Highlands feel the force of nationalism
With the SNP riding high, Scotland’s semi-feudal great estates face reform – as well they might, since they were created on the misery of crofters and clansmen by a treacherous elite in league with the English. BEN JUDAH meets the land-grab rebels
Amid fears that the SNP plans a Mugabe-style land grab, the old order is crumbling
They call him the Mannie, and panting, almost out of breath, I can see him rising over the dying bracken and the dry gorse at the top of the hill – a sandstone giant, atop a 100ft column of colonial splendour. This is the first Duke of Sutherland, and tiny beneath his plinth, here since 1836, I can see where Scottish Nationalists have been digging to topple him.
TheVictorians called him the Great Improver. The towering Duke was English, of course, and everything you can see from this peak, from the mountains in the distance, to where the coast disappears out of sight, he inherited with his Scottish marriage. This was, and much of it still is, the Sutherland Estate, the barren result of the
They would empty the hills, forcibly resettling the tenants. Eviction would be swift and villages would be set alight if they resisted
Duke’s improvements – the Highland Clearances. Deer skip and chew through lichen and tufts, where his men burnt whole villages, as the hill tumbles into the sea.
The Highlands aswe knowit is still apatchwork quilt of enormous estates created out of the Clearances. Today half of the privately owned Scottish countryside still belongs to 432 landowners. Nationalists call this a colonial creation, and radicals inside the Scottish National Partyare pushing Holyrood to begin dividing them up.
Hunger for land reform has grown in the Highlands alongside nationalism. The attacks on the Mannie began in the Nineties. At first, there was a plot to dynamite it. Then, in green paint, they daubed “Monster” all over him.
SNP politicians in Inverness began hectoring for the Duke to be ripped down and replaced with a Celtic cross. Nationalist intellectuals suggested breaking his column, and then smashing him limb by limb, to lie ruined like the torched crofts of his 15,000 evictees. The closer Scotland gets to independence, the closer the Mannie, and the estate system he symbolises, is to a full-frontal attack.
What were the Highland Clearances and why do they matter? The barren moors as we see them today are a modern, man-made wilderness. After the Jacobite rebellions, Scotland’s feudal lairds, who once saw themselves as clan chiefs, protecting upland villages, evolved into 19th-century British lords. Their inheritance was overpopulated, unprofitable and blighted by disease. To turn a profit, men like the Duke of Sutherland believed they knew the answer. They would empty the hills, forcibly resettling their tenants. Sheep, and profits, would replace people. Eviction would be swift and villages would be set alight if they resisted. Those who could not be resettled on the coast would be sent to the colonies. Two centuries on, the sheep have gone. The bracken and the heather are now grouse moors and deer forests, filled with the childhood memories of the aristocracy.
There used to be a “British” narrative to these events: in 1707 a poor Scotland and a rich England fused, with the result that Highland families rushed to work in the spectacularly industrialising Lowlands, and destitute crofters set out to conquer and colonise the world under the Union Jack. The Highlands, went the old reading, had been improved from misery into thriving sheep farms and grouse moors, with the people packed off to new, better lives in Canada and other thriving white colonies.
In 1973, a radical theatre group toured the Highlands. Called the 7:84 company (because seven per cent of Scotland’s population owned 84 per cent of its land), they were performing a play by John McGrath, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil. The church halls were packed. The Highlands, the storywent, had not seen any improvements. In fact, it had been a colonial frontier. Treacherous lairds, conniving with London money, had expelled their own people from the lands. Then they ruthlessly exploited them: first the stolen moors had become sporting estates, and then came the fire-belching oil-platforms of the North Sea. The play was an instant sensation.
The following year, a radical, little-known theorist called Tom Nairn published a book – The Break-Up of Britain – which was sniggered at in London as fantasy. It is now seen as a milestone in Scottish writing.
Nairn argued that Britain was nothing less than an old, aristocratic, imperial state; a decrepit thing holding back democracy. To a new generation in Glasgow and Edinburgh it felt bang on. And along the coast road, a few miles north of the Mannie, I find that a new history is being erected in Scotland.
Here is the village of Helmsdale, all shuttered shops and pubs, where Alex Salmond came in 2007 soon after becoming Scotland’s First Minister. At dusk, bluish lights from oilrigs blink from the sea as I stand by the SNP’s antimonument: The Emigrants. This is dedicated to those driven out of the hills by the Duke of Sutherland. A bronze couple and their children, evicted to lives overseas, the father looking forward, the mother looking back into these tumbling hills of pleasure-shooting with hate. The book, the play and the statue all tie together – into the emergence of a new popular mythology, replacing at its heart Britishness with the Clearances. It is Scotland reimagined as a second Ireland, England’s victim, not England’s partner.
When they free Scotland, SNP activists dream they’ll free the hills – and in Highland pubs, I find the land-reform dreamers. Cleaners are planning to turn the grouse moors into national parks. Water-maintenance technicians are sketching out how to turn the gamekeepers into park rangers. On the road to Inverness, in one hamlet after another, is SNP militancy.
In the Highlands, I find dreamers everywhere, even in the ski resort of Aviemore. Before the referendum, a couple of crusty old folk would meet as the SNP, but since then the party in the area has swelled from 60 to more than 260. This is happening everywhere. There were 25,000 members before the vote; there are 115,000 now. This momentum, and the SNP’s sweep of 56 out of 59 seats in last May’s general election, is why two-thirds of Scots now think independence is inevitable.
Now party radicals want land reform to go further than has ever been expressed before: not only to make community buyouts impossible to resist, but to ban landowners leaving their estates to a single heir, breaking them up over time. And theywant punitive taxes to force sales. They may not couch it in these terms – but they want Scotland to follow Ireland, where before independence more than half the country was owned by absentees in estates of 3,000 acres or more.
There is drizzle on the windscreen as we drive into the Cairngorms. Myguide is an activist from the SNP,whom I’ll callAlex. “Don’t quote myreal name, or put my job,” he pleads. “When you live in the country, lots of your work depends on these lairds. It’s not just me, but the builders, the joiners, the electricians and gamekeepers. They’ re all SNP. They all want land reform. But you can’t fall out with the laird – that’s your job gone.”
We drive on, into the glens. Butwe are 40years too late for the countryside, where the tenants who escaped emigration once lived. The villages are gone. One after another, in whitewash, all shuttered up. “That’s a holidayhome, that’s a holiday home, that’s stayed in, that’s a holiday home, that’s just been sold to be a holiday home.”
The acquirers, for the most part, are English. “We can’t afford to live here any more, all these holiday homes have pushed the prices up to like £500,000 for one of these cottages and they’ve killed ’em off, all the shops.”
This means the Highlands look open, immense – but actually, for the people here, the