Recording our community land sector
In 2007 I was teaching at the University of Guelph, in Ontario. I had been tasked with a third year class on the history of Celtic Britain from 1603 to the present. As the weeks unfolded I realised I was feeding them a steady diet of famine, war, oppression and general disaster. I wondered how I could inspire them with a positive view of the future. I went online and researched the community buyouts in Gigha, Eigg and Assynt. In the last weeks of the course all 59 of those Canadian students drew upon what people in this room, and many others, had achieved, and from that they saw what could be done to create new solutions to old problems.
I have been inspired by what I have learned during the last couple of days. And I have been reflecting on what I as a historian, and my department at UHI, can offer. Most people are too polite to ask me how my professional and personal obsession with the past is of any earthly use. But I think that is a valid question. And as we look to the future, I am going to suggest three ways in which taking the long view, taking a historical perspective, is immensely relevant and useful. I first want to tell you about some oral history projects which the Centre for History and Community Land Scotland are proposing which will preserve and record the story of community land buyouts. And then I will offer some reflections on the worryingly ahistorical rhetoric about so-called wilderness in the Highlands. Lastly I will offer some thoughts on how land use has changed enormously over time. I think these historical perspectives are exciting and freeing because they show that change, and that a variety of futures, are possible.
First of all, a very practical project. The UHI Centre for History and Community Land Scotland are already collaborating with many of yourselves on several oral history projects focused on buyouts. Plans are becoming action!
The first begins this summer. Jasmine Chorley, from the University of Toronto, is an intern with HIE. She hopes to conduct an exploratory exercise with the North Harris Trust. She intends to interview people involved in the buy out and collect documentary evidence to deposit in an archive.
The second proposed project is being spearheaded by my colleague at the UHI Centre for History, Iain Robertson. The idea is to salvage tapes of interviews made in the 1990s by Issie MacPhail, ensuring these are not lost. These recordings of people involved in early buy outs, such as Simon Fraser and Allan MacRae, would be digitised, transcribed and deposited in an archive. We hope other recordings from Gigha from the 2000s will be transcribed to make them more accessible to the public. We are being ambitious in seeking funding, hoping to create new oral recordings of more recent buyouts; funding academic research into the topic; creating public talks, museum displays and exhibitions.
As you well know, the phenomenon of community land buyouts is a sea-change in Scottish history. Indeed it is of international significance. As a historian I am excited to help create records of the experiences, of the successes and failures, and of the economic, social, political and cultural consequences of these. And these records, whether you are interested in history or not, can be used to formulate new policies which work better for the land and for the people who work and live on it.
But what about the earlier past? Is that just the province of archaeologists, historians and enthusiasts?
I have become increasingly intrigued by how history, especially ideas about the Clearances and about pre-clearance life, are evoked to make points for and against various conservation ideas; rewilding; the development of wind energy; and hill farming practices. As a pedantic academic you can imagine how much I enjoy picking holes in the historical accuracy! Clearly our understanding of history is not just of importance to geeks like myself, because our ideas of the past are profoundly influencing how we are debating the future.How we are formulating our opinions about land ownership; the place of red deer, and sheep, and trees; about rural poverty and social justice; about wind turbines and about wild land. I am an avid reader of the Northern Times and the Scottish Mountaineermagazine. Arguments rage in articles and letters to the editor. On one hand the despoiling of a pristine wilderness by industrial atrocities is lamented; and on the other hand there are fears of a ‘second clearances’ where birds and the aesthetic enjoyment of empty landscapes are preferred to a human population. History is frequently evoked to justify a position. I see historically-based arguments coalescing around two main areas. One is the place of people in the landscape and the other is how land is used. And in both, I think a historical perspective provides opportunities for envisioning positive futures for people and for land.
I imagine some of you received Jim Hunter’s latest tome for your Christmas. If so, you will have become familiar with Strath Brora in east Sutherland. He powerfully demonstrates how densely populated landscapes such as these were until two hundred years ago. A few weeks past I was cycling up Strath Brora. I noted the isolated holiday houses, the two farms, some sheep, and a lot of fishing equipment attached to range rovers and jaguars. With the wind at my back I passed the site of the old townships of Ascoilemore, Ascoilebeg, Carroll, Kilpheddermore and many others I don’t know the names of. This is the same in every strath in the Highlands. However to the untrained eye these are less abandoned places than wilderness, unspoilt scenery, untouched by human interference.
