Progress on land reform must not stand still

But as its title suggests, The Battle for Scotland’s Countryside wasn’t just another beautifully filmed travel programme. It was an exploration not just of geography but of the political, social, economic and ecological conflicts that have long haunted our hills and glens.

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Hayman focused strongly on access issues, which for many Scots are almost taken for granted these days. I remember a few years ago while walking in the uplands of Southern Spain being shocked by the grim steel gates and huge metal fences that cordoned off vast private hunting estates – and being equally thankful that Scotland now has perhaps the most progressive right-to-roam laws anywhere in the world.

It was not always like this, as The Battle for Scotland’s Countryside reminded us. Back in 1884, James Bryce, a radical Liberal MP for Aberdeen South, brought forward the Access to Mountains and Moorlands Bill before the House of Commons. It demanded that “no owner of uncultivated mountain or moorlands shall be entitled to exclude any person involved in recreation, scientific or artistic study”. It failed, so he brought it back again and again – 15 times in total – until he left the House of Commons to become British Ambassador to the United States of America.

Only when Scotland got its own parliament, 118 years on from Bryce’s first attempt at reform, did we finally get the right to walk freely across our own countryside. The right to roam is now universally recognised as a universal success. It’s attracted visitors from near and far to our hills and helped create and sustain thousands of small business ventures and tens of thousands of jobs in rural Scotland.

The legislation was passed just a few months before I became an MSP, so I wasn’t directly involved in the political debate. But let’s be clear, it was contentious – a point that was neglected in an otherwise excellent documentary.

A number of big landowners warned that the proposal would do irreversible damage to rural economies. The Scottish Landowners’ Federation threatened to block the legislation at the European Court of Human Rights.

And the Scottish Conservatives, never knowingly on the side of progress, raged and fumed, all the way through the legislative timetable, saying that the proposal had “no place in modern Scotland”, and likening Holyrood to Zimbabwe, North Korea and Cuba. Fortunately, no-one else was listening. Labour, the SNP, the LibDems, the SSP, the Greens and the independents all came together, leaving the Tories looking like Victorian relics.

The legislation has rightly been praised as one of the greatest achievements of Holyrood. And since then we have seen further progress, from the extension of community land ownership to stronger protection for wild land areas from commercial development and moves to restore ecological balance by reducing overgrazing and bringing back species such as the beaver.

However, there is still a mountain of unfinished business to be dealt with. Hayman left with three fundamental questions to ponder. What is land for? Who has the right to own it? And for what purpose?

I was intrigued by an Aberdeenshire gamekeeper who claimed that grouse shooting is an everyday sport within reach of the working classes. Pressed a bit further, he admitted that a day’s shooting locally for grouse and mountain hare might cost between £250 and £500 a day. That sounds prohibitive to me, and at these prices, I wouldn’t imagine many football fans will be selling up their season tickets to spend their Saturday afternoons shooting birds.

Still, it’s definitely at the cheap end of the marketplace – the shooting equivalent of going to see Albion Rovers rather than one of the big Scottish Premiership clubs. As I understand it, a day’s driven grouse shooting on one of Scotland’s top moors could costs several thousand pounds, depending on how many birds are shot.

Either way, we’re not talking about bowling or swimming. We’re talking about a niche sport, available only to those with serious wealth. Add up the total numbers who participate in deer stalking and grouse shooting, and we’re probably talking about a few thousand people.

Yet a quarter of our entire land mass is devoted to sports shooting, an activity which involves destruction of our natural resources on a grand scale, through overgrazing of vegetation, burning and draining of moors, bulldozing vehicle tracks across our hillsides, and in the case of grouse moors, exterminating other species to maximise the number of game birds available for killing.

Surely we can do something better with our uplands? Some landowners – mainly conservation bodies and a few private landowners usually of Scandinavian origin – do manage land in a responsible ecologically sustainable way. They strive to bring back native woodland and other vegetation, encourage visitors and work with local communities. But this is still a bare fragment of our uplands when set against the tens of thousands of square kilometres whose main function is to sustain a niche sport for the rich.

One traditional landowner, whose family have owned the estate intact since the days of Robert the Bruce, ruefully acknowledged that things can’t stay the same. But nothing will change in the foreseeable future, he insisted. Maybe in 200 years’ time, he suggested

Maybe. Or maybe we can start to figure out how to speed things up. When James Bryce went to Washington to become the US ambassador, he would have found an attitude towards landownership that could not be more different from the feudal mentality he left behind. Even today, despite the 20th-century expansion of state forestry and the 21st-century spread of community ownership, the amount of publicly owned land in Scotland is not much more that 10 per cent of the total. In California, five times larger than Scotland and seven times more populous, 45 per cent of all land is federal or state owned and managed in the public interest.

It’s a sobering thought that when it comes to land ownership, that bastion of free market capitalism is still centuries ahead of egalitarian Scotland. That’s changing. thankfully. But let’s hope it won’t take Scotland the 118 years it took us to secure public access to break with a system of land ownership and management that in huge areas of our country has been frozen in time since the reign of Queen Victoria.