The crofters who took on the mega rich – with tree planting
Alison Campsie looks back at a parliamentary Act which helped to transform land use in the communities of the Highlands and Islands
It has been described as a “game changer” – a law that shook up the way crofters could manage their land and gave them the power to plant trees for the first time.
This week, crofters from across the Highlands will gather to mark the impact of the Crofter Forestry Act of 1991 and the 25 years since the first trees were planted in Lewis and Sutherland under its remit.
The law came at a time when only the wealthy were planting trees in the Highlands with investors buying up vast tracts of forestry in a bid to gain tax relief on their income.
Famously, the late broadcaster Terry Wogan was among celebrities who invested in tree planting in the Flow Country, a vast expanse of wetland and peatland in Caithness and Sutherland, as part of a scheme which came under fire for reducing habitats for several bird species.
While celebrities were aiming to earn tens of thousands out of their forestry investment, crofters were still forbidden from diversifying from traditional activities of grazing animals and cutting peat. The Crofter Forestry Act changed all that.
Calum Macdonald, a former Western Isles MP, first put forward a Private Member’s Bill to gain the first extension of crofters rights over their grazings since the 1880s.
He said: “Prior to this, the rights of crofters over their grazings were just what they had been for 100 years.
“But in the 1980s there was a revival of interest and a change in the image of crofting.
“The problem was that the rights of crofters were still stuck in the 19th century and they were unable to take advantage of new economic and environmental opportunities
such as the widely-recognised need to plant more trees.
“The only people able to plant trees in the Highlands were multimillionaires.
“There was a particularly infamous example involving showbiz stars like Terry Wogan planting vast hectares in the Flow Country in Caithness while the crofting communities got nothing at all.”
Duncan Mackay was clerk to the Sandwick North Street township in Lewis, and one of the first to take advantage of the new Act.
He said the scheme had a “transformational effect” on the finances and physical surroundings of crofting communities.
He said: “Before the Crofter Forestry Act came along we were struggling to raise £70 for fertiliser for the grazings. Every place was struggling then, because if you wanted to do improvements, you had to go round begging for money.”
After the Act, common grazings committees could receive £5,000 a year for 15 years in compensation for planting 100 hectares or 190,000 trees.
Mr Mackay said: “Within a few years we were affluent and were able to do lots of improvements. It was absolutely fantastic.
“It transformed the whole place and at the end of the 15-year period we had £28,000 sitting in the bank, in a high-interest account.
“We never looked back once that came in. It absolutely changed grazings and agriculture. It changed the whole concept.”
It is estimated that 10 million trees have been planted under the scheme.
Mr Macdonald, who now develops community wind farms, said the success of the forestry scheme showed that crofters should be afforded more rights to diversify their incomes.
“Why shouldn’t crofters have the right to harvest wind energy as well peat? Why not the right to plant wind turbines as well as trees?
“We have half a million hectares in crofting tenure and 5,000 communities organised into grazings committees yet successive Governments still see this as an embarrassing anachronism instead of a unique Scottish strength that should be central to land use policy in the 21st century.”