This vision has been demonstrated recently in SNH’s ‘Wild Land Map’. Despite the title, it actually records places perceived as wild land. What it measures is cultural ideas about land and how urban society currently sees and perceives some kinds of land as wild. The map was not intended to guide policy on development. However an unintended consequence is thatit is now being used to influence decisions. I think all of us enjoy ‘getting away from it’ and relish outdoors solitude. And it is perfectly valid and useful to record areas people perceive as being wild. But why select this one attribute? An attitude of the mind, no less, not even a physical reality. And an attribute of the present which does not reflect how these places have been over the long term. Why not instead map rural industry? Areas perceived to be wild also contain twentieth-century human projects like hydro-electric dams, pylons, estate tracks, commercial forestry plantations, quarries and peat cuttings; let alone seventeenth- or eighteenth-century iron smelting, milling, salt panning and brick making facilities. Or why not map where people used to live, and could potentially live again: landscapes abandoned only 150 or 200 years ago after thousands of years of habitation? Rob Gibson is fond of reminding us that areas perceived as wilderness significantly overlap with ‘clearance country’. Or why not map land use? Mapping arable, common grazing, sheep farms, grouse moor, forestry and deer estates would again show that almost all land perceived as wilderness is, for better or worse, altered, managed and utilised by humans for commercial purposes. The long view, the historical perspective, shows where people have lived, manufactured, extracted, exploited, and stewarded natural resourcesand how this has changed through the centuries depending on the prevailing economic, political and philosophical climate.
Even the land itself has changed. The land, as well as the people, has a history. I was struck by an article last month by Alan Featherstone about rewilding. He made some good points but then claimed that if the people had not been forced off the land ‘there would have been little to support them, such is the depletion of the land.’However Reay Clarke’s recent book explains that the ecological impoverishment was a result of the clearances: a result of the removal of the people and of the sheep monoculture which was introduced. Reay Clarke is a well-known sheepfarmer,and he notes that as Strathnaver was turned over from mixed farming to sheep, Patrick Sellar, everyone’s favourite factor, recorded an astonishing diversity of plantlife. This was a result of the careful husbanding of the upland pasture over several centuries, primarily for cattle. This was the case across the Highlands. Over the past few years I have learned an immense amount from one of our PhD students, David Taylor, who has studied late eighteenth-century Badenoch. He describes how, at the apex of the black cattle economy, the Drumochter hills which today we perceive as wasteland, only fit for deer, hillwalkers and perhaps windfarms, were thick with cattle grazing all the way to the very summits. This was no scraping of subsistence but large, profit making herds providing top range beef for the cities of the south. Last year I passed through the Drumochter Pass on the train. Sitting beside me was an unfortunate cyclist trying to get home to Glasgow. He was treated to an unsolicited lecture on the eighteenth-century productivity of this now barren landscape. My point is, that ecologies are historic. And understanding that these ecologies have changed through time;understanding that they are created through human decisions about land use; and understanding their long term consequences, equips us to make decisions about how best to steward the land for the future. If how it is now is not how it has always been, then we have choices for the future.
If we are to createpolicies intended for the best interest of the land, its various ecologies, and its human inhabitants, then it is important not to see only the present situation and preserve it in formaldehyde. The long view holds centuries of changes and centuries of possibilities.
So as we think about what’s next for the sector, how relevant and useful is history?
I think it is relevant and useful to record the endeavours of those who are doing new things. And in all their successes and their failures we can reflect on what to emulate and what to avoid.
I think it is relevant and useful to promote a historical view to issues of changing settlement patterns and uses of the land. A long term view frees us to question how things are now and to imagine possible futures.
If where we live has changed in the past, then it can change again.
If how the land was used to meet the needs of the people changed in the past, then it can change again.
If how we used natural resources changed in the past, then it can change again.
Taking the long view, the historical view, of our relationship with the land places us within a much bigger story of change, disaster, success and adaptation. And it suggests exciting possibilities for many different futures.