The Assynt Crofters’ Trust had completed the purchase of the 21,000-acre North Lochinver estate. For Bill Ritchie, one of the officers of the trust, there was a sense of wonder. “To think we had actually pulled it off,” he said. “That the crofters could get up in the morning and say, this is ours. That was a huge, magnificent feeling.”
Brian Wilson, the Labour MP, was as effusive writing in the West Highland Free Press. He declared the success to be “something of genuine historical importance . . . far more meaningful than all the pomp and flummery of transient summits and royal occasions”.
It was indeed an epoch-making moment. To some the notion of the croft is beguiling: the smallholding by the shores of a sea loch, the strip of land to work under the shade of the mountains, the promise of self-sufficiency. Who could resist such a delightful prospect? Some could not. The trust, as a framework for crofters’ communal ownership of the land where they lived, quickly caught the imagination. It appeared to offer a golden mean between private ownership and nationalisation and the vision would be achieved by grants and loans. But the romantic dream ignores what has been a harsh reality. Crofts were only legally defined in 1886, after a succession of poor harvests and terrible hardships for the rural poor. That act of parliament was philanthropically intended to assist impoverished Highlanders, offering them security of tenure and a system for establishing fair rents. But it brought only the barest subsistence.
Since then, for more than a century experiments have gone on — with crofting, schemes of settlement, curbs on rights to property, quangos and public expenditure — to give Highlanders a stronger stake in the Highlands.
Still the Highlands declined and the Highlanders fled, unless detained by some influence generated from outside, North Sea oil or the fad for back-to-nature lifestyles. There is nothing to suggest that the latest craze for communal ownership will alter the course of history.
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Yet the new enthusiasm for land reform received government endorsement following Labour’s victory in 1997. First Wilson, as a minister of state at the Scottish Office, asked Highlands and Islands Enterprise to look into the concept of communal ownership. Then under Jim Wallace, the minister for justice in the new Scottish executive, crofting communities gained more rights, the minister proposing that townships could at any time start the process of taking over land they lived on, so long as they met certain conditions. What crofters acquired would still have to be paid for, albeit at a price set by the valuer.
Although crofting communities can count on this measure of official support, can they ever offer more than the poorest kind of living? It seems unlikely. The one expedient not so far tried is for Highlanders to take their place on the same footing as everyone else — in Britain, Europe, North America and now the Orient — in the modern, liberal, individualist, capitalist order.
The price of failure here can be high (though surely not higher than the price Highlanders have already paid). Yet the reward of success is huge for those who depend on themselves, not on others.
Today, fit young Highlanders often do not want to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and get stuck in an isolated place for bare subsistence. For most, the real problems remain what they always had been: barren ground, a cold climate and the impossibility of living off the croft alone. Farmers elsewhere tackle such difficulties with technology, but this is seldom worthwhile on the small rocky plots of the Scottish glens or isles.
When crofting started, the British Isles could not feed itself and imported much of its food. Now, European surpluses are the problem, rather than any shortage. They come from industrial farming, and it is not certain that small farmers will survive even in fertile regions, far less in northwest Scotland.
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These days, while the Crofters Commission — which supervises crofting — has 18,500 crofts on its register, 11,000 of which are in the Hebrides and more than 3,500 on Lewis, it fails in the task of keeping the people on the land.
The population of the Highlands and Islands emerged as static at the census of 2001. This was the balance resulting from a population rise on the mainland, especially around thriving Inverness, offset by slight falls elsewhere. An exception came in the Western Isles.
Here the population plunged: 4,000 people, 14% of the total, had left in 10 years. This is the most heavily crofted part of Scotland. On such evidence it seems unlikely that any further fiddling with the law of the croft can produce a viable community at the heart of a healthy Highland population and culture.
Now migrants determine the general level of population. These incomers are a powerful social force, especially if they arrive from England, birthplace of 18% of those in the Highlands at the census. Since Lowlanders also count as incomers, the actual proportion of people whom Highlanders see as different will be yet higher. A rough guess might be that this proportion is heading towards 40%.
While these settlers are unpopular, the economic transformation of the region could hardly have taken place without them. Some find their way into crofts, though the route is tortuous. An empty croft is not disposed of on the market but only through selection by the Crofters Commission. The received Highland wisdom is that a free market, such as exists for private housing, debars locals.
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Rather than crofting, more incomers are able to live and prosper in remote regions without lavish subsidies or cosseting legislation, something unfathomable to the locals.
Where incomers produce goods, they are often of quality, in clothing, jewellery, glassware, foodstuffs. Others, defying the lessons of history, take over abandoned upland farms, perhaps to breed exotic strains of livestock. Some incomers have even improved the old, abysmal standards of Highland tourism. There are also those who, while continuing a busy professional life, prefer seclusion amid beautiful scenery now that a once-distant glen is just another zone of cyberspace.
Of course, there are go-ahead crofters who adopt “tele-crofting”, by which they sell smoked salmon or hand-knitted woollens over the internet. But the more common reaction among natives is that no recent development has left them any happier. They may feel like strangers in their own land, kept in crofting reservations like so many native Americans and, like them, afflicted by social dysfunction, ill health, alcoholism, low expectations and achievement.
Crofting should be abolished, although this is not an idea likely to be entertained for a moment in politically correct, devolved Scotland. Crofting will otherwise just wither on the vine while it wastes human resources that could be put to better use. The outcome will be the same: no crofting to speak of by the turn of the 22nd century.
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Extracted from Wild Scots by Michael Fry, to be published by John Murray on July 4 at £20. Copies can be ordered for £16 plus £2.25 p&p from The Sunday Times Books Direct on 0870 165 8585