The Scottish locals fighting to save their island
A team of people are tracking my progress from London to the outermost edge of the Hebrides. It’s late spring but there is snow on the runway at Inverness; the road from the airport to Ullapool, on the west coast of Scotland, is icy and at risk of closure; the ferry route from Ullapool to Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis and Harris, has been down for 36 hours and counting. ‘That’ll be the swell from the front,’ texts Julia Higginbottom from her van on Great Bernera, currently being battered by wind. ‘You’ll be fine tomorrow.’
That night, the next morning’s sailings were cancelled; the islanders say the weather will shift by lunchtime. ‘There’ll still be a big swell, it just depends how big it is,’ texts the gung-ho hotel receptionist.
If you live three hours from mainland Britain, in the middle of the North Atlantic, this is par for the course. On Great Bernera, a tiny Hebridean island, your days are dictated by the light, the weather and Caledonian MacBrayne’s ferry timetable. ‘You just [need] a planning mind,’ says Julia.
Planning ahead is etched into the fabric of this island. To an outsider, life here could sound slow and meandering, but it isn’t; it’s rigorous. It has to be. Otherwise roofs would stay leaky, vegetable patches would flounder and dry food supplies would run low just as a week-long storm sets in.
In recent years, though, thinking ahead has come to mean something new. The population now stands at around 225, and for some time they have been trying to formulate a plan to ensure the community’s survival. But the clock is ticking, and if they can’t attract more young people to Great Bernera soon – and make it a viable place for families to live, work and raise children – island life will peter out.
For generations, the sea provided people on Bernera with a living. It was once a thriving community of crofters and fishermen – a 6km by 5km hunk of heather-strewn rock, fringed with white-sand beaches, its turquoise waters teeming with fish. Records show that in 1827, some 60,000 lobsters were sent to London from Bernera. At the time of the 1899 census, the population was over 600; 20 years later, it was still big enough and young enough that the island was able to spare around 100 men to fight in the First World War.
The demographic is very different today: most islanders are approaching or well beyond retirement age. Last year, the school closed – there were only six pupils. The Post Office recently closed too. Meanwhile, the once busy pier is now quiet. These days, among those islanders still of employable age, finding work is a struggle.
It has been since the 1990s, when the fish farms (once owned by islanders) began to be gradually taken over by foreign conglomerates. As fishing became less lucrative, the farms struggled to get staff, losing workers to the mainland and to Stornoway, where an engineering firm was recruiting. It led to a population drain. ‘It’s why so many retirees are here,’ says Julia. ‘Because they don’t need to go to work.’
Today fishing is still a hard sell. Of the four working fishermen, the youngest is approaching 60. ‘One is 74 and still working. That’s a passion, a vocation,’ Julia adds.
But another part of the dwindling population problem, islanders argue, is Bernera’s landowner. Cyran de la Lanne-Mirrlees, a 27-year-old aristocrat based in Frankfurt, has, they claim, failed to engage with them properly on their attempts to right the ship – and they say they are unable to create new crofts or build new housing without his say-so.
Now, something of a coup is bubbling as crofters attempt to buy out the landowner and take matters into their own hands.
It is nearly 150 years since the Bernera Riot, when a community of crofters became the first to challenge the Highland Clearances in the Scottish law courts. This eventually paved the way for land reform legislation: the Crofters’ Holdings Act, passed in 1886, granted security of land tenure to crofters.
In 1962, the island was bought by Count Robin de la Lanne-Mirrlees, an eccentric aristocrat said to have been a source of inspiration for Blofeld, Ian Fleming’s villain in the James Bond novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Soon the Count was much loved on Bernera, and the feeling appeared to be mutual. ‘He wasn’t like a local, but he wanted to be,’ one resident recalls. ‘[When he] came up here, he wasn’t sure how to boil an egg, never mind anything else. But he stayed. Bernera got under his skin.’
The Count lived out his days on the island. When he died in 2012, he left most of his estate, including Great Bernera, to his grandson, Cyran. The Telegraph’s obituary described his ‘benevolent feudal rule’ – he only raised the rents ‘once in 41 years’.
Cyran was 16 at the time, so his father Patrick has been involved in running the estate (it was held in trust until Cyran turned 25). But for the last eight years, a trust made up of islanders has made attempts to buy Great Bernera.
The first attempt in 2015 – a community buyout plan backed by 85 per cent of islanders – collapsed during negotiations. Offers of ￡120,000 and another of ￡135,000, some years later, were both rejected. Patrick de la Lanne-Mirrlees had been ‘very adamant that he wasn’t going to talk to us unless we had a reasonable figure,’ says Julia, but claims he has never told them what that reasonable figure is.
