I have various views! Firstly, much though love hill farming, don’t mistake what you see now for tradition. There are certainly strong elements of tradition, but older hill farms were more diverse than their modern equivalent, mixing small scale arable and cattle with sheep rather more than is the case now.

I would like to believe that there is a drive to repeople Scotland and certainly the Scottish Government make good noises. But I wonder if it amounts to anything. Forestry and Land Scotland (formerly Forestry Commission Scotland) are an agency of the Scottish Government and they own 9% of Scotland’s land area. They have a huge opportunity to repeople remote parts of Scotland, but I doubt they have built a single house for 20 years. If the Scottish Government was serious about repeopling Scotland they could make a huge start without a single piece of land reform legislation. They could just build.

The big point here is that reforming the management of public land has at least as much potential as reforming the ownership of private land in driving repeopling.

As for community buyouts etc. Time will tell I suppose. But I would counsel against falling into the assumption that highly concentrated private ownership is necessarily antithetical to re peopling. People seem to assume that because the current estate system was (at least partly) a product of the Clearances then the owners would seek to maintain land in its cleared state. But a recent report for the Scottish Land Commission found no evidence that current patterns of land ownership are a barrier to sustainable development.

I plan to blog soon about an interesting example of a community group and a classic sporting estate working in concert to defeat what they perceived as a common enemy.