A few years ago the leader of an environmental group approached a Scottish Executive minister with the suggestion that Harris be designated as Scotland’s third national park. He was bemused by the ministerial response: “It is a good idea, indeed it is a very good idea, but that is exactly why you mustn’t say anything about it.” What the minister feared was that if environmentalists were seen to be behind such a project, it would have been immediately opposed by many islanders, who had long seen the interests of such outside bodies as inimical to those of the indigenous people.
Things change, though. Today many islanders are anxiously awaiting the outcome of a meeting this Thursday when Western Isles Council debates the idea, which could make Harris the first island national park in Britain. Council support is a prerequisite for the Scottish Government to consider the proposal.
To many residents and visitors, Harris is the jewel of the Outer Hebrides, a claim challenged of course by Barra and the other islands. On its west side is a wealth of miraculous scenery with peerless beaches, such as at Luskentyre and Scarista, and the surly mountains of north Harris beyond, while on the east the Minch has carved one natural harbour after another out of the rocky coast. Like all the Western Isles it is exposed to the sporadic violence of Atlantic storms but the next day can be as still as any mainland location, and when the sun shines, so does Harris.
This is a community well used to tackling big issues. It all but exhausted itself in the 1990s as it wrestled with the proposition that its economic future could only be secured by Europe’s largest coastal quarry being established at Lingerbay in the south of the island. The plan was to extract 600 million tonnes of anorthosite from the mountain Roineabhal over 60 years, leaving a scar that could be seen from space. Island opinion swayed back and forth.
Planning permission was finally refused in 2000, nearly 10 years after the plan was first lodged, but there are still some who believe the continued depopulation of the island would have been arrested by the quarry. But since then the focus has shifted. In 2003 there was a community-led buyout of the 55,000-acre North Harris Estate by the North Harris Trust, the 7,500-acre Seaforth Estate followed and earlier this year crofters on the west side took the 16,250-acre publicly owned crofting estates of Borve, Luskentyre and Scaristavore.
This has helped persuade most islanders that conservation in the form of a national park is the way ahead. In a ballot last year, 732 people voted for pursuing park status and 311 against the idea, with a turnout of nearly 72%.
The division represents opposing and deeply held views of how best to fight the traditional Highland spectre of depopulation. The outlying island of St Kilda, last inhabited 80 years ago today, remains a potent if extreme lesson in the possible consequences.
The vote followed a feasibility report by the Isle of Harris National Park Study Group. It concluded that 10-15 jobs would be created directly by a national park authority. But when indirect employment is included there could be up to 90 jobs, the equivalent to at least 1,000 in the central belt. It would bring significant government money and there would be access to new funding schemes from Scottish, UK and European sources for projects which would employ islanders or people who might move to Harris to take up work, while not restricting crofting activity.
The report was clear: “The most pressing needs in Harris are to reverse population decline and improve its age structure.”
The population of Harris has been declining since 1921. In the four decades that followed the Second World War, Harris lost more than 40% of its population, and the haemorrhage continued with another 24% drop between 1981 and 2001, when it stood at just 1,984. Between 2001 and 2009 there have been 329 deaths and 99 births, a ratio of 3.32 to one which the community can’t sustain.
Despite these bare statistics there are still those who close their eyes and perceive Harris to be a thriving island with 25 primary schools and a dozen men turning up to gather sheep in every township. Now two of the last four primaries are under threat, while one active crofter is the norm in many townships.
The celebrated Gaelic singer John Murdo Morrison, 72, the former proprietor of the Harris Hotel in Tarbert who is also a vice lord lieutenant of the Western Isles, is one who has seen the people leave. “When I was young there were probably 3,500 people on Harris, almost double what there is today,” he says, sitting in his house in Tarbert. “So one thing is clear – something has to be done to arrest the decline. Tourism is what holds the economy together now. Just look at the procession of campervans coming off every ferry. But we have very little in the way of facilities to offer them. National park status could allow us to develop a genuine 21st-century tourism infrastructure without prejudicing the natural environment.
