Of all the SNP’s various revolutionary plans for Scotland, the one that in the view of the party chiefs would most obviously allow the country to become more equitable was always the plan for fundamental land reform. Not the near-beer reform the traditional political parties had espoused—but full-blown radical reform, which would really shake things up. Now, with the SNP firmly in charge and with a comfortable majority in Parliament, a plan for real change could get under way. “Scotland’s land is a valuable asset,” the newly elected SNP member for Argyll remarked, “and an asset which should benefit the many. The party is committed to empowering communities through land reform, enabling them to determine their own futures.”

  A million acres would be in community hands by 2020, pledged one minister. All land would be fully registered within a decade, promised another. Quiverfuls of extreme reformist legislation would now be let fly, to make sure the land in Scotland was henceforth to be distributed among the people more fairly than ever before.

  The result of all this pledging and promising was the swift passage of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act of 2016—a draconian piece of legislation that, for some landowners, had an immediate, chilling effect. The earlier act of 2003 merely encouraged communities to bid for any landed estates that came up for sale. This 2016 act went further: if the would-be new owners, communities all, pledged to indulge in the loosely defined “sustainable development” of their purchase, then the law positively forbade the current landowners from selling to individuals, but compelled them (if they planned to sell at all, that is) to sell only to such forward-thinking communities. It was the passage of this powerful new law allowed the SNP’s charismatic new leader, Nicola Sturgeon, to announce the first successful community buyout to a gathering of enraptured party faithful in Glasgow in October 2017. To a swelling chorus of applause and delighted cheers, she said:

  And we have started Scotland’s modern journey of land reform.

  That journey continues today.

  In recent months Ulva, an island off the west coast of Mull, has sought permission to [enter into community ownership].

  If permission is granted, the residents can get on with raising the money needed.

  The Scottish Government has carefully considered the application.

  And I am delighted to announce that we have today granted permission to the people of Ulva to bring their island into community ownership.

  She could barely get her words out, so loud and delighted were her listeners. The six current inhabitants of the island heard the news that evening and professed themselves as thrilled as the conferees down in Glasgow. The leading lights of the Northwest Mull Community Woodland Company, a local forestry group that would now act as the “community” purchasing the island, had been given due warning of the announcement, and they were wondering how best to raise the £4.25 million at which Ulva had been valued for sale.

  The only person who knew nothing of the suddenly changed circumstance was Jamie Howard, Laird of Ulva. He was on the island, checking on his cattle at the time. His daughter telephoned from London to tell him what Nicola Sturgeon had said. He was to be, quite without warning, effectively dispossessed.

  The Scottish government, he learned, had stepped in at the last moment. The sale to the helicopter visitor, which Jamie Howard was anticipating would probably go through, was to be canceled. He could barely believe what he was hearing. “I was completely flattened, and hugely disappointed that they could have treated us this way,” he told The Scotsman newspaper. But the following morning his worst fears were confirmed: a letter of pitiless economy arrived, its contents quite unanticipated. It informed the sitting laird that under the rules by which Scotland was now being run, he no longer had the right to sell his island to any of the individuals who had expressed interest. He had to take the island off the market right away. The only entity that under the 2016 Land Reform Act was legally permitted to buy it would be the group of people nearby on Mull who had lately formed themselves into a local community. Ulva was now to be the subject of a community buyout. An independent appraiser would determine what the island was worth and tell the community, which would then be allowed time to raise the money and complete the purchase.

  The tiny Inner Hebridean island of Ulva, with a population of six, and hitherto owned by a single family, was sold in 2018 to a community of locals, under new Scottish laws encouraging wider ownership of the country’s land.

  The Howard family were not best pleased. While conventionally wishing the island residents well—all five of them—they issued a statement of cool contempt. The road to the moment of sale—which was consummated on Midsummer’s Day 2018, a scant eight months after Ms. Sturgeon’s triumphal announcement—had been, they said, “a somewhat dark one. The strong indication is that the driving impulse for this acquisition has been, and is, not so much for the welfare of Ulva and its resident community but more to satisfy the long-held personal ambitions of a relatively few local individuals on the island of Mull; to benefit SNP party politics and prejudices; and to feed media headlines.”

  The new-formed community did not have to raise much money toward the purchase. The Scottish government had set up a land fund specifically designed to help local communities buy land from their landlords. In the case of Ulva, it donated 95 percent of the £4.25 million purchase price. The remaining and relatively trivial balance of £212,500 could be raised, the government said, by the community members themselves.

  They did not have long to wait. Though Ulva has attracted many well-known figures in the past—Sir Walter Scott, Beatrix Potter, Samuel Johnson, and, of course, James Boswell among them—the richest legatee of its former residents, back when it sported some eight hundred people in the mid-nineteenth century,* is an Australian financial giant, the Macquarie Group. The original Macquarie, Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, was born on Ulva, and gained fame for a distinguished army career that culminated in his appointment, in 1809, as the first governor in chief of New South Wales and Tasmania, where he was regarded as a consummate and humanitarian success—“He found a gaol,” remarked the Dictionary of National Biography, “and he left a burgeoning colony.” His best-known contribution to Australia’s early history—and for which to many in the country today he is thought of as “Australia’s father”—was his decision to allow all the convicts in what had been established as a penal colony to enjoy, at the end of their sentences, the rights of free men. Provided that they behaved well and generally conducted themselves well, they should be treated “as if they had never transgressed the law.”

