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Something odd is happening in the Hebrides. After years of recrimination over ‘who owns Scotland’, lairds and crofters are threatening to find an amicable solution to the thorny problem.
It has already happened on one large sporting estate, and the unlikely outbreak of civility could be about to spread.
One swallow, of course, does not make a summer and the fact that a community buy-out or two have been achieved on friendly terms does not mean that old enmities have been forgotten.
But the experience of the people of North Harris is proof that the move towards community ownership in remote parts of the country need not be attended on every occasion by bitterness and claims of an ancient wrong being righted.
The land reform laws passed by the Scottish Parliament were meant to empower rural communities by allowing the transfer of land ownership from the individual in the big house to the village, glen or township.
On rugged and rocky Harris the handover was remarkably smooth. Jonathan Bulmer, 59, of cider fame, bought Amhuinnsuidhe Castle, along with its salmon fishing and rugged mountains, as a family home.
He was besotted with the 55,000-acre
Do you think the buildings now being constructed in Scotland are of a lesser quality than those of an earlier era
