Martyn McLaughlin: Should the Highland Clearances be reversed?

Calls to repopulate settlements lost in the Highland Clearances lose sight of what the area needs most, writes Martyn McLaughlin.
Sir Robert Grieve, as chairman of the Highlands and Islands Development Board, knew the importance of maintaining population levels.Sir Robert Grieve, as chairman of the Highlands and Islands Development Board, knew the importance of maintaining population levels.
Sir Robert Grieve, as chairman of the Highlands and Islands Development Board, knew the importance of maintaining population levels.

When the Highlands and Islands Development Board was created more than half a century ago with the express intention of solving the region’s economic woes, its chairman, the late Sir Robert Grieve, made it clear he and his colleagues had one overarching ambition they could ill afford not to meet. “No matter what success is achieved in the eastern or central Highlands,” he declared, “the board will be judged by its ability to hold population in true crofting areas.”

At the time, the ‘Highland problem’ was as impenetrable as the ‘Glasgow effect’ is to today’s ranks of economists, public health researchers and planners, but the region was fortunate to have a man as perceptive as Grieve. He understood that forging a prosperous future depended on safeguarding communities at the periphery as much as it did on achieving growth in Fort William and Inverness.

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Decades later, the issue of re-peopling one of Scotland’s most glorious expanses is again on the political agenda. In a headline-grabbing submission which lends a radical new emphasis to the Planning (Scotland) Bill, winding its way through Holyrood, Community Land Scotland (CLS), the body representing community landowners, has called for a raft of new powers it believes can regenerate swathes of the Highlands and act as a corrective to past injustices.

It wants ministers to be given the right to designate areas laid to waste by the Clearances for the purpose of their resettlement. What is more, the group believes communities should be granted a right to buy the land so as to render aspirations a reality. To quote David Cameron, one of CLS’ six-strong board of directors: “These temporarily deserted lands should once again ring to the voices of children playing in their landscape.”

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It is an emotive argument which demands particular care, especially when so many lost settlements were the victims of forced evictions. The ignominy of wresting entire communities from their homes is well remembered by descendants in places like Assynt and Knoydart. Together, they have taken control of their land and their future, success stories which helped legitimise the right-to-buy process and paved the way for the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 and the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015.

More importantly, they have inspired others. Since 1990, the amount of Scotland’s land in community ownership has increased fivefold, accounting for 562,230 acres by last June, around 2.9 per cent of the nation’s total land mass.

If such statistics are heartening in isolation, placing them in context blunts their impact. Half the privately owned land in Scotland remains in the hands of a nudge over 400 people – approximately 0.008 per cent of the population. As the Land Reform Review Group noted four years ago, as a measure of inequality in a modern democracy, such numbers are exceptional and demand explanation.

If noblesse oblige cannot reignite lost communities, can CLS? There is no doubt the “bitterness” famously referred to by the late Willie Ross, a former secretary of state of Scotland, about the region’s treatment remains a tangible force.

But it would be wrong to conflate the desire for repopulation with the notion of righting the wrongs of the Clearances. For all that history weighs heavily in places like Argyll, Caithness, Mull, and Sutherland, their people are surely motivated by more immediate concerns.

It is an uncomfortable truth that many of the former townships CLS wish to see reinstated fell silent for economic reasons. Today, they have no infrastructure in place, nor employment prospects. To resurrect them in the hope a nascent community might become sustainable would be a reckless expense.

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Existing towns and villages would surely rather see money spent remedying longstanding bugbears such as fuel supplies and broadband provision. The pull to return to an ancestral home and weave together history’s frayed threads is strong, but it is not an inexorable force – the lure of the past will always be checked by the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

That is not to dismiss CLS and its aims altogether. There are ways of bringing people back, not least by ensuring that yet more of Scotland’s land does not become the preserve of the few. The progress the Scottish Government has made on land reform is undermined by the farcical situation which permits any individual to buy as many acres as they wish, with no public interest bulwark to curb their acquisitive tendencies; a cap on land holdings is long overdue, and surely more constructive than focusing on abandoned settlements.

It would also be prudent to look across the Irish Sea, where in recent decades, a charity called Rural Resettlement Ireland has helped over 700 hard-up families relocate from congested urban areas to the Atlantic coast. A similar initiative has taken root in Argyll and Bute, where scores of new residents have settled thanks to a dedicated resettlement fund.

Might the same modest success not to be replicated on a larger scale in the Highlands, a remarkable place with its own unique attractions? It is a place ripe with opportunity for those willing to embrace the challenges and rewards of rural life, and if sold correctly, will find willing converts. But they should be encouraged to find their own way, rather than being asked to follow in the footsteps of ghosts.

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