  To honor their founder’s connection to Ulva, the Macquarie Group topped up the government’s Ulva grant with a healthy infusion of cash, so that the full purchase price could be met. And so, on that Midsummer’s Day, once the wire transfers had been made and the checks satisfactorily cleared and an immense pile of paperwork had been signed and sealed and notarized, the Isle of Ulva, the isle of the wolves in Gaelic, passed formally out of the Howard family’s possession and into the hands of, among others, the five people who lived on the island. Until that day they had been tenants; on June 21, 2018, they awoke as owners, never liable to pay rent again.

  Ulva now has a development plan and a development officer, a young woman well versed in such planning. She arrived in 2019 from the south of Scotland to come and live in a cottage near the boat landing, thus bringing the population to six. It is hoped the population will rise to twenty by the end of the 2020s—applications have been pouring in, they say—and then rise to fifty once a cluster of affordable housing has been built. The big and none too beautiful mansion house, where the Howards had lived since the matriarch bought the island for a pittance in the 1940s, is to be converted into a visitor center. A herd of some thirty Highland cattle will be imported, and the arable and pasture potential of the 4600 acres will be exploited, the new owners hope, with the aim of becoming profitable by midcentury, if not before. Most recently, there were newspaper reports that the community is trying to win a grant of still more government money, in an effort to get Ulva to pay its way.

  Jamie Howard as a result of the sale is acceptably comfortable, financially speaking, lives in Edinburgh and the South of France, and wishes to forget this sorry chapter in his life. He is quoted as saying that he could not now imagine ever going back. Ulva, for him, is history.

  What will now happen on Ulva remains to be seen. What has happened thirty miles to the north, on the island of Eigg, however, is by now well established, because a buyout there occurred twenty years before. Eigg was where the notion of community ownership in Scotland got its start.

  Actually, not quite true. Technically, there is one very much older example, at a township called Glendale on the northwest corner of the Isle of Skye. In the late nineteenth century the crofters there, legatees like so many in rural Scotland of the injustices of the clearances, found themselves unexpectedly and, considering their impoverishment, cruelly denied two permissions that were crucial to the livelihood: their landlords said they could no longer collect firewood from the beach, and they were told they could no longer graze their cattle on the village green. Led by a firebrand named John Macpherson, they promptly rebelled, and they did so with sufficient vigor, mostly directed at Skye police, that the government directed a gunboat, HMS Jackal, to steam into the Pooltiel Loch to try to parlay. William Gladstone, the prime minister of the day, also paid a soothing visit and was much taken with Macpherson’s spirit and the strength of his cause. But even so, five Glendale crofters—soon thereafter to be branded “the Martyrs” in the press—were tried for their unruliness and packed off for short prison terms. So great was the consequent negative publicity that once freed they and their fellow community members eventually won their point: new crofting laws were passed. Even though the rebels found those unsatisfactory as well, the situation calmed down when the government itself bought the land, subdivided it into plots for each homestead, and gave them all to the inhabitants, providing them with the security they had long craved.

  Since that time, well over a century on, some of the crofters have sold their lots, thereby diluting the notion of the settlements being a true community, as well as the idea of the land thus being community-owned land in a technical sense. Nonetheless, the Glendale crofters now have a place in history. Given that their problems were at last resolved by an eventual government purchase made at the end of 1908, almost ninety years before the buyout of Eigg, they can lay claim to being the first in the movement.*

  Until 1997, the island of Eigg—one of the four Small Isles to the south of Skye, a loose congregation of geologically spectacular islands that also includes Rhum, Canna, and the risibly named Muck—had until 1997 been owned by a variety of individuals who had, not to put too fine a point on it, rather run the place into the ground. Like so many Hebridean islands—indeed, like most places in northwest Scotland—it had once known a measure of isolated prosperity. At times, under the superintendence of the Clanranalds, lairds for numberless generations, there were as many as five hundred residents, growing potatoes and oats and rearing cattle. But come the nineteenth century and the usual woes began: the Clanranald family found the burden of island ownership irksome and sold the island for £15,000 to a doctor named Hugh MacPherson. In short order, he began to suffer the shocks of the potato famine—or rather, his tenants did—and like so many landowners, he saw the rising price of wool for textiles as rendering sheep a far better source of income than the rents paid by his tenant crofters. So he began his own cruel program of clearances in 1847, thereby triggering the all-too-familiar spiral of Scottish depopulation. Nova Scotia, with its similar climate and topography, was to be the main beneficiary of Eigg migration, with Barbados, so very different, being an unexpected runner-up.

