This latter day Monarch of the Glen is in the process of restoring what could graciously be described as the best example of Stalinist castle architecture outside of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Clan chief McLeod is in the process of spending £1.1 million on patching up the castle's copper roof. The vast majority of the funding has come from the public purse, the estate have had to take on significant debts to pay for the remainder. The roof is just the first part of work done to keep this crumbling pile from collapsing underneath the weight of its place in our understanding of what heritage really is.
McLeod sums up the problem facing our latest generation of the aristocracy, who through no fault of their own inherited massive obligations to maintain these monstrous carbuncles... the poor souls.
“I’m just a link in a chain that goes back 800 years — and my job is not to be the weak link,” he says.
To me this is the very core of what's wrong with Scotland's relationship with our landed gentry, the obligation to maintain the natural order with toffs on top holding grimly on to huge swathes of Scotland. Take for example, the Duke of Buccleuch, whom I've met a couple of times, he's a lovely chap, very approachable, good to his workforce and elderly tenants, keen to encourage community involvement, a great supporter of the arts, interested in developing sustainable housing, district heating schemes, biodiversity, green issues etcetera, a really lovely bloke. However, he is not just the largest private landowner in Scotland, he's the largest private landowner on the continent of Europe. He owns 279,000 acres of Scotland. Local folklore has it that you could walk from Portpatrick on the west coast to St Abbs on the east coast and never set foot off Buccleuch land.
Now short of challenging our collective lairds to a bout of fisticuffs to get the land back to the people, we're left in this ludicrous situation where a few folk, most of whom are not resident here or speak with the same tongue, keep a stranglehold on the growth of Scotland. What to do?
Look at our population densely crammed into the central belt. There is no need for it. Why can't we have those communities who were cleared to the cities and conurbations in the 19th century return to the vast tracts of land both north and south of the Central Belt? Previously people needed to be near their source of food and employment. Today with the globalisation of the food industry and the growth in small to medium scale enterprises, there is no need for companies to have a massive workforce on their doorstep.
We need to sit back and compare our use of land and the spread of our population with similar sized countries, who manage to have an even coverage. We need major investment in our road and sea infrastructure. Why for example, has the main arterial route up the west coast of Scotland had a set of temporary lights on the Loch Lomond, Tarbet to Crianlarich A82 road for nearly forty chuffing years?
Sustainable communities where housing is owned and maintained collectively by communities is not some utopian wishy washy dream. There are people like the Hartwood Community who are actively pursuing the reality of finding people tired of the grind of working to live, to pay mortgages on the hugely inflated cost of housing. A recent exercise saw them build a comfortable, liveable, safe, low cost, warm straw bale house for less than £5000, using reclaimable materials and readily available low carbon methods of energy. Naturally, they did this without planning permission in a hidden away location. This so incensed the likes of the Daily Mail, that they trawled through various images in an effort to track down these vile sandal wearing, didgeridoo playing affordable house building zealots to report them to the Authorities...
I digress, back to the young McLeod of McLeod. I have a solution for him that needn't hump him with debt or burden the public purse. Let Dunvegan die a natural death, I'm not advocating architectural euthanasia, merely suggesting he let it slowly go back to being a ruin. In the meantime if he wishes to maintain a castle in Dunvegan, amidst his own 25,000 acres, why not save your pennies and build a contemporary castle, that you can live in and still bring cash paying visitors to? You could hold an open competition for Scotland's many fine architects to design you a castle fit for the future. Build it from locally sourced materials, make it environmentally sound, jings a straw bale castle might keep the wolf from the door. Alternatively you could go for something like this.
It's a beauty isn't it? Monte Silo is perhaps not to every aristocrats taste, I can't imagine hanging a stags head above the fireplace would be a good look, and the servants silo might be a tad cramped. However, the facts remain, spending your life avoiding being the weak link in an 800 year old chain is redundant in this new age of austerity and environmentalism. Get with it, free your mind and let go of your acreage to the people.