“We have everything else here already: mountain climbing, marine sports, bird watching, you name it, all within half an hour of your pillow. We have a crime-free society. Yet it always galls me that so many people have to commute to Lewis to work. The national park would offer new opportunities. It would increase tourism and related employment. It would persuade people to have more pride in the island and to encourage their children to come back to Harris in the future.”
Norman Mackay, 56, a builder who lives up the east coast of the island at Finsbay, doesn’t agree. “It is bad enough already for locals buying property, particularly the young,” he says. “A national park would make things worse with property prices rising as people with money come looking for holiday homes. We are talking to people in Cumbria who are in a national park and that’s what’s happening there.”
Harris is not an island at all, but the southern part of the largest and most northerly of the Western Isles, most of which forms Lewis. The division dates back to the death of the prominent Norseman Leod in the second half of the 13th century. His descendants were to become the Clan Macleod, but two branches developed, one under Leod’s son Tormod, the other under Torcuil, who was either Tormod’s brother or nephew. Tormod took Harris, Skye around Dunvegan and Glenelg while Torcuil got Lewis, Assynt, Coigach, Gairloch and Raasay. Nature had aided the division with the Clisham, at 799m the highest mountain in the Western Isles, and the sea lochs Seaforth and Roag helping provide physical boundaries. Even local government recognised the distinction with Lewis set in Ross-shire and Harris in Inverness-shire.
Harris itself is divided. On the one hand there is the fertile west coast, with its long white beaches and mesmerising views to Taransay and the mountains to the north. Many of the people were cleared in the 1820s to make way for farms, and pushed on to the rocky east coast and its near lunar landscape of rock and stone amid which they would create lazybeds by mixing the little soil they could find with rotting seaweed. More than a century later the ecologist Frank Fraser Darling was so struck by this desperate industry that he wrote in 1955: “Nothing can be more moving to the sensitive observer of Hebridean life than those lazybeds of the Bays district of Harris. Some are no bigger than a dining table, and possibly the same height from the rock, carefully built up with turves [sic] carried there in creels by women and girls. One of these lazybeds will yield … a bucket of potatoes, a harvest no man should despise.”
The east coast did, though, provide a series of small natural harbours where the people could safely keep boats, allowing them to look to the sea for their survival. Now they look to the island itself.
From his house overlooking the waters of West Loch Tarbert, Calum Mackay, 55, chair of the Harris National Park Study Group, which was set up by the North Harris Trust, rehearses the options. The deputy head and senior Gaelic teacher in Sir E Scott School, the only secondary that serves children on Harris and the nearby island of Scalpay, he is convinced a national park is the way forward.
“If two or three jobs are created on Harris, we throw a party,” he says. “That’s how bad things are. When I was young we regularly had a dozen people in each village working at their crofts, but hardly anyone does it any more, even on the best of the land. When I was young, fishing, crofting and Harris tweed were the foundations of the local economy and had been for 40 or 50 years. They’re all practically gone now. Look at Scalpay, which was a thriving fishing community, but no longer.”
Crofting has been affected by falling agriculture prices and fishing is facing many challenges. The closure of the Minch Herring fishery, 30 years ago, was a big blow to Harris and Scalpay. There remains 40-50 boats fishing out of Harris, which are still vital but employ far fewer people than in the past.
“The population is rapidly declining,” Mackay continues. “There are no children below the age of eight on Scalpay, and the [primary] school is heading for closure in a couple of years. Meanwhile the parents down at Seilebost [on the west side of Harris] are fighting to keep their school open. Soon we will just have a primary school at Tarbert and one at Leverburgh at the south end. But there aren’t developers queuing up to revitalise the local economy. In such a time of economic stringency I can’t see any way to achieve the investment in the island we want without pursuing a national park.”
He believes there is a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about what a national park would entail, despite some residents having direct experience of living in national parks north and south of the border.
“If you look at the legislation which defines the aims of national parks in Scotland,” he says, “the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000, you will see it isn’t about being restrictive. The aims are to conserve and enhance the natural and cultural heritage; to promote the sustainable use of the natural resources of the area; to promote understanding and enjoyment (including enjoyment in the form of recreation) of the special qualities of the area by the public; and to promote sustainable social and economic development of the communities of the area. It is all proactive. There is nothing to fear.”
