Scot Land

Scotland has a lot of land. It's huge - millions of square kilometres of moorland and forest - I'm walking across some of it on the Scottish National Trail. 

Most of the hills and valleys I walk through are empty of humans. Deer, some sheep, wild birds... but no people. This place used to support a population - I pass the ruins of old clachans (wee villages of stone houses) every day here in the North (I'm writing this in Ullapool.) One clachan I passed today had the ruins of six wee houses, and so probably had between 20-40 people living there at one time. 

 

 

We like it, like this; green hills, the emptiness, the 'wilderness'. So we preserve it that way. But why? Why not repopulate the land? Not all of it of course, but Scotland has so much that it could afford to put people onto, say, 10% of its moorland, and you'd barely notice.

The clachan I passed today for example - next to a river that could provide energy with a micro-hydro scheme, with flat, fertile riverside land for a market garden (providing for the hotels in Ullapool), and a high-speed internet link for work and school. It could support - again - five or six families. 

But of course that's just a pipe dream. Because the land owner wants to keep the land free of people, so that wealthy clients can hunt deer and grouse across it. Exploiting the land as a business, not for the community. This is the colonial view of land -where natural resources, which should be the property of all of us, are exploited by the few. 

The land owner has that clachan because his ancestors 'cleared' the villagers out, preferring hunting over the villagers' smallholdings. He had that right, because he had been granted the land by the Crown, or had grabbed it by force. So, a murky past, that now looks like respectable ownership. Huge areas of Scotland's land is held by a very small number of people; 432 people own more than half of Scotland's private land. 

This combination of our 'wilderness' aesthetic, and the colonial exploitation of land, have frozen Scotland's hills and valleys as bare green spaces, empty of the communities that this land could sustain. 

It can't last like this. Climate change will create mass emigration from the new deserts in Southern Europe, and from the water resource wars of North Africa and the Arab-speaking countries, to Scotland, Norway, Sweden and maybe Siberia.

For that future, but also to put right the murky past, and to create a vibrant, community-based future, Scotland should bring communities back into the Highlands.