For Argyll has been watching with interest a significant political development – the growing tendency for communities in Scotland to take charge of the resources critical to their sustainability.

This process began on Monday 1st February 1993 when the Assynt Crofters’ Trust in north west Scotland became the owners of the North Lochinver Estate. They bought it after a prolonged campaign in the aftermath of the liquidation of its then owner, Scandinavian Property Services Ltd – and renamed it the North Assynt Estate.

This was the first of what we now call ‘community buy outs’ and followed the break up of the estate into seven lots for sale under Edinburgh estate agent, John Clegg & Co.

Crofters were concerned about this plan for two reasons:

• The boundaries of the lots cut across grazing land. This created the possibility of some crofters would have to deal with more than one landlord
• The crofters anticipated that some of the lots would be administered by the new owners themselves rather than by professional factors (estate managers).

This community buy-out was followed by a series of others across the Highlands – the islands of Eigg and Argyll’s Gigha, estates in North Harris and South Uist in the Western Isles and on the Isle of Raasay.

The Herald estimates that the 100th community buy out is now in process with a bid from the Evanton Wood Community Company north of Dingwall to buy 64 acres of woodland from the Novar Estate.

While these developments have been both enabled and fuelled by the Land Reform Act, recent Community buy outs have moved from land to properties crucial to community sustainability.

An Aberdeen town bought former bank premises to convert to a centre for community cohesion and enterprise. In Argyll, the village of Tayvallich has bought a core business of petrol pumps, shop, post office and cafe.

In a different move to take charge of its own destiny, the community of Applecross in Wester Ross – which took over ts own petrol pumps in 1995 – has just appointed a new doctor as a result of its own activities. Alarmed by the prospect of the vacancy not being filled, with remote areas traditionally struggling to find applicants, Applecross left nothing to chance.

It set up a website dedicated to finding a new doctor. It stressed its unique resources as a small, friendly community with access to stunning outdoor activities – hillwalking, climbing, sea kayaking, sailing, fishing – and trumpeted the mountains of Torridon, Skye and Achnashellach and the waters of the Sound of Raasay. It advertised in outdoor pursuits magazines as well as the British Medical Journal.

It attracted interest from all over the world, in sixteen applications from Arizona to Lithuania to Poland  and has now appointed Dr Mark Derbyshire from Chepstow, a keen hillwalker and fisherman.

Applecross is currently the focos of the televisoin series, Monty Hall’s Great Escape but Dr Derbyshire didn’t even know about this until after his appointment. It was the community’s own campaign that caught his attention.

The initiatives of these communities  are together in the early days in terms of a movement but it is in fact an evolved form of communism.

The earlier communism of reds-under-the-beds frights (and whose demise was recorded in Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man), was a monolithic, centrally controlled command economy where, as legend has it, everyone had shoes but all shoes were brown and not necessarily the right size.

This new communism is localised and demand-led, born from local need. It sees people getting together to act in the common local interest, embracing enterprise and moving into management through the establishment of development trusts.

The growth of a dispersed micro politics is an inevitable consequence of the information explosion. Today’s communities are less dependent and much better informed. The enterprise and new energies in Gigha, with long term community development strategies sitting alongside the delivery of short terms solutions is proof, here in Argyll, of what can come of this. Exciting times.

The photographs above are, from the top:

• Ardvreck Castle in Assynt, taken by copyright holder, Richard Baker and reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
• The breathcatching Bealach na Ba (the Pass of the Cattle) from Loch Kishorn over to Applecross. Until the late 20th century, this vertiginous single track road, hanging above the swallow-hole of a deep dry valley, was the only access to Applecross. The photograph was taken in 1975 by Anne Burgess who owns the copyright. It is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.