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8 comments:
You raise a number of interesting issues - some of which have been knocking about inside my head for a while, without attaining bloggish expression. The whole subject of the landed gentry's influence in Scotland - developmentally, economically - seems to have slipped out of public consciousness. The old 7:84 sentiment increasingly discregarded.
I wonder if one aspect of this is the urban bias of commentary and politics. If you weren't dragged up on one of these estates (as I was) with their bizarre Great Chain of Being class structure - the brute realities of their continuing operation is difficult to comprehend. Those with pasts exclusively couched in Glasgow or Aberdeen or Edinburgh tend not to appreciate the continuing influence these (usually) men have on the civic life of the nation. Quite a different barrel of sardines than the class-cultures of towns, with their silos and well-edged social divisions, finding expression in the very architectural divisions which divide and split townfolk from one another.
An issue to be revisted more fulsomely, methinks.
Thanks for the comment old chap.
If you look at the rise to power of the traditional merchant class and their move into landed gentry you discover that the same lines of influence and power are still in existence today, often on a global basis.
I was rather taken aback to discover that Percy Wetherall of the Jardine Mathieson family, was until quite recently the Taipei of Hong Kong, a post his family have held for the past 150 years...
Not quite in the same vein as our Earls and Dukes, but still so influential, particularly when dealing with some of our lesser lights in Holyrood.
http://www.alastairmcintosh.com
has some interesting views on how we introduce a more fairer system into landownership. he's a splendid chap who also heads up the GalGael trust, teaching traditional boat building skills to Govanites.
Land reform is long overdue in Scotland, but is there any political will to tackle the subject?
Sadly no. There doesn't appear to be any political beast willing to put their balls on the line and take on this absurd situation.
I was rather taken aback to discover that Percy Wetherall of the Jardine Mathieson family, was until quite recently the Taipei of Hong Kong, a post his family have held for the past 150 years...
Not quite sure where you gleaned this bit of 'knowledge' from, but it is erroneous. The word you are looking for is 'Taipan' (or 'Tai-Pan'), a Cantonese slang word meaning at its politest 'big shot', but like a lot of Cantonese slang it really means something a good deal cruder - it was originally a term used by Chinese toward foreign bosses, but is now applied to bosses of companies of any nationality.
The boss of JM was traditionally referred to as the 'taipan of Jardines' not of Hong Kong - all the long-standing firms there had their own Tai-Pans. I think your comment takes rather too literally the story-line of James Clavell's novel of the same name, which is only loosely (very loosely) based on historical reality.
Now I'll let yo get back to your discussions of so-called 'land reform', otherwise know as 'expropriation' of legitimate property rights, paid for with public money, of which there have been too many examples since the devloved administration of Scotland came into force. We certainly do not need more.
Thanks Bill, I stand corrected.
I take it you're not particularly keen on loosening the hold of the large estates then. Are we just keep Scotland as a lovely wide open place accessible only to the shooting and fishing types?
Name me another country where most of the land is owned by foreigners?
Its a disgrace. I suspect we'll need to wait for independence to sort it out.
Never forget that the landed gentry are merely descended from the gangsters of the 13th century.
Marvellous thinking.
New ideas; things that can be achieved if one is prepared to think the unthinkable. So far, I like it.
However.
Ownership of huge swathes of the country by one individual may seem old fashioned but it bestows continuity and at least some degree of maintenance of the good as well as the bad. There is a maturity to land ownership that is self-evidently the result of many years of experience. What comes with it is an ethos, possibly of deference, and possibly of benign tyranny, but it gravitates against faddy changes that subsequently prove to be crap.
What I want to know really is what is the alternative? It is all very well abolishing the Duke of Buccleuch, but the idea of replacing him with some terrible collective of alfalfa eating lefties who then decide to turn it into a confederacy of the mediocre, and who latterly decide to import failed asylum seekers in sandals made out of old auto tyres gives me the willies.
So ok, you are not saying that, and that is the Daily Mail version, but there are risks with bucking the status quo and they have to be assessed when chucking away a thousand years of history.
Monte Silo - I could happily live in it.
The Hartwood Community seems fascinating and I would like to know more.
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