Green lairds, Lego millions and the battle to buy back Scotland's land

Holyrood wants more community ownership of rural land - but it's still an uphill struggle, writes Xavier Greenwood

- Xavier Greenwood

If anyone can explain why Sofie Kirk Kristiansen, heir to the Lego fortune, paid £25m for a large tract of land in the Highlands, it is Andy Wightman.

The campaigner and former politician has spent three decades cataloguing the ownership of more than three-quarters of rural Scotland. But it's a “genuine mystery”, he says.

It’s not the fact of the purchase, which Wightman discovered earlier this month, that is puzzling. Kristiansen already owns the nearby Strathconon Estates and is one of 421 landowners who are thought to control half of all privately owned rural land in Scotland. It’s the price. Wightman believes the market value is closer to £7m.

Strathconon Estates said the purchase will “form part of a wholehearted nature restoration project” in the area. Although this doesn’t account for the eye-watering price tag, it fits into a wider pattern. Land in Scotland has become dramatically more expensive over the past decade, as so-called green lairds realise the value of old shooting estates as places of “natural capital” to restore peatlands and forests. These can generate credits that corporations invest in to offset their carbon emissions.

It’s a shift many environmentalists support, but it still leaves vast swaths of the country in precious few hands. In fact, despite government efforts to diversify ownership since devolution, land is becoming more and not less concentrated in Scotland.

The Scottish parliament has tried to address this. Earlier this month it passed a land reform bill that could allow the government to intervene in private sales and potentially break up large estates. Ministers will be notified before any sale greater than 1,000 hectares, which also gives community groups the opportunity to table a rival bid.