The mutiny that could FINALLY force the Laird of Great Bernera to sell his island
It’s home to 200 people who counted the loveable old laird as one of their own. But after his death, his German grandson inherited their Hebridean paradise – triggering a dramatic fallout and a landmark legal battle...
DERELICT for more than a decade, the former home of the late laird slowly yields to the elements in its heavily overgrown garden. Count Robin, as islanders called him, led a frugal life on Great Bernera, the remote speck of the Outer Hebrides he owned for 50 years, but he would not have enjoyed seeing his house reduced to inhabitability.
Indeed, much that has happened on the island in the ten years since his passing would surely leave its former owner despondent.
‘I fell in love with the people here,’ he once said. ‘That’s why I bought the island.’ It became the most prized item in his property portfolio. Beset by debt in the 1990s, his fundraising fire-sale included his house in London’s Holland Park, a chateau in France and a flat in Switzerland. But Bernera? Never. He belonged here and counted himself as an islander. He was even a member of the local lottery syndicate.
The contrast with today’s laird – Count Robin’s 26-year-old grandson who lives in Frankfurt and has barely set foot on Bernera – could hardly be more stark.
Cyran de la Lanne, who inherited the real estate his grandfather held most dear, has zero affinity with the island or its people, say locals.
Few have ever met him and those who have describe a young man who seems almost indifferent to owning 7,000 acres of Scotland where 200 people live.
But, for all his apparent apathy, the absentee landlord may earn a place in Scottish legal history as the first landowner forced to sell to the community under land reform laws.
ARAFT of islands and estates have passed from lairds to communities since the Land Reform (Scotland) Act was introduced in 2003 but, until now, transactions have always been by agreement.
Now, for the first time, a landowner stands to be compelled to sell whether he wants to or not – at a price decided by an independent valuer. And, in a further blow for the absentee laird, that valuation is expected to be substantially lower than the sum islanders offered him – and he turned down – four years ago.
‘That’s the line we’re now going down and we’ve informed him of this,’ one Great Bernera resident, Tom Macdonald, 68, told the Mail this week. ‘We would have preferred to settle it amicably.’
The compulsory handover in prospect will mark a grim end to 60 years of family ownership of the island, which is accessed by a bridge from Lewis.
From the day he bought it in 1962, the dashing Robin de la Lanne-Mirrlees was devoted to the place. The Oxford-educated former Army captain was godson of the 11th Duke of Argyll, a close pal of James Bond creator Ian Fleming (who dedicated On His Majesty’s Secret Service to him) and the Queen’s heraldic researcher.
To the surprise of many, he decided to settle on the island, moving from London into the august-sounding Great Bernera Lodge which, in reality, was scarcely more grand than any other dwelling house there.
‘When I came here, I could have built a mansion but I wanted to live among the people, be one of them, and not strut around as the new laird,’ he once said.
‘My family has always stuck by the principle that you make money by creative means, and help other people.’
According to locals, Count Robin was not only an assiduous collector of titles but also the archetypal benevolent landlord.
He donated land and pumped his own money into community projects and, for years, refused to raise rents for islanders in tenanted crofts.
The Count had a long-term relationship with German Duchess Margarethe of Wurttemberg, the mother of his only son Patrick who is the former mayor of the German city of Delmenhorst in Lower Saxony.
He was married only once in his 87 years – to a carer half his age who nursed him through a period of ill-health. It lasted just a week.
As he explained, he wed ‘out of gratitude really’.
The more far-reaching misjudgment, perhaps, was in the drawing up of his will.
In it, he skipped a generation and left the bulk of his estate to Patrick’s son Cyran, who was aged 16 in 2012.
HIS inheritance included Great Bernera, its lodge, Inchdrewer Castle in Banff, a villa at Le Touquet in northern France, land near the Pyrenees in southern France and a farm in Sicily.
The Count left instructions for the estate to be held in trust until his grandson was 25 and made it known both to his family and islanders that he wanted the community to have first refusal on any sale of Great Bernera – an indication, perhaps, of his ultimate aim for the place. Not included in Cyran’s inheritance was Little Bernera, the uninhabited isle which lies a few yards off its big brother’s northern tip. This the landowner left to the National Trust for Scotland – but it declined the bequest.
A spokesman said: ‘Whilst it is of undoubted value, it would not bridge any gaps within our existing portfolio of nationally important properties and would incur significant cost obligations.’
And so, by default, Cyran became the owner of Little Bernera too. It is not known whether he has ever set foot on this smaller island.
Indeed, for a young man with enormous tracts of property in his portfolio, little is known of any recent movements. He was clearly sufficiently taken by his sudden inheritance to post an idyllic picture of Bernera on his Facebook account. But more recent posts depict luxury holidays in foreign
climes such as Venice, and a clear love of sailing.
He has studied at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management but, at 26, there is no indication of progress beyond there.
Contact with islanders has been virtually non-existent. Where negotiations have been entered into, his father Patrick – who was left nothing in the will – has been the one doing the talking on Cyran’s behalf.
He told islanders he was doing so in his capacity as ‘executor’, adding: ‘The consequence of that... is that I am obliged to act especially carefully and not to sell the estate below value.’ From an early stage, then, it was clear the family intended to sell the island. The sticking point was price.
