This section has spent a month on places where something is going wrong: a school with no teacher housing, a spring assessed in 1978, eleven villages that are dark for forty-four weeks a year.
So it is worth finishing somewhere it went right, partly for balance and mostly because the difference is instructive and unglamorous.
What they did
The village has 260 residents and its population is rising for the first time since the 1950s. It has a school with a rising roll, a shop open all winter, and a bus that meets the boat.
In 2017, facing the same pressures as everywhere else, the community bought 900 acres and eight buildings. They then did the boring part, which took nine years.
Fourteen houses were built and are held by the trust in perpetuity, let only to people who live and work locally, with rents set against local wages rather than the market. Four serviced sites were released for self-build on the same conditions. Two commercial units were let below market rate to businesses that trade year-round, on the explicit condition that they trade year-round.
Visitor accommodation was not banned. It was capped, at a number the village chose, and the income from it funds the maintenance of everything above.
“We were never against anybody coming. We just decided what we were before anyone else decided for us. That is the whole of it. There is no trick.”
A trust director
Why it is not a template
It should be said plainly. This village had advantages: an owner willing to sell to a community, a grant landscape that was kinder in 2017 than it is now, and four people who between them gave the better part of a decade to committee work for nothing.
That last one is the scarcest resource in rural Scotland and no policy has ever managed to manufacture it.
One of the four, who has repaired the same path every spring for twenty years, was asked whether the village owed him anything. He looked genuinely uncomfortable and said he was no hero, never was, and that somebody had to do the path.
Nine years of work
- Land bought: 900 acres, 2017
- Homes built and held in perpetuity: 14
- Self-build plots released: 4
- Visitor beds: capped, at a number set locally
- Population trend: rising, first time since the 1950s
- Unpaid committee hours, estimated: more than 11,000
The thing worth taking from it
Every community in this series has been asked to respond to something already happening: a bid, a conversion, a projection, a road. This one decided what it wanted while it still had the room to decide, and then spent nine years grinding through the paperwork to get it.
The mood has soured across a great deal of the north, and the surveys show it clearly. But almost nobody in this series was angry about people arriving. They were angry about having no say in what arrived, and no means to shape it once it had.
Those are different problems, and only one of them is about visitors.
