LOCHINVER JOURNAL At Long Last, Scots Can Lord It Over the Lairds By WARREN HOGE OCHINVER, Scotland -- "Haste ye back," the road signs say as you pass by the stony villages along this coast where the grass is bent sideways by the ceaseless wind. But the hearty Scots summons has rung hollow for many people from here for centuries. This wilderness area was where hundreds of thousands of settlers were driven off their properties to make way for profitable sheep farming by rapacious landlords in the infamous Highland 'clearances." They were burned out of their thatched cottages and off their fields, and packed onto ships bound for the colonies or forced into servitude under Scotland's medieval feudal land-owning system on small patches of land called crofts along the infertile rocky seaside. Although these convulsive events happened in the early part of the 19th century, for the descendants who still live on this unforgiving land they are as fresh as yesterday. "Aye, it's a deeply ingrained feeling here, you must never lose sight of that," said Allan MacRae, 59, "Aye, it's a deeply ingrained feeling here, you must never lose sight of that," said Allan MacRae, 59, whose great-grandfather was among those evicted. Photo credit: Jonathan Player for The New York Times whose great-grandfather was among those evicted. "There is a deeply rooted resentment." Jumbles of piled rocks called cairns are all that remain of the cottages of the displaced, but the feudal land-owning system is more than a memory. It still exists. "It was set up in the 12th century to impose some order on, you know, the mad Scots, and it has not changed since," said Daniel Morgan, a doctoral student of the subject at Edinburgh University. Now, 900 years later, change is being proposed. Scotland gets a new Parliament in May, and Donald Dewar, Britain's secretary for Scotland, announced in January that its first order of business would be reforming the ancient land-holding structure. On his mind as he spoke was a community of 13 hamlets next to Lochinver that six years ago bought itself from its owner, a Swedish businessman, and set up its own cooperative self-government. It is called the Assynt Crofters' Trust, named after the loch that runs along one side of the 178-square-mile estate and the hardscrabble farmers who have become at once individual tenants and collective shareholding landlords, or lairds. Half of Scottish land in private hands belongs to just 350 people, and 1,500 private estates account for 80 percent of the country. Among the lairds are aristocrats, reclusive foreign investors, pop stars, offshore companies and wealthy people from London's financial sector who live distant from Scotland and treat their properties as commodities to be traded on foreign markets or use them as hunting and fishing retreats. For generations, residents have had their land sold out from under them with no knowledge of the transaction or the new laird to whom they owe their feus, or land fees. Some cottage dwellers recognize their absentee owner only by his bank account number. Sixty years ago Assynt ended up being the wedding present of an English duke to his son-in-law. The Knoydart peninsula, south of here, typically has had seven lairds in 50 years, among them a Nazi sympathizer, an English businessman jailed for fraud, the head of an English soccer team, and a condominium developer from the London suburbs. James Hunter, an author of books on Highland culture, said, "We're alone in Europe in giving local communities virtually no say in how land is used." Between 1811 and 1823, more than 15,000 people were driven from their homes in Assynt and surrounding areas. "Where today there are vast areas without a single human inhabitant, 200 years ago, every strath and glen was home to many families," said John MacKenzie, 61, an Assynt leader, using the Scottish words for river and mountain valleys. The land the Assynt crofters now own is desolately beautiful, with hillsides of mossy green peat sweeping down through seaside mists to cliffsides and crescents of dark sand beaches. A crofter's cottage in Assynt in the Scottish Highlands, where the hardscrabble farmers banded together to buy the land. The first order of business of the new Scottish Parliament in May will be reform of the country's ancient land-owning structure. Photo credit: Jonathan Player for The New York Times The gray sea is choppy from the never ceasing blustery wind, and rain and snow career across the shoreline at a slant. There is water everywhere, cascading down the rock faces, burbling through the boggy pasture land in "burns," or brooks, or lying serenely in the 70 lochs on the estate. Wet and acidic, with its topsoil blown away by the salty winds, the ground is despairing to farm. "It's broken land, marginal land, poor land," said MacRae, who raises 20 Highland cattle on his croft and works a second job unloading hefty deep-water fish from trawlers in Lochinver harbor. "You can't live off of crofting alone," he explained. Under the plans laid out by Dewar, local communities would gain the right to buy estates at market value and be able to tap National Lottery money to help raise the purchase price. In cases where lairds tried to sell land secretly, through share dealing, for example, or consistently disregarded the interests of the local people, the government could make the purchase by the community compulsory. Crofters in Scotland gained secure tenure of their land by law in 1886 and they improved their lot with amendments in 1974, but they are still blocked by their lairds from building on their own properties or developing common resources like fishing, game, woodlands, tourism, mineral rights or hydroelectric power that would help remote communities survive. "This land can't depend on agriculture alone," MacRae said. In 1992, the Assynt crofters learned they were for sale when they noticed a number of low-level flyovers by prospective buyers in small aircraft. They found out that their Swedish owner had gone bankrupt and was trying to maximize his profit by dividing them into seven parcels. They also discovered to their irritation that the sale brochure portrayed the estate as a wild place "that serves to emphasize that man himself is perhaps the alien element in the landscape." To fight back, they had to overcome generations of supine acceptance of outside control. "When we suggested buying the land ourselves, people thought it was ridiculous and far-fetched," said Aileen Kinnaird, now the trust's secretary. "Everybody accepted the old way." The trust was formed with MacRae as its chairman, and a fund-raising campaign drew support from sympathizers around Scotland and from descendants abroad of people chased off the land 180 years ago. The Assynt Crofters Trust collected the necessary $500,000, and on Feb. 1, 1993, took possession. Listing the trust's accomplishments during the last six years, MacKenzie mentioned a survey of housing needs, woodlands projects to reforest the denuded land, a computerized environmental management project, the stocking of lochs with brown trout, and a new contract for a micro hydroelectric project that will feed power into the national grid. The living-room window of his house on a promontory at Culkein overlooks the slate waters of Clashnessie Bay and a hillside cairn left by family members forced to the edge of the sea by the clearances. Staring at the site, he said: "We have, I believe, here in Assynt, changed the perception and the course of land tenure in the Highlands of Scotland forevermore."

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