If anyone can explain why Sofie Kirk Kristiansen, heir to the Lego fortune, paid £25m for a large tract of land in the Highlands, it is Andy Wightman. The campaigner and former politician has spent three decades cataloguing the ownership of more than three-quarters of rural Scotland. But it’s a “genuine mystery”, he says.
It’s not the fact of the purchase, which Wightman discovered earlier this month, that is puzzling. Kristiansen already owns the nearby Strathconon Estates and is one of 421 landowners who are thought to control half of all privately owned rural land in Scotland. It’s the price. Wightman believes the market value is closer to £7m.
Strathconon Estate said the purchase will “form part of a wholehearted nature restoration project” in the area. Although this doesn’t account for the eye-watering price tag, it fits into a wider pattern. Land in Scotland has become dramatically more expensive over the past decade, as so-called green lairds realise the value of old shooting estates as places of “natural capital” to restore peatlands and forests. These can generate credits that corporations invest in to offset their carbon emissions.
It’s a shift many environmentalists support, but it still leaves vast swaths of the country in precious few hands. In fact, despite government efforts to diversify ownership since devolution, land is becoming more and not less concentrated in Scotland.
The Scottish parliament has tried to address this. Earlier this month it passed a land reform bill that could allow the government to intervene in private sales and potentially break up large estates. Ministers will be notified before any sale greater than 1,000 hectares, which also gives community groups the opportunity to table a rival bid.
‘All the money that is generated from Ulva has to be used for Ulva. But it doesn’t generate enough’
Anne Cleaves
But campaigners say the bill doesn’t go far enough. Scotland has the most concentrated pattern of private land ownership in Europe, which has been blamed for depopulation, limited housing supply and lower economic activity. When a few hundred people decide how tracts of the country are used, it’s not always with communities in mind.
The history of land in Scotland is deeply political. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Highland Clearances saw lairds evict tenant farmers to make way for sheep, then deer and the creation of hunting grounds. This consolidated land into large estates, many of which persist to this day.
Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen has become, to some people, a negative emblem of the era. The 1851 painting depicted a rural landscape that was grand, majestic and empty of all but the animals.
Holyrood has tried to redistribute some of this land. It abolished the feudal tenure system in 2000, while three major acts have given and extended the rights of communities to buy land in their area. The Scottish Land Fund issues grants of up to £1m to help.
This has proved popular, especially in the rugged and remote Western Isles. Ulva used to have a population of more than 600 people. By the time a local group bought the island for £4.6m in 2018, it had five inhabitants. Since then, homes have been renovated, a busy hostel has opened with a boutique hotel to follow, and the population is back up to 19. This may sound modest, but not in the type of place where it could be zero.
It’s hard work, though, for a community group with a handful of part-time staff and a board of volunteers. “Ulva is what I see straight out of my window,” says the group’s chair, Anne Cleave. “I'm retired and I have the time to commit to doing as much as I can to support the paid staff. But none of us have legal skills.”
Nor has it been entirely smooth sailing. Ulva has had issues with its water supply and there have been some complaints by tenants at the slowness of repairs. The community group initially purchased the island with the help of a large grant from the Scottish government, but costs are ongoing and this means constant fundraising. QR codes dotted around the island raise a few hundred pounds a year. “ All the money that is generated from Ulva has to be used for Ulva,” says Cleave. “But it doesn't generate enough to do the things that we want.”
Community ownership is “not a doddle”, says the broadcaster and land reform campaigner Lesley Riddoch, who was a trustee for the purchase of the Isle of Eigg in 1997. “We can’t solve Scotland’s land problems buyout by buyout.”
The residents of Ulva celebrate the deal to buyout their aristocrat landlord
Wightman sees these buyouts as an imperfect practice into which locals are often forced as a last resort. “ If your primary school is not performing, politicians don't say to the community of parents: ‘Well, you take over it and run it.’ But we do with land.”
It is also a drop in the bucket when it comes to changing landownership patterns. When Alex Salmond was first minister, he set a target for a million hectares to be under community ownership by 2020. This figure is currently 208,597 hectares, just 2.7% of the total area of Scotland. The increased cost of land is one of the main reasons it isn’t higher. “We probably wouldn't be able to raise the money if Ulva was being sold today,” says Cleave. Scotland’s new legislation will do little to fix this reality.
Wightman thinks the bill would have made no difference to Kristiansen’s Highlands purchase, not only because of what it appears she was willing to spend for the land, but because there is no community body in the vicinity. “Lotting”, where ministers require large estates to be broken up into smaller parcels, can only be done in specific circumstances.
Any solution to Scotland’s deep-rooted land issues is invariably complicated, but Wightman argues that it starts with putting a greater price on the land itself. “Tax can act as a disincentive to accumulate too much because it imposes a holding cost,” he says.
Without radical measures, from levies to residency requirements, the status quo is likely to continue. Not a bad thing for green lairds, nor, perhaps, for the environment. But an issue for locals who want a piece of Scotland to call their own.
Photograph by Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images