Andy Wightman has a simple objective with his Who Owns Scotland website. But that doesn't make it easy to achieve.
"I'm setting out to make it much easier for people to find out who owns large areas of rural Scotland," he told the Record. "I'm not doing urban Scotland, as that would take several lifetimes."
The Quest for Land Ownership Transparency
Wightman's website is the product of countless hours going through archives and analysing title deeds. His site now accounts for the ownership of 77 per cent of rural Scotland - some 5,934,294 hectares. Scotland already has the oldest national land register in the world, the General Register of Sasines, which dates back to 1617. But Wightman's site makes it far more user-friendly.
"The information has always been there. The problem is, it's very difficult to interpret, because you are invited to interpret quite complex legal documents. And that's not a skill most people have," Wightman said.
Concentration of Ownership
Wightman's research has found 88 per cent of rural Scotland is privately owned. Most of the 12 per cent of public land is owned by the National Forest Estate. "And of that 88 per cent, it's the fact so few people own so much of it," he added. "So 408 landowners own over half of the privately owned rural land in Scotland. It's that concentration of ownership in a small number of hands which is quite remarkable."
"It's certainly the most concentrated pattern of ownership anywhere in Europe."
Who Are the Owners?
In terms of who these people are, the historic aristocracy - the dukes and the earls - have been slowly declining in their landholdings. "At the end of the 19th century, the Duke of Sutherland owned the entirety of the county of Sutherland, with the exception of a few lighthouses and a couple of churches. But they now own a tiny fraction," Wightman said.
"Some of them have disappeared. But others like the Duke of Buccleuch, the Duke of Argyll, the Marquees of Lothian, the Duke of Roxburghshire, they're still around. Their estates may have declined compared to what their forefathers owned 100 years ago, but they're sticky, these people."
Newcomers and Foreign Ownership
In their place has come a variety of newcomers. "They come to Scotland because we have a very open, very liberal land market where anyone, from anywhere in the world, can buy as much land as they can get their hands on," Wightman said. "That lack of regulation is why we have such an interesting cast of characters. But foreign ownership has stayed relatively constant - it's only around five per cent."
Devolution and Land Reform
One of the hopes of devolution was to tackle the issue of land ownership. Several pieces of legislation have been passed to assist crofters, and there have been high-profile community buy-outs of small islands like Ulva. But Wightman rates the work of the Scottish Parliament on this issue as a mixed bag.
"It was a good start and then a long, slow decline," he said. "The pattern of land ownership is getting more concentrated after a long, steady trend since the end of the 19th century of less concentration. That's now gone into reverse, and that's not good."
"Land reform is about putting power in the hands of people - either by making existing owners more accountable, or by having many more owners. Certainly by giving people the opportunity to buy land, if they want it, relatively easily. And none of that has happened. We have been tinkering around the edges. You've got to have measures to break up concentrated ownership."
"There's really been nothing to disturb the sleep of the Duke of Argyll, or the Duke of Buccleuch, in 25 years of devolution."
