The story behind

New music album, We Have Won the Land, celebrates a landmark victory in Scottish land reform in the north-west Highlands. Here, musician Rory Matheson explains how the album came about

Amid lockdown’s many challenges, as musicians, we were able to nd a faint silver lining – time. Time to create, time to practice, or even time to forget about music altogether.

After several years of non-stop music-making, I decided to do the latter – get away from the city for a few months and head home to Assynt. It was during this time at home, while reading the book We Have Won the Land that I had the early idea for this record.

The book, written by John MacAskill, gives an in-depth account of the Assynt Crofters’ Trust’s historic and extraordinary campaign to buy back the land from foreign landowners in the early 90s.

Although slightly before my time, my family were involved in the campaign from the very beginning and are still part of the Trust today. Next year (2023) will mark 30 years since the Trust of cially became owners of the North Lochinver Estate, which was later renamed the ‘North Assynt Estate’, therefore it seemed a perfect time to help celebrate – and remind people about – the outstanding achievement of the Assynt Crofters’ Trust.

The parish of Assynt sits on the west coast of Sutherland in the north-west Highlands of Scotland. In 1989 the wealthy Vestey family renamed a 21,300-acre section of the parish as ‘North Lochinver Estate’ and sold it for just over £1 million to a Swedish land speculator, who in 1992 went into liquidation.

it seemed a perfect time to help celebrate – and remind people about – the outstanding achievement of

ABOVE: The village of Drumbeg on Loch Drumbeg in front of the spectacular Quinag mountain, in Assynt

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Friends Graham and Rory worked together to compose the music for the album; the album artwork depicts the beautiful landscape of Assynt

The estate was then to be broken into several lots and sold separately to clear outstanding debts. Not one of these transactions considered the interests of the people who lived and worked on the land.

After hearing that the estate was once again up for sale, several public meetings took place, and it was subsequently decided that the crofters themselves would try to raise enough money to bid for the land – a proposal some judged to be impossible.

A steering committee, formed of representatives from each of the 13 townships that made up the estate, was set up to guide the project initially. The Assynt Crofters’ Trust was formed in the summer of 1992 to begin formal negotiations. After two unsuccessful bids that year, it was third time lucky, and in February 1993 the crofters’ third bid was successful, and they bought the land for £300,000. This was a euphoric victory for the crofters of Assynt, who now own the land they live and work on. Their success is also recognised as being deeply in uential on land reform in Scotland. This album, We Have Won the Land, celebrates this unprecedented success. It is a duo album, and the other half of the duo is the great mandolin and ddle player from Orkney, Graham Rorie. Graham and I are great friends and we have worked together on many projects over the years, and yet we have never had the chance to compose music together for an album of our own, and therefore this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do just that. Almost exactly a year after the initial idea, we took a trip up to Assynt and rented a cottage for a week-long residential writing retreat. We used the brilliant timeline set out in the book to help us plan the musical shape of the album and managed to write all the tunes we needed in our week north. A few weeks later we met in Glasgow to start organising and arranging the material we had written in Assynt, before heading into rehearsals with an incredible band of musicians.

A great thing about this project was that we were able to select our ‘dream band’ and, to our delight, everyone from that band was available and willing – another advantage of the ‘time’ lockdown granted. The album features Anna Massie on guitar, Fraser Stone on drums and percussion, Charlie Stewart on bass, Craig Baxter on bodhrán, Tiernan Courell on utes and whistles, and Kristan Harvey on ddle. Graham also played ddle, mandolin, and electric tenor, and I played piano and accordion.

As well as the instrumental tracks, we were also joined on a couple of numbers by the great Gaelic singer James Graham, from Lochinver. The physical album comes with detailed sleeve notes explaining the story and inspiration behind each track, which can be enjoyed alongside the music. As a result, we hope the music on this album pays homage to the crofters of Assynt and helps somewhat to celebrate the Trust’s amazing achievement in the months leading up to their 30th anniversary. S

‘We Have Won the Land’ will be available to stream on all major platforms and can be purchased on CD or via download from 22 April 2022. grahamrorie.com/we-have-won-the-land