Over the last few years, the group has sold houses and plots of land to reduce its debt from £1.18m to approximately £750,000. Having defaulted on its loan – described by Clements as a clerical error on the bank’s part – the Trust was forced to refinance. Under a landlord, there wasn’t really the same community input.”Įven so, finances are tight. “If we’ve got buildings, we’ll try and make them available for businesses. “I don’t think people felt they had the opportunity to do these things before,” Clements explains. The Trust also has a regular income from the island’s four wind turbines while a new campsite aims to bolster funds further. Since the buyout, the population – 110 of whom are members of the Trust – has grown, properties have been repaired, new businesses including an art gallery have opened and tourism is seemingly on the rise. “The landlord was doing the bare minimum, keeping them wind and water tight.” “Ninety-five per cent of our housing was below tolerable standard,” he says. Gigha residents took charge of their island in 2002, when the Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust secured £4m in grant money from the Scottish Land Fund to purchase the island from the multimillionaire and leisure entrepreneur Derek Holt.Ĭlements, who moved from the mainland in 1997, remembers the situation as both “daunting” and “exciting”, while stressing Holt’s neglectful stewardship.
Some estimates claim that Scotland has the most unequal land ownership of any country in the western world. That figure is less equal even than in England, where half the land is owned by around 0.05 per cent of the population, according to data published in 2019. Half of Scotland’s rural land remains in the hands of just 432 owners – less than 0.01 per cent of its population. The reform was desperately needed, and there is still a long way to go. In the case of Knoydart, which is cut off from the National Grid and sewage and water supplies, residents now manage their own utilities. In many cases, communities have established their own renewable energy supplies. It has allowed communities across Scotland – from small isles such as Eigg and Ulva, to swathes of larger islands such as Harris and Lewis, to the remote the peninsular of Knoydart, which is inaccessible by car – to reverse declining populations by building homes and developing businesses and tourism prospects. Since 2003, the number of assets in community ownership – from sprawling land estates to pubs, churches and even modest plots of woodland – has risen by approximately 500. Three years later, the Land Reform Act gave self-defining communities first refusal on land put up for sale. New legislation in 2000 put an end to the system and created the Scottish Land Fund to help communities buy land from their landlords. Feudal land tenure – in which property owners were required to pay a fee to a “superior” – was still in use. Following devolution in 1999, the first Scottish parliament unleashed a deluge of eye-catching legislation to counteract the country’s arcane land use and ownership.