Why estates are colonial structures ruling over Highlands

The work was straightforward but the cultural practices were out of the Edwardian period.

Where you stood, the doors you did not go through, the people you did not speak to – these were all aspects of class differentiation which were entirely new to me. What was worse, the whole glen was infused with such malfunctioning social norms and the insidious power struggles between the landowners, the tenants and the visiting public.

Times have changed (a bit) since then but it was an eye-opener into the world of land-owning hegemony in Scotland for me.

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Hunting estates loom large in any analysis of Scottish land ownership on account of their extent and the conspicuous consumption that this form of landholding represents in a region of Scotland where the land issue has been so prominent.

There are around 340 such properties covering around 2.1 million hectares of land – more than 50%of all privately owned land in the region. The typical estate ranges in size from 5000-8000 hectares.

There is a long tradition of hunting in Scotland going back to the very first arrivals of people after the ice retreated. As the Scottish nation developed, hunting was widely enjoyed both as an everyday activity in pursuit of food and as a recreational activity by the nobility. Many of the forest laws that were enacted in medieval times were designed to protect and conserve game species.

Prior to the 17th century, however, there was no relationship between game and land ownership. Outside of the royal hunting forests, everyone was free to hunt game and to claim the fruits of their endeavours. Subsequently, however, and culminating in an act of 1621, game was converted into an exclusive right of property not by claiming ownership of wild animals, which are still legally res nullius or “things belonging to no-one”, but by effectively excluding all but landowners from the right to kill them. This remains the legal position today.

Landowners have the rights to game not by any specific rights to the quarry but through the power to prevent anyone else from hunting it. Rights to game have thus become a valuable part of land ownership and, as a result, cannot be separated from the land. Salmon, being part of the regalia majora or “Crown rights”, are a real exception and can be held independently of the land.

(Image: Strutt & Parker)

Not only are exclusive rights to game of relatively recent origin but the exclusive dedication of large areas of land to hunting dates back only to the second half of the 19th century, following a marked decline in the sheep farming economy.

This coincided with rising levels of wealth in the south of Britain and the growing passion for the sport of deerstalking and other hunting activities.

Technical progress in the design of the rifle and the penetration of the railway also contributed in opening up the Highlands to the tourist. This prompted a rapid growth in the leasing of land for deer forests by wealthy individuals from the British landed and mercantile classes.

Queen Victoria herself lent her own imprimatur to the process when her husband Prince Albert first leased Balmoral Estate on Deeside in 1848 and later purchased it in 1852.

There followed a rapid expansion in the process of “afforestation” and, as one writer put it, everybody who was anybody in 1850 wanted a Highland sporting estate. There were plenty of takers in the Victorian world of burgeoning industrial capitalism – an emergent class of nouveau riche, redolent with competitive snobbery, desperate to emulate a traditional land-owning aristocracy.

This nouveau-riche class of emergent landed proprietors built lodges and houses, pushed roads into the glens, constructed paths for the passage of hunters and ponies (to extract deer carcasses), built boundary fences, devised and implemented new game management techniques and passed new laws to embed the new regime by entrenching hunting rights. As a consequence, a triumphant new cultural formation took hold – the Highland sporting estate.

Prior to 1811 there were only six or seven deer forests actively managed for hunting. By 1873, the number of estates had risen to 79 and by the end of the 19th century there were between 130-150 deer forests covering one million hectares – a vast outdoor playground for the upper strata of British society.

Despite a modest contraction after the First World War, mainly as a consequence of the acquisition of land by the Forestry Commission, deer forests extended over 1.1m hectares in 1957. In 2002, the extent of hunting estates, incorporating not only deer forests but all land used primarily for hunting including grouse moors, stood at over 1.8m hectares of land.

The sporting estate phenomenon has attracted much attention over the years from critics and adherents alike, both of whom have sought, in various ways, to challenge or uphold the hegemony of hunting estates in the Highlands.

During their genesis, the process of afforestation was physically resisted in many parts of the country. Gaelic culture at that time was still prevalent across the Highlands and Islands and it repeatedly failed to understand the new dispensation and its accompanying game laws which were alien to older indigenous traditions.

This cultural alienation is evident in the Gaelic proverb which asserts that “everyone has a right to a deer from the hill, a tree from the forest, and a salmon from the river”.

Such a view forms part of a wider belief system which has consistently found it difficult to reconcile the fact that “the fish that was yesterday miles from the land was claimed by the landlord the moment it reached the shore”, It is important to understand that the Highland Clearances were, at this time, still in living memory.

While the development of hunting estates was merely the next stage of the transition to a capitalist system of landholding, the emotions that the Clearances had evoked were, in many senses, rekindled by the spread of this hunting vastness.

The hunting estate remains the dominant landholding framework in the Highlands and Islands and, since its genesis, has resisted any attempt at reform bolstered by a political climate that has taken little serious interest in its affairs.

The British upper classes and, now, a much wider sector of society, are passionate about hunting.

Ownership of a Scottish hunting estate is the epitome of the hunting lifestyle, allowing for the enjoyment of exclusive hunting rights over large areas of country. This conspicuous consumption of leisure is thus intimately bound up with the ideology of land ownership and the sanctity of property rights.

Any challenge to the hegemony of the hunting estate attracts equally passionate defence. As the former editor of The Daily Telegraph and keen hunter Max Hastings wrote: “The delusion is widely held in Scotland … that the Highlands are a paradise in a state of natural grace, which might more properly be held in public ownership.