  After MacPherson sold up in 1893, owners of varying degrees of incompetence or insouciance came and went, among them the supposedly liberal politician Walter Runciman, who is most notable—or most notorious—for having recommended in 1938 to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that the Nazis be allowed to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.* When Runciman died in 1949, his sons sold Eigg to the first of a succession of other lesser-known figures—the initial buyer a Welshman whose cattle, soon after he moved in, all died of bracken poisoning. He was followed by a naval commander who wanted to run a school for disabled children, but had few takers; once his money was depleted and he found there was only one pupil remaining in class, he decided to sell—confessing as he did so that far from being a naval officer he was a plain civilian who had only ever commanded a small fire brigade.

  The Isle of Eigg, which for centuries had a succession of colorful private owners, has since 1997 been owned by its inhabitants, its subsequent development closely watched as an early experiment in community-run real estate.

  It was then, in 1975, that the precipitant figure of the saga purchased the island. He was to be the ninth and penultimate Laird of Eigg: Keith Schellenberg, a millionaire playboy Yorkshireman. Schellenberg wanted the island so badly that he escaped from being locked inside a castle owned by his second, vengeful wife, by rappeling down the castle walls to a telephone box and from there offering a purchase price of some £274,000 to the erstwhile fire-brigade captain, an offer that was promptly accepted. Like so many of his predecessors—and like so many island owners generally, almost all of them needy and male—Schellenberg intended to create for himself what some psychologists have termed a quasi-uterine utopia, in which he could both rule without challenge and bask in cosseted, quasi-maternal comfort. He promptly turned the island and its small clutch of inhabitants on its head, in so doing inadvertently creating the modern idea of community landownership that so defines—or seeks to define—present-day Scotland.

  Schellenberg was by all accounts a handsome, dangerously plausible, devilishly charming, and deeply disagreeable figure. He was well able to afford the firefighter’s sale price from the fortune he had already amassed in a string of businesses that involved chemicals, animal feed, and shipbuilding. He was a man of many idle pursuits: he had been variously a bobsled pilot (representing Britain in the 1964 Olympic Games) and a competitor in the kindred winter sport of the luge, as well as a powerboat racer and an inveterate—if vegetarian—partygoer and social climber. He was highly sensitive to criticism and was a feared and capricious litigator. He married four times and he regarded the purchase of Eigg as his opportunity—thanks to Scotland’s ancient traditions of feudal landlordism—of creating a near absolute micromonarchy for himself, with his clutch of island tenants under his almost total authority. Almost nothing could be done on his 8000-acre island estate without his permission.

  His first intentions seemed honorable enough—with promises of money to be spent in prodigious quantities to right the wrongs of past owners, plans for golf courses and tennis schools and tourism schemes, and exhortations to young people well beyond Scotland to come and help make the island a more vibrant place. But his promises all soon evaporated. It transpired that he had virtually no ready money, having spent great sums on divorce settlements, alimony, and child support. All soon turned out to be smoke and mirrors. He hired and sacked people, abandoned projects in midstream, forgot to pay visiting entertainers for his many extravagant and unaffordable parties—one lordly Scot imported to add glitter and social cachet to one event loudly and drunkenly yelled at the bewildered islanders that they were “the scum of the earth and half-baked socialists.” Tenants soon began to claim that their houses, untended by the factor on the often absent Schellenberg’s estate, were slowly turning into dilapidated, rat-infested slums. Soon afterward, the island amenities, such as they were—a community hall, most notably—were being closed down.

  More of Schellenberg’s friends came to the island for ever more raucous parties (with a swastika draped from his mansion balconies on at least one occasion). Schellenberg himself, with a gathering disdain for the islanders, liked to spend exasperated hours racing along Eigg’s narrow only road in his 1927 ten-seater Rolls-Royce touring car, scaring people, sheep, and chickens in equal measure and laughing mercilessly as he did so.

  If the islanders had any initial fond feelings for this new laird, they vanished in quick time; and their increasingly mulish attitudes of noncooperation and dislike resulted before long in evictions, punishments, and overt threats of violence from teams of burly bailiffs, on call to do Schellenberg’s bidding whenever needed. The atmosphere on Eigg deteriorated steadily through the eighties and nineties. Things reached a climax in January 1994, when someone set fire to Schellenberg’s hated Rolls-Royce, quite wrecking it and turning it into a blackened shell. The police were called, and a bevy of constables chugged over on a MacBrayne company’s ferryboat from Mallaig: none of the islanders would speak to them about what might have happened, other than for each to deny any personal knowledge or responsibility. No clues of value were found; no one was ever called to account for the arson.

  Schellenberg promptly lost himself in fury, called the islanders all manner of names—drunken hippies, dropouts, rotten and quite barmy revolutionaries, holders of acid-rock parties—and evicted a group of tenants out of pure spite. The seventy-three islanders (a small number of curious incomers had arrived in previous years), who were by now well-known in the British press—there were few better pegs for a story than an attack on a Rolls-Royce owned by an Olympian with a German name hidden away on a remote Scottish island—set to thinking how best they might be able to buy out Schellenberg and demand that he be on his way. Large local organizations—the Scottish Wildlife Trust, the Highland Council, and Highlands and Islands Enterprise among them—pledged support and in time possibly funds to help create a body, a community-based body, that could perhaps buy the island out from under Schellenberg’s increasingly autocratic rule.