Estate of the Nation

IT’S coming up to Valentine’s Day, at the time of writing, and the media is full of the same old articles—how to cook the perfect romantic supper, how to keep the spark alive, how to prioritise retailers’ happiness over that of your other half by buying expensive trinkets they neither want nor need… You know, the usual.

Stories about love—whether heartfelt or commercial—will always be popular because they’re of interest to almost everyone, whether that’s because they’re looking to measure their own relationship against that of others, or because they’re trying to find one in the first place.

Depressingly, as one limps out of the heady teenage years and mounts the Stannah stairlift towards middle age and beyond, the exact same thing applies to articles about property and house prices. Either you own property, and you’re alert to anything affecting the value of your assets, or you’re desperate to own property and have a masochistic addiction to reading about how that possibility is spiralling ever further from reach. Incidentally, I am increasingly thinking that the only way to buy a house these days is to draw one, make an NFT out of it and flog that for the necessary cash. Which, in a world where mining involves computers not canaries, might as well be called constructing your own home.

Life journey

One of the big media stories in the high-end property market at the moment is the price and volume at which Scottish estates are being snapped up. This comes as no surprise to the shooting industry, which has over the past few years seen a number of gamekeepers turfed out of jobs to make way for trees, wolves and big egos, but seems to be slowly gathering momentum in the mainstream.

Speaking to Country Life, which as we all know is the only property magazine you’ll ever need, Savills’ Evelyn Channing said: “Following on from the private sale in 2020 of the 7,400-acre Urlar estate, comprising two grouse moors at Aberfeldy, Perthshire, to an institution—not for its grouse shooting, but for its natural-capital potential—we have seen some extraordinarily high prices paid for Highland estates in the past six months.” As Channing notes elsewhere in the article, published last month, this natural-capital potential will be realised by investment funds and individuals through “woodland creation and peatland restoration projects—in recognition of the role that land is going to play in combatting climate change”.

Despite the stunning imagery and use of estate agent-y words like ‘idyll’, ‘scenic’ and ‘impressive’, however, it’s a pretty dry article. And that’s a compliment to, not a criticism of, the writer—after all there’s no point writing a hymn to the Scottish landscape when it’s clear that the main drivers of demand for it are its size and cheapness.

The estates, it’s clear, could have been anywhere, but they happen to be on some of the most glorious sporting country in the world—and that’s bad news for anyone who wants it kept that way. Around the same time the Country Life piece was published, a Reuters Special Report ‘Who Owns Scotland? The Millionaires Buying Up The Highlands’ appeared online, exploring this tension between the new ‘green lairds’ and those traditionally in charge.

Forest green

If you’ve not seen it, it’s a beautiful piece. It’s laid out with huge photographs, clever illustrations and all the tricks digital journalism can use to really pull you into a story—providing, of course, your internet connection can take it. For those in the rural areas criminally neglected by any tangible digitypes tal strategy, however, it’s probably quicker to ask a friend to print out the article and post it.

On the words side, the article is comprised of characterful interviews with various different estate owners and quite evidently has no particular axe to grind. Reuters is known for its Thompson Reuters Trust Principles, which require its journalists to steer clear of bias and emotionally loaded words, and it shows in this piece. This is vastly important not only for the usual reasons around balanced reporting, but also because this topic is not going to leave the spotlight any time soon, and the article is a welcome antidote to lazy media stereo- involving shooters killing the planet by being stuck in the past, who are waging a slow war with radical eco-heroes who can stop climate change just by breeding vast tribes of Scottish wildcats. (It’s as yet unclear as to whether the wildcats will put their heads together and figure out how to reverse the melting of the polar ice caps, or simply remove the cause of the problem by clawing the entire world population to death, but I secretly hope the real reason wildcats are in fashion is because some of the wealthy green lairds have bought into the old superstition that their poo cures baldness, because nothing would cheer me up about global wealth inequality more than a billionaire with cat shit on his head.)

Stereotypes are never not problematic, but I am particularly worried about the development of this topic in the media because—as I saw recently while researching articles about BrewDog’s rewilding land—it’s so easy for journalists to fall prey to fads and falsely castigate those who are actually doing a great deal for conservation, and praise those whose real aim may be less positive change and more corporate greenwashing. And, as with the trading of such vast amounts of land, the people who stand to lose the most from the popularisation of one-sided views about what should happen on these estates are those who live and work on them, whose local economies can be destroyed by the proliferation of fashion over fact.

It might sound oddly cynical to point to a good piece of journalism and say that the sky is falling down, but sometimes—as anyone in a bad house, or a bad relationship, can attest—it takes an example of how it should be done to highlight the flaws in everything else. GTN