A district valuer assessed the combined worth of the two islands at just £70,000 on the basis that they were almost entirely designated as crofting and common grazing areas, meaning there was little scope for development for a private landowner.
Even the prospect of erecting wind turbines on the larger island was ruled out because of their proximity to and visual impact on the famous Callanish Stones, one of the most important attractions on Lewis.
Up to 95 per cent of the buyout funds typically come from public money such as the Scottish Land Fund, but this figure is pegged to valuation – and Patrick was reportedly dismissive of the £70,000 figure.
He was said to have obtained a private valuation of his own which put the price at around £500,000, but islanders have never seen evidence of it.
The two sides were miles apart. Worse, from the islanders’ point of view, the Germany-based family’s interest in Great Bernera appeared to them to be purely financial.
They found themselves negotiating almost exclusively with Patrick while the actual owner of the island remained on the periphery. Indeed, they began to wonder if Cyran had any interest in what was being discussed.
Mr Macdonald remembers: ‘One of my fellow trustees was over in Germany on business himself and went to see them there.
‘There was no doubt Patrick was the main man.’
On another occasion, during an informal dinner to discuss the future of the island with Patrick, Mr Macdonald remembers Patrick sitting back in his chair, smiling and telling him: ‘Make me an offer I can’t refuse’.
Mr Macdonald added: ‘He didn’t want to talk about the situation... that was the level of his discussion with us: make me an offer I can’t refuse.’ So the community attempted to do just that.
In 2018 the Great Bernera Community Development Trust put together an offer of £130,000 – a combination of public and private money representing almost twice the value of the land.
The landowner’s father stalled as he explored ways to sweeten the deal.
Alluding to the possibility of wind turbines being erected after the sale, Patrick told residents he needed to ensure ‘the beneficiary of my late father’s estate is protected for a loss of compensation for such future developments’.
In a letter to islanders issued through his lawyer, he said: ‘Would you be prepared to come to an arrangement regarding a clawback of possible income regenerated by wind turbines on the estate? This could be in the range of 20 years and 50 per cent of the income.’
ULTIMATELY the deal fell through as islanders made it clear there was to be no wind farm and no prospect of the former owner taking a cut of any profits once it was sold to the community.
Indeed, many islanders were scandalised by the suggestion. ‘It seems to me he wants to get the most money for the least possible effort,’ said one.
But what scandalised others more were the demands from Germany for financial ‘compensation’ from crofters who wished to sell their properties or build on them.
They alerted their MSP, the SNP’s Alasdair Allan, telling him their laird was not only imposing charges but exploiting loopholes in the legislation to frustrate a compulsory purchase.
In the Scottish parliament in June, Mr Allan stopped short of demanding his government tightened up the Land Reform (Scotland) Act but he presented a picture of a community withering under the weight of its landowner’s disregard.
One constituent, he said, had been hoping to retire to his family home in Bernera but instead had to put the property on the market to pay for his late mother’s care home fees.
For 18 months, said Dr Allan, Bernera estate refused to sign the necessary papers to allow the sale until the islander coughed up ‘the completely arbitrary sum of £16,000’.
Dr Allan added: ‘That kind of sum might not mean very much to an absentee landlord, but it is impossible for most people to magic it out of thin air.
‘I should also say that that practice is unheard of on other estates.’
The sale finally went through without the ‘completely unjustifiable fee’, said Dr Allan, but the island’s story remained one of managed decline. In recent years, he said, it had lost both its shop and its school.
‘Although there are young families who want to move back to the area, the lack of scope for local development under the current owner means that it is impossible to reverse the island’s depopulation by building any new affordable housing.’
IN a statement, he later said: ‘For people in the Western Isles to be bound by the increasingly unreasonable whims of an absentee landlord is, in my view, completely unacceptable.’
Dr Allan said the holding up of local development was causing ‘real distress’ and several islanders had been in touch with him about their own situations.
Others were more vociferous still on the landowner’s conduct. Labour’s Rhoda Grant told the debate: ‘At the end of the day people such as Cyran de la LanneMirrlees should not be put in charge of a cat, far less people’s futures and wellbeing.
‘Indeed, there are more powers in Scotland to remove a cat from a bad owner than there are to remove land.’
But perhaps the most telling response came from Public Finance Minister Tom Arthur.
‘The crofting community right to buy has never been used to completion, but maybe it is about time that it was,’ he said.
‘In this case, it might be able to bring the owner to the negotiating table. If not, I feel that this community is the type to follow through with its plans.’
From day one, the most contentious element of the Land Reform legislation was the idea that a landowner may be forcibly stripped of his or her property.
Now, in the face of years of intransigence from a laird seemingly determined to stoke the Act’s most draconian powers, it finds few critics from any quarter in the parliament.
‘It’s been ten years,’ says Tom Macdonald. ‘We have watched communities who started this process after us complete it before us. They’re done and dusted because they had a willing seller. We thought we had a willing seller.’
Cyran de la Lanne did not respond when approached for comment through his estate factor in Stornoway on Lewis.
For islanders, stony silence from the Frankfurt landowner and his father has become a familiar theme over the years.
At this late stage, it looks unlikely to forestall the inevitable.