analysis of 'feus', 'non domino titles', 'superiorities', 'entails' and all other manner of highly dubious legal tricks implying righteous ownership of our lands and commonties.

In a deeply researched account of the history of landgrabbing in Scotland, Robert the Bruce does not quite appear the hero some would make of him. Bruce was a murdering warlord who parcelled up Scotland for his own gain and influence, selling off land under feudal tenure to foreign lords and royalty, disenfranchising the people from a barely bawling Scottish state. The centuries fell one after the other as the rich and influential sold off a Scotland they simply did not own. Nobles colluded with the church and the Reformation helped 'legalise' their ownership by highly dubious acts such as the Acts of Registration and Prescription of 1617, 'sealing' land ownership in the hands of the rich who could afford Edinburgh lawyers and felt that a brief tenure of land (20 years!) was enough to claim the deeds to it. And so it went on through the tragedy of the Clearances until, all too belatedly, we had the Abolition of Feudal Tenure Act in 2000.

In that longue durée of 8 centuries, Scotland's land, totalling 19.5 million acres, lost over 10 million acres to 1550 private landowners in estates of over 1000 acres! And it has not slowed down -  modern land grabs by the rich have attempted to seal off land for private use, tax benefit and corporate expansion. Andy Wightman feels the law must go a lot further to protect our common land from total disappearance: land laws must be repealed, Crown rights should be abolished, Land Funds and Land Policies should be enshrined in statutes for the benefit of communities and our new devolved government should set our Law Commissioners the task of reform on the scale Lloyd Goerge once attempted.

We may have National Parks, the Right to Roam and the new Community Buyout rights, but the bald facts are that Scotland is still at the mercy of overpaid law firms, absentee landlords, the self-absorbed rich and far too few enlightened enough to hand back something to the people.

The book is an essential read for all of us who want to live in the Scotland we imagine... it can be bought from Andy's own site here >>>
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Vertical Landscapes: Exploring Glasgow's Hidden Bouldering

With the new guide to Glasgow Bouldering forthcoming, and with the last two years spent scouring our local landscapes for vertical diversion, many of us discovered a closer, more nuanced appreciation of climbing and how it helps maintain mental wellbeing as much as physical. The big mountains and wilderness landscapes were for the first time excluded from access and our pandemic taught us all to appreciate the landscapes on our doorstep. Even the urban world has its own small wildernesses and landscapes to immerse ourselves in for a while. For me, the daily walk in lockdown occasionally became a hunt for an esoteric piece of rock spied on the OS map or Google Earth. Rumours of boulders and mythologies of obscure rock were hunted down to help feed a hunger for the vertical. Even Dumbarton Rock was out of range, lying outside of the Glasgow City boundary. It's a venue which famously makes the blood run cold, with fiercely exposed overhanging routes, highball boulder problems and cl...
Read more

The Lost Township of Grulin on Eigg

‘The Stony Place’ as it translates, the archaeological notes on the RCAHMS database for Eigg, state baldly the lost humanity of Grulin as early as an 1880 OS survey map: ‘…eighteen unroofed buildings, six enclosures and a field-system’. Now a scheduled monument and memorialised as a ‘depopulated settlement’, though it is not obvious if the verb is passive or aggressive, Grulin Uachdrach (Grulin Upper) is, like Hallaig on Raasay, a place of violent silence and resonance. Who lived here and why was the site abandoned? If it were not in Scotland, suspicions might fall to the climate, remoteness and apparent unsustainability of the stony place, a rabble of large rocks under the steep slopes of An Sgurr, but the carefully constructed walls tell us it was once a thriving township – the kilns, folds and blackhouse walls integrated with the giant boulders such as Clach Hosdail. In 1853 the whole of the village of Grulin, both upper and lower, housed fourteen families who were forced to l...
Read more

Timeline Walks of Scotland #Hallaig to Screapadal on Raasay

'Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig ...' Hallaig - the lost village of Raasay - is a powerful place. Arguably, it has become a shibboleth for the soul of Gaelic culture. To visit it, to just be there momentarily and feel the resonance of the place, is to know the fragility of place and home, of how kinship can be shattered and how loss can invade a land. Aptly, Hallaig is now a site of pilgrimage for those who value the universal lessons of history.  There are t errible reasons for the loss of Hallaig. Its silent mouths of abandoned shielings, the dumb sheep meandering amongst the ruins, whisper with Sorley MacLean's poetry. The place misses the sounds of day-to-day community, and all around the woods and burns and slopes this tough but rich landscape once made this a hardy paradise under the eastern cliffs of Raasay. Facing east to the dawn and overlooking the peninsula of Applecross and the berry-dark depths of the Inner Sound, the walk to Hallaig leads quietly...
Read more