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The Scots must be told again and again until they start to believe it, that their hills are in reality intensively and expensively managed by private landowners, almost all of whom incur huge financial cost in doing so, which would have to be made good from the public purse if they were not there. It is worth exploring this claim in some more detail since Highland hunting estates are almost universally claimed by their adherents to be uneconomic enterprises.

This argument is frequently deployed in defence of the hunting estate regime in terms of the beneficial impacts that the net inflow of funds from external sources brings to some of the most fragile parts of rural Scotland.

In the absence of any official data on the economics of estates, it is difficult to quantify such impacts. However, one estate did publish financial information that, in addition to providing some specific data, demonstrated how such information can be used to convey very specific messages.

The estate concerned is the Letterewe Estate in Wester Ross. At the time, it extended to 32,000 hectares of roadless wild country (it has now been reduced to 16,825 hectares) and has, for a long time, been one of Scotland’s most famous deer forests. The estate was acquired by a Dutch businessman, the late Paul van Vlissingen, who was also an active conservationist.

(Image: PA)

Conscious of the debates in Scotland on land matters since he purchased the first part of his estate in 1978, he, unusually among his peers, sought to take an active part in these debates.

One way in which he did this was to publish a 10-year management plan for Letterewe in September 1998. The plan outlines the management objectives – “the natural development of wild land, its flora and fauna in all its interrelationships” – and argues that the owners see the estate as a “valuable wild land asset to be loved”, rather than as “a producer of income”.

The plan was launched at a press conference in September 1998 against the backdrop of the political debate on land reform in Scotland and Van Vlissingen made a number of comments on the prospects of land reform. What makes the plan interesting is its presentation of the estate as a benevolent institution which incurs heavy operating deficits and which finances scientific research and provides other “local support”.

To reinforce this message, the plan includes a summary of the estate’s finances (excluding scientific research and “other local support”) as follows: present estimated market value £8m; average annual income £250,000; yearly out-of-pocket loss £120,000; loss of income on asset value at 7% £560,000; total loss of income to owners per annum £680,000.

Such a financial presentation reinforces the view of sporting estates as benevolent institutions in which losses are inevitable and significant financial inputs are made to the local economy.

But interestingly the figures imply more than the usual simple annual revenue losses and suggest that investment income foregone on the asset value – that is the income the owner would have received if it were invested elsewhere – represents a further benevolent contribution to the local economy. On this basis, the total “loss of income” to the owners is a breathtaking £680,000 per annum.

It is impossible to analyse the revenue any further – for example, is the private consumption of the estate for holidays and hunting paid for in these accounts?

However, what the figures do not reveal is that the underlying asset – the land – has undergone significant capital appreciation. On the basis of the purchase price of the estate, which was bought in different parcels since 1978 for a total of £3,405,000, and a current value of £8m, the property has grown in value by 7.8% per annum.

In 1999 alone, such growth would yield a capital appreciation of £624,000, a figure which outperforms the opportunity cost of investment elsewhere and which is more than sufficient to finance ongoing annual operating deficits.

Letterewe, far from being a loss-making concern, was a good investment and, against such a scenario, annual losses are not actually trading losses but the price paid for the consumption of non-market benefits.

Further complications in interpreting the nature and scale of the financial performance are introduced if one attempts to include potential tax liability since the core part of the estate was owned by Clyde Properties NV, a company registered in Curaçao, a tax haven in the Netherlands Antilles.

Letterewe’s finances are typical of the sporting estate sector and recent research has confirmed that revenue losses for an average estate are in the order of £40,000 per year, the average estate being approximately one quarter of the size of Letterewe.

The reality for most estates is that they are owned to provide tangible benefits to the owner by way of a place to relax, enjoy holidays and undertake a range of leisure pursuits. The “loss” incurred in doing so is, in fact, the cost of leisure.

Despite this, capital returns can be gained from estate ownership. 
As one leading estate agent wrote in an in-house magazine for owners of Bentley cars: “Be your interests fishing, shooting, walking or golf, or simply to identify an ideal environment to raise your family in an increasingly uncertain world, Scotland has the best to offer.”

As an investment, owning  Scottish property, particularly a quality sporting or residential property, has generally proved  very rewarding with significant 
long-term capital gain being achieved in many cases. 

Of late, such property investments have proved safer and considerably more rewarding than many other investments. As these properties are in short supply, they will continue to prove a sound investment in years to come. 

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Just as starvation in Africa will not be sorted out by pumping aid relief money in, nor will the structural problems of the sporting estate economy be overcome by an equally misguided policy of relying on a stream of external subsidies from the various maverick characters who regularly find themselves
the proud owners of a Highland sporting estate.

The sporting estate in reality is an indulgence for wealthy people who like hunting. They are uneconomic because they were never designed to be economic. 
No rural development programme anywhere in the world advocates the sale of land to a few wealthy individuals who will then ‘support’ the rural economy by injecting cash from outside which will, in turn, support a few jobs. Nobody in any serious development agency, if given a blank sheet of paper, would design such an economy for the Highlands.

As James Hunter observed when it was suggested that landowners might feel threatened by the developing debate about land ownership: The more they feel threatened in my view the better. 

They need to feel threatened and they should feel threatened because there can be no future in Britain in the 21st century for a rural economy dependent on tweedy gentlemen coming from the south to slaughter our wildlife.

That is not the way to run the Highlands and islands.