Letters: Do Scottish ministers serve the people, or just a tiny elite?

Referring to farmers being moved off land they have farmed for decades, a spokesman for the Scottish Tenant Farmers Association makes a comparison to what can be taken as the Highland Clearances in centuries past – supposed “improvements” for unviable hill farms – but this very area of the Borders, once the land principally of the Armstrongs and Elliots, suffered brutally in its own right from far before.

Just a few years after the Union of the Crowns, virtually 400 years ago in 1620, King James issued a proclamation about tenants’ rights in the Scottish Borders. In previous years the occupants of the land, in my understanding, were given rights of tenancy associated with their obligement to defend Scotland from invading armies from the south. This was not then, as it is now, an area of sparse population, and rights had been given as Scotland’s defence owed much to the people who lived on the Scottish side of the border with the Auld Enemy. Clan Chief Martin Elliot in the 16th century could quickly muster 600 fighting men of his clan alone. With the joining of the crowns, it is reported King James was put under pressure to remove these Scottish Borders landholders’ rights of occupancy. The new landlords –including Buccleuch, who had only recently taken possession – it would appear wanted absolute possession of the soil. The new act made legal the eviction of occupiers of land (whether farmed by their families for centuries or not) and appropriation of their land by landlords. Remarkably, although the same Borders tenants’ rights applied on the English side of the Border, the King did not remove their rights of occupancy at this time. Bewcastle just on the English side of the border continued to have small landlords, but a few miles across the Border, evictions from smallholdings of those who had farmed the land for generations was made legal.

Scottish ministers would do well to heed the clarion call of letters in your paper to address the land issue with urgency. This was a land once of outstanding beauty, where old names suggest a land well forested with mixed woodland – Tinniswood, Billitwood, Kirkwood etc etc. The traditional name for Newcastleton, a village which is now like an oasis in the desert in the now sparse landscape of Liddesdale, bar from dense conifers and barren grouse moor, is Copshawholm-”shaw” signifying a wild natural wood. Even Buccleuch’s namesake, Sir Walter Scott, holidayed for weeks at a time in this area for seven successive years, travelling around Liddesdale being hosted by locals and learning from them the Border ballads he later used in his worldwide acclaimed books. Their generosity was such he boasted he spent virtually nothing bar the cost of a sack of corn for his horse in seven years. Poetry readers in the 1700s across Europe and the US read of the longing for the beauty of the “arcadian banks” of the Liddel in the highly popular poetry of John Armstrong, a son of the area.This area was stripped of its beautiful mixed woodlands, still standing exceedingly bare of broadleaf trees and consequently native birds, and despoiled in recent decades by mile after mile of dense conifer, removing beautiful vistas, covering land once worked for generations to deliver health-giving food.

A visit to the area is most needed to appreciate the significance of words spoken by a former Duke of Buccleuch’s chamberlain, when the chairman of a local Liddesdale committee in the 1800s earnestly tried to persuade him to allow the local people to have access to a small piece of hill or mossland, from the surrounding 88,000 acres the Duke possessed, to try to reclaim the land in order to grow food.The local minister had travelled as far as London to plead for fairness as he saw his congregation, as he described, working to the bone to make the pennies in order to make the pounds to pay the rent to his lordship. The chairman of the Liddesdale committee pleaded for the locals to be given the chance to reclaim a small piece of land, arguing that their work would add value and improve the ducal estate by enhancing the land.The answer given by the Duke’s chamberlain: “But we don’t want to have it improved!”

It seems Scottish ministers urgently need to address whether they serve the Scottish people, or a privileged elite. In perhaps no area of Scotland is this need greater than in the area once described as being kept in aspic for the benefit of a single family.

Instead of conifers, we need light.

Carol Charters
Edinburgh