In its heyday Langholm, a picturesque town between four hills in the River Esk valley, was one of southern Scotland’s industrial hubs, home to more than a dozen textile mills. Decades of deindustrialisation battered the town’s economy, however, and residents were left uncertain about their future.
“In the times of the mills, we used to bring busloads of people in,” says Gavin Graham, a lifelong resident who spent 22 years working life in the town’s mills. “The population of Langholm was about 2,500 people but we had 1,500 jobs in the mills. The high street at lunchtime was like Piccadilly Circus.
“We had full employment and no problems. Within 20 years, all those jobs have gone. There are only about 15 to 20 textile jobs left in the town.” With the mills gone, the people of Langholm have come up with a novel strategy to attract tourists — community-based rewilding. Last year the Langholm Initiative, a community development trust, bought 5,200 acres of Langholm Moor for £3.8 million, to create the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve. It was south Scotland’s largest ever community land buyout.
The grouse moor was held for centuries by the dukes of Buccleuch. Margaret Pool, the chairwoman of the the Langholm Initiative, recalls that the announcement that it was up for sale coincided with a meeting of the group, who were “just about unanimous that we couldn’t let it go”.
The moor appears to be a wilderness unsullied by human activity, but the uniformity of the landscape is a sign of human interference. For decades, it was intensely managed with grouse shooting in mind. The upland’s bogs, forest and peatland were turned into a homogenous expanse of moors clad by heather, which provides food and shelter to nesting birds.
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In the decade up to 2018, Buccleuch Estates and public bodies spent more than £2 million in an effort to increase grouse numbers while protecting other wildlife. The attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, leaving the moor commercially unviable.
Driving on a single track road through the former grouse moor, Jenny Barlow, the estate manager at Tarras Valley Nature Reserve, cannot help but notice the many opportunities to turn this regimented terrain into a disorderly wilderness.
“Rewilding is nature-led recovery with a helping human hand. What this might look like in ten years is a patchwork of lots of different habitats. It would be more of a mosaic,” she says. The initiative is planning to restore areas of woodland, and re-wet areas and block ditches to re-establish moorland.
“The trees are key,” Pool says. “They have to be a variety of native trees and will complement the remnants of the ancient oak forest that is already there. By creating that biodiversity, it will naturally attract different species of animals.”
The trust also hopes to restore damaged peat bogs, which in addition to providing a home to hen harriers will help mitigate climate change.
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Despite covering 3 per cent of the global land surface, peatlands contain about 25 per cent of global soil carbon, twice as much as the world’s forests. Peat soil covers about a quarter of Scotland’s land surface, storing about 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon, equivalent to 140 years’ worth of Scotland’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
However, it is estimated that more than 80 per cent of Scotland’s peatlands are in poor condition and instead of acting as a carbon sink they are releasing it into the atmosphere.
The Langholm Initiative is developing a management plan based on several ecological surveys to determine the most effective steps to diversify the landscape. It is also engaging with the local community and partner organisations to find opportunities to provide nature-based jobs for young people, to encourage them to stay in the ageing town and help to attract tourists.
Among the ideas discussed are interactive courses on wool production, a dark-sky observatory, camping sites and new housing on the moor.
“There’s a bit of not wanting to tell other people about the moor,” says Graham, the former chair of the Langholm Initiative. “But at the end of the day, we have to. Tarras Valley was our secret place but now we want to tell the world about it because our economic future needs visitors here.”
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Even though it is in the early stages of developing the nature reserve, the trust already has an eye on doubling its size. It is attempting to raise £2.2 million by May 31 to purchase the remaining 5,300 acres of the moor from Buccleuch Estates. While the land of the first buyout is mostly brown heather, that of the second is a mix of grassland and peatland around the headwater of the River Esk.
“It’s vital we get this land because I don’t think whoever buys it is going to manage it as a nature reserve,” Barlow says. “It has a different feel to the land that we already own and it gives us more opportunities to do things on a landscape scale.”
The initiative is hoping to emulate the success of their first fundraising campaign, which after receiving a £1 million grant from the government-funded Scottish Land Fund, raised the remaining funds with contributions from charities and £200,000 in donations from over 4,000 members of the public. The new fundraising mission has had £500,000 donated by an anonymous donor, and more than 1,200 members of the public have contributed £110,000 to the crowd-funding page.
Yet like the first buyout, members of the initiative are expecting the deal to come down to the wire, and hope that the public and charities will push the effort over the line.
While still in its early stages, the Langholm Initiative is hailed as a success story of a community managing its own land with environmental and financial sustainability in mind — a favourable contrast to the “green lairds” buying land to impose their own reforesting plans on the Highlands.
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The Langholm Initiative’s first community land buyout would not have been possible without a £500,000 donation from the Bently Foundation, which was established by Chris and Camille Bently, two American “lairds” putting down roots in their ancestral homeland.
In 2020, the couple bought Kildrummy, a 5,500-acre estate in Aberdeenshire, for £11 million. It boasts an Edwardian mansion, forestry plantations, several farming lets, a wind farm and grouse moors.
Camille and Chris, a multimillionaire property developer, split their time between San Francisco and Kildrummy. They aim to turn the property into a tapestry of habitats where declining species are protected. They also support conservation projects around the world.
They were drawn in by the initiative’s bottom-up approach and hope that its successful transition to eco-tourism will be a road map for declining towns across Scotland.
“The community buy-in was really inspirational. You can have a number of wealthy people go in and buy land and say they want to do something good with it but to have a community effort lead the way ... I think that’s the future of conservation,” Camille says. “It seems hypocritical because that’s kind of what we’re doing on the [Kildrummy] estate but I think there’s room for both.”
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“Any time a community can get behind a project, it will be much more successful,” says Chris. “Sometimes even though you’re trying to do something good with rewilding and improving the land, you can garner a bit of criticism when it’s one individual doing that to a property. The entire community doing it with everyone’s input is very beneficial.”
