Crofting system

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Crofting system is “hopelessly failing” 23/10/14

Sirs,

Please allow me to outline a few truths about the pastime known as crofting. Despite the positive media spin issued by the Crofting Commission and others it does not take much to examine that this system is hopelessly failing.

The Crofting Commission and others blame all the problems of crofting on a group called ‘Absentees’, a derogatory label relating to anyone who is deemed to live over 32km from their croft. The image created by the Commission of the hated ‘Absentee’ is of course one which they equate to neglect.

However, any purposeful use the ‘absentee’ uses his land for is conveniently ignored by the commission bureaucrats in order to give the illusion that the land should be re-claimed for sustainable use. Their solution is to strip the ‘absentee’ of his tenancy in favour of a ‘local crofter’. This ‘local crofter’ could very well be someone living in a completely separate district never mind village and already working several other crofts. This ruling is what creates decay, reducing remoter districts to wastelands while echoing the conclusions of Frank Fraser Darling’s studies from sixty years ago about land deteriorating into wet deserts. Then, like now, these warnings are completely ignored as unpalatable by self-serving bureaucrats who are not qualified to be making decisions on land-use.

The issue of multiple tenancies often go hand-in-hand with the convenient 32km ruling but there is a further question to be posed: Who are the aspiring young crofters looking for land? Do they even exist? If so then why are there so many multiple tenancies? The only answer to this question would appear to be spurious claims made by the Crofting Commission and their related cronies.

State subsidy and benefits create nothing but poverty and the hectares of deteriorating land, neglected drainage and broken fences are testament to the utter failure of this system. I have to ask myself the question what would those who had to make use of the land to survive think of the present situation? My forefathers in west Uig had to literally create arable land from scratch. They toiled relentlessly over their scraps of land merely to survive. If they could have hired the Brahan Seer to inform them of the deterioration and playtime that would become of that land they created they would be utterly devastated.

You must excuse my interpretation of the facts as I am but a simple country boy who was brought up on a croft. I therefore have no academic background in reading about crofting from books or debating the subject with gentlemen in tweed suits and clean brogues. My only experience of crofting has been limited to the practical skills of land-use, animal husbandry and the communal township life of my youth.

Angus Macdonald

Gardeners Cottage

Murieston

Livingston

West Lothian

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