Renowned Wickerhead Allan Brown of the Sunday Times has an interesting article in this morning's paper about the travails faced by poor Hugh McLeod, the 30th chief of the Clan McLeod and the cursed inheritance of maintaining Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye.
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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