Crofters lead by example

A YEAR ago today the crofters of Assynt took ownership of the

21,000-acre North Lochinver Estate on a wave of goodwill from the rest

of Scotland which was in itself a popular and important statement on

Highland landlordism.

But there was more. The crofters had touched something very deep

within the Scottish soul, something which had to do with our

relationship with the land, with a lost heritage, and with reclaiming

part of our own history. It was to put enormous pressure on the

crofters.

The country had followed their campaign from June till December 8,

1992, when they had finally managed to convince the creditors of the

bankrupt Scandinavian Property Services Ltd, most notably the Ostgota

Enskilda Bank of Stockholm, that if they didn't sell to the crofters for

#300,000, they weren't going to sell to anyone else for their #473,000

asking price.

At the time Allan MacRae, the crofters' inspirational chairman, had

tried to put these expectations into some kind of perspective -- ''I

can't see how we can do any worse than what has gone before.'' He was

only too well aware of what had gone before, the son of a

stalker/shepherd his great grandfather had been cleared from the land at

Ardvar to make way for a sheep farm which had once supported 500 ewes

but, before the buy-out last year, had not one beast grazing on it.

It would not be enough, however, to do just a little better than the

Vestey family or the discredited SPS land company which had paid the

Vesteys #1,080,000. The crofters had to show by example that the land

should belong to those who live and work on it. Already their

counterparts in Borve and Annishader on Skye have followed suit and the

people of Kinlochbervie are preparing to, while other Highland

communities are known to be considering it.

But more than anything else the 100 or so crofters needed time. That

was not going to be easy given the publicity which had been crucial to

their campaign and the fact that so many people felt that they now had

some kind of stake, financial or emotional, in Assynt.

They also had set difficult targets, committing themselves to using

the estate to create employment and affordable housing so that the young

people could see a real future in Assynt and help balance the ageing

profile of the crofting community. This couldn't be done in the glare of

publicity.

After holding a fairly extraordinary celebratory ceilidh in the

Lochinver's Culag Hotel last February, the crofters very skilfully

managed to withdraw from the stage. It was not easy as Bill Ritchie, the

secretary of the Assynt Crofters Trust, remembers.

''There was a lot of pressure on us to respond to various Government

documents about the land etc. We were different and people would say

'let's hear what the crofters think about this or that.' But we resisted

the temptation because all we are concerned with is running the North

Assynt Estate.'' They had reverted to the old name for the area.

They did go public again last summer announcing a computer software

company Implex Environmental Systems Ltd was relocating from Liverpool,

having taken the lease of Torbreck House, bringing two hi-tech jobs into

a house that had been used by previous estate owners to house a keeper.

The crofters weren't wasting any time.

Last week in the old post office in Stoer which acts as their estate

office/corporate headquarters, some of the trust's office bearers talked

of their feelings now, what has been achieved, but mostly of their

vision for the future. It is a very different atmosphere from a year

ago, as trust vice-chairman John MacKenzie recognises. ''The euphoria

has diminished, but the optimism has remained. What we have done by

winning our land is to unlock the scale of the vision that hitherto

prevailed; to unlock the estate's assets for the crofters.''

A clear example of this was the trust leasing four lochs near Drumbeg

to one member to start an angling school which in turn will create one

full-time and one part-time job. But the first thing that had to be

done, however, was to get some kind of management structure in place.

Management by committee was never seriously entertained. Pat MacPhail,

a crofter from Clashmore township, was appointed crofting administrator.

He now works on the day-to-day running of the estate with the trust's

lawyer and the much-criticised Crofters Commission, which he says has

gone out of its way to help.

They also fairly quickly realised that ownership of the land did not

mean they could provide housing overnight, but the commitment is still

there. There is to be an audit of housing needs. Meetings, meanwhile,

have been held with local authorities, Scottish Homes, the North-west

Council of Social Services, Sutherland Community Care Forum, and the

Scottish Crofters Union.

''We are examining the idea of a housing agency in North-west

Sutherland. Individual crofters can still negotiate with white settlers,

but given that we now own the land, the trust will be trying to

facilitate the aspirations of younger locals to build houses themselves

or to have them built for them. The whole point remains to try to get

houses for local people,'' John MacKenzie says.

He also is the man who was charged with investigating the energy

potential of the estate. ''We looked at wind generation. It is not a

viable proposition at this point but there are the possibilities of

water generation on two sites. We are in negotiation with a firm of

consultants and we have made grant application for feasibility studies

to be carried out on two sites which we hope will show that we could

generate up to 500KW.

''Caithness and Sutherland Enterprise has already given us a positive

response. We plan to export the power to the grid and we have made

application to Hydro Electric and the two sites have been registered.

Power is one of the few things we have to export and the money would be

used for the good of the local population. There would be employment in

the construction phase and part-time maintenance afterwards, but the

revenue would help underpin our other efforts to create employment.''

Most important of these is the potential for crofter/forestry which

can attract grant aid of tens of thousands of pounds. Indeed tomorrow

night in Stoer Community Hall there is a meeting to discuss the issue.

Bill Ritchie sees this as vitally important. ''We will be asking the

crofters if they agree to this being developed to create employment

rather than everybody just being handed #500 or whatever. We would ask

them to identify the areas where this could take place and then we as a

trust could embark on projects. With the scale of what we have here we

could put together a team of people and have them employed for five

years or more, planting, fencing, and draining. Then people could be

employed to manage the timber as it grows.''

It will be fitting if the return of native oak and yew to the old

Macleod lands of Assynt means the youth of the area will now be able to

stay. Again and again trees feature in the imagery employed in Gaelic

poetry and tradition, their characteristics being translated into human

terms. More widely, the loss of woodlands, rightly or wrongly, is held

as a potent symbol of something taken from Scotland by a series of

outsiders, from the Romans through Cromwell's soldiers to the

nineteenth-century iron masters. The trees should grow well among the

people of Assynt. But in the meantime the First Anniversary Ceilidh will

be at the Culag the week after next.