In 2021, an application was submitted to the Scottish government on the grounds that the Land Reform Act allows for crofters to force a sale. Last summer, MSP Alasdair Allan took Bernera’s plight to a debate in the Scottish Parliament. For now, they are in limbo.
It has been dubbed a ‘hostile takeover’ – some news stories paint it as a kind of medieval uprising with pitchforks and blazing torches. In reality, there is nothing hostile about it. Rather, this is a tale of a community that is trying desperately to secure the island’s future.
A cold Wednesday morning and a group of islanders are clustered around, chatting over enamel camping mugs of steaming Earl Grey tea, preparing for a day’s work. The fence posts need checking, the sheep seeing to and the chickens feeding; they haven’t got going yet. ‘Usual Hebridean morning,’ says Julia’s husband Nat cheerfully.
At 51, Julia and Nat are among the younger islanders making a go of it here. They moved to Bernera four years ago from Birmingham, where they ran a film production company. When their children moved out, they decided to sell up and slow down. Inspired by a friend who used to holiday in Bernera and took enchanting photographs of the white-sand beach and blue sea, they bought a van and drove there.
Julia recalls driving from the ferry at Stornoway to Bosta Beach (a bridge links Lewis to Bernera) and stopping en route to look around: ‘We stopped at the croft we ended up buying.’ Nat recalls turning to his wife and saying: ‘This is where I’m going to die.’
The croft didn’t have a house on it, so they decided to live in their van and build a home themselves. They are still considered outsiders by some, but they don’t mind. ‘Lots of people don’t last… but [we’ve just gone through] our fourth winter. And we’ve done it in a van. I don’t think we’re going anywhere. I think we’re here forever.’
Initially they assumed that the internet would be poor. It wasn’t. ‘Within a month, the BT van turned up and said, “Where do you want your fibre?”’ says Nat. They still produce films remotely.
Now, Nat is the island’s unofficial tech support. ‘Once or twice a week I’m in somebody’s house, fixing their email or forgotten password or something.’
Another of the islanders drinking tea with them, Callum Macaulay, 64, has a nearby croft. He lives alone, tending his 25 acres and making a living by doing building jobs around the island. ‘I don’t earn a lot,’ he says. ‘But I don’t need to.’
He can still remember a time when people flocked here. ‘There were more people coming across the bridge to Bernera to work than there were going the other way,’ he recalls. ‘People who have grown up [here] haven’t seen any opportunities on Bernera,’ he says. ‘There’s no reason for them to stay – apart from the fact that [they] love the place. But we need young people here.’
Employment is, he argues, key. The Great Bernera Community Development Trust, set up in 2013 by a small group of islanders, has set out to – among other things – create jobs.
‘There is certainly enough work for construction people,’ says Julia. ‘We all struggle to get people to come and do building, plumbing, electrics, so even if you just start with those, with some basic skills courses being run.’
Tourism, they hope, can grow too, and they’re keen to encourage more young remote workers to take advantage of Bernera’s super-fast broadband. The problem is that all this requires investment. ‘We need more infrastructure and enterprise schemes,’ says Julia.
Beyond Kirkibost pier, seaweed farmers are gathering crops. Crown Estate Scotland issued a harvesting licence for sections of the foreshore that it manages, with net revenue passing to the Scottish Government and local authorities. If the buyout were to be successful, this is just the sort of thing they could campaign on as owners, says Julia, as currently the benefit of all this abundance in Bernera’s waters is ‘not being generated to the island’.
Today the pier is peaceful, the water like a millpond. The only activity comes from a pair of scallop divers pulling on wetsuits, ready to go out in a small boat.
The Trust recently built a structure to offer showers and toilets for people mooring on the jetty – holidaymakers in summer, fishermen year-round. The landlord’s permission was not needed – the pier is one of the few council-owned areas. ‘We found it easier to deal with the council,’ says Callum. ‘[It was a case of] “Can we put a building here?” “Yes”.’
‘If the landlord was like that… that’s the difference having more control over the community would make,’ adds Julia.
Other decisions that have to go through the landlord – that locals argue could boost the island’s employment – include those around land. Crofting has experienced something of a revival of late, particularly since the pandemic, so they want to be able to divide up land to create new crofts. One of the ‘bonuses’ of owning the island, says Nat, is that they could apply to make new crofts available and negotiate the terms.
According to a local newspaper, an islander who wanted to buy his family’s croft in order to build houses there for his children tried repeatedly, over several years, to get a response from the family. ‘It’s not always an equal picture,’ says Julia. ‘It’s very much down to how tenacious you are, and the relationship you have, which may be non-existent to relatively good.’
Local newspaper the Stornoway Gazette once described the family as waging a ‘campaign of obstruction from Germany’.
It’s part of a wider conversation across Scotland. Much of the highlands and islands are now in the pockets of foreign millionaires – from so-called ‘green lairds’ rewilding land to businessmen buying up islands to turn into luxury resorts.
Bernera is unlikely to ever be a great money spinner for a landlord. In 2018, the Scottish government valued the island at just ￡70,000. It is craggy and hard to farm. The landscape is almost lunar. ‘Not massively good for anything other than sheep farming,’ says Julia. You couldn’t turn it into a luxury resort, either: much of the island is under crofting tenure.
And yet the trust is fizzing with other ideas for how to bring money and people to the island. At the pier, Julia shows me a shipping container full of electric bikes they hope might entice tourists in the summer. Ideally they’ll spend some money at the community café for lunch, she says, and perhaps pick up dinner on the way home from the ‘honesty shop’, a tiny pink hut on Julia and Nat’s croft, stocked with store cupboard basics, local black pudding, cheese and vegetables.
At 32, Paul is one of the few young people on the island. He moved from Aberdeen to his grandfather’s croft last year. ‘I love it up here. I’m fixing up my house and doing odd jobs for different people.’ He trained as a guitar maker and plans to set up his business properly once he’s built a workshop.
There is a sense that this island could become a hub for people like Paul, attracting artists and food producers in the way islands like Skye have, which could, in turn, boost tourism. Julia and Nat want to host supper clubs in the summer, and there is certainly space to start more small creative businesses here.
A lack of housing stands in the way.
‘There are no empty houses,’ says Callum. ‘And few, if any, on the market.’
Many are single-occupancy homes, explains Julia, either because younger family members have left, or the person living there is ‘maybe retired or elderly and has lost their partner. Even the social housing is full pretty much all the time, with a small waiting list.’
According to Rightmove, only four houses have sold on the island in the past five years. The average price of ￡107,500 is, argues Callum, beyond the grasp of those on local wages.
The trust is working with the Hebridean Housing Partnership to find ‘small patches’ of land to build on in areas around the island that aren’t owned by the estate. And if the crofters’ buyout goes ahead, the community would swap the landlord for the Crofting Commission, applying to them for many of the changes they might want to make.
‘The difference,’ says Callum, ‘is it would be managed by people who are also the crofters, rather than somebody who is remote from them.’
Later that day, we drive to the school, which closed last summer. There is something terribly sad about the empty playground. The school being mothballed was a watershed moment, says Callum. ‘The only thing we can do to try to change that is to encourage families to come back. It’ll put us in a stronger position.’
Down the road, the little community centre café is open. It relies on volunteers, who sell Bernera T-shirts and do a very good line in black-pudding baps. Kevin, a retired plumber, drives up on his quad bike for a cup of tea. He moved here from Merseyside with his wife Sue six years ago and he is also part of the group trying to bring about the buyout.
‘If we owned everything, we could decide what we want in our community – [like] if we want to build some sheltered housing [or] sell a bit of the land to bring money back in. At the moment we don’t have that freedom.’
But more than that, he wants to leave a mark, he says, ‘as one of the individuals who have moved things forward’.
Katherine Maccaulay, who works in the café, agrees. ‘We need to do something. You can’t just leave the island [as it is] or it’ll die off. I remember when the Count was here, he was quite a people person and everybody liked him. His son and his grandson are so different. They don’t come here and they don’t seem to care.’
Cyran de la Lanne-Mirrlees did not respond to The Telegraph’s request for comment. He has previously said, in a statement to the BBC, that he didn’t know of ‘any cases of communication difficulties’.
‘There has been recent success regarding croft development with the community. My interest is always to have fair terms and conditions for both sides. I have no intention of blocking any developments... My idea for the future is to find an avenue helping us both; the community and the estate. This could be in the field of renewables creating tangible benefits for the community.
‘If a sale were to take place, discussions over the valuations would be done with official representatives of the community.’
He has also said: ‘It has been in the interest of our family since my grandfather’s days to develop Bernera. We welcome any idea for the mutual interest of our family and for benefit of the people of Bernera.’
Not all islanders are in agreement with Katherine, Julia and others. Some are resistant to change – having a landlord is what they’ve always known.
‘Some people hold that it’s [Cyran de la Lanne-Mirrlees’] land, so he should be able to do what he wants with it, which is fair enough,’ says Julia.
But Callum is firm – if they are to keep the island going, this is the only way. ‘There are always folk who aren’t keen on things,’ he says. ‘[But] the community is forever going to be changing. If we don’t accept that, it will die.’
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