Mackay was not born on mainland Harris, but on the tiny island of Scarp off the west coast of Harris. He arrived when he was aged two and a half, his father a gamekeeper on the Amhuinnsuidhe estate, now owned by the North Harris Trust, which he also chairs. He is tickled by the twists and turns that have given him an unexpected role in estate management. “Little did I think when I was a boy on Amhuinnsuidhe that the community would end up owning the land we were playing on; it all seemed highly improbable. But the buyout of the estate does show what the community can do when we work together. It is the same down the west side of Harris where the crofters have taken control of their land.”
His birthplace would be in the park. The islanders voted for a national park based on the boundaries of the parish of Harris, which includes the islands of Scarp, Scalpay and Taransay, and the remote outposts of St Kilda and Rockall. Historically it also embraced Berneray, but it is now physically attached to the island of North Uist by a causeway.
They want a park with “call in powers” similar to the Cairngorms park, which leaves most of the planning function to the local authority, only calling in applications which would affect the park. The full planning powers enjoyed by Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park were not thought appropriate.
According to Duncan MacPherson, 45, land manager with the North Harris Trust, the distinction is important. “National park status would not stop any development that would not already be stopped because of existing designations,” he says. “You wouldn’t be able to have a large wind farm as it is, but you would be able to have a few turbines, which is what most communities want.”
He also stresses that there will be no marine element to the park, distancing it from the Coastal and Marine National Park proposed by the last Scottish Executive to the outrage of the fishing community. “Everybody agrees we have to do something to stop the depopulation which is continuing. Between 1951 and 2001 Harris lost 50% of its population, when the average for all the Outer Hebrides was a loss of 26% … Without significant change we are looking at a future population well below 1,000.”
Joan Cumming, 39, who lives at Seilebost, is a community development officer and her husband Gordon works as estate manager for the nearby Borve Lodge Estate. They have an eight-year-old daughter, Anna, and a son, John, nine.
A native Gael and crofter’s daughter from Lewis, Cumming trained as a zoologist and worked for Scottish Natural Heritage during the polarisation of island opinion over the proposed quarry at Lingerbay. So she is alive to the concerns others hold that a national park could prevent development. But she is clear that it is the right course to follow.
“The drive for the national park is to make the most of the heritage and landscape of Harris, to blow the island’s trumpet,” she says. “The environment has everything to offer, but the facilities for locals and visitors alike are still quite basic. The finance that would come with the national park would give us a chance to do something special here.
“It would be an accolade for the island that would be recognised the world over, and that was recognised in the way a clear majority voted for it.
“It would give impetus and boost community confidence, and give the people even greater pride and sense of place. That’s something I want my children to have when they are growing up – it creates stronger ties, making youngsters more likely to come back to the island if they leave to take up further education opportunities elsewhere. I know I didn’t fully appreciate how special my environment and culture was, growing up. It was only after I left that I understood. That is the other important factor to this proposal – it will focus on promoting the Gaelic culture of the area alongside the landscape and environment.”
However Donnie MacDonald, 57, owner of the Rodel Hotel in a sheltered spot at the south end of the island, once run by his grandfather, is worried. To him and his wife Dena, 58, any kind of park planning powers would undermine Western Isles Council. “For so long having a local authority that stretched up and down the archipelago from the Butt of Lewis to Vatersay was just a dream, but then it became reality in the mid 1970s,” says MacDonald. “Since then what the council has achieved has been considerable. We can’t undermine that by having one planning law for Harris and another for the rest of the islands. It would be ludicrous and undemocratic.”
He is particularly concerned by the effect of increasing controls. “We are already knee deep in environmental designations in and around Harris,” he says. To support his argument he cites the national scenic area that encompasses South Lewis, Harris and North Uist, and the fact the area’s wetlands are protected by the Ramsar convention. On top of that, he says, “We have sites of special scientific interest, special areas of conservation and special protection areas. Our environment is clearly being conserved. It is the youth of the island that needs to be conserved in the future.”
As a hotelier MacDonald relies on tourism, but believes what Harris needs is development that would provide jobs 12 months a year. “I never feel good about employing good and loyal staff at Easter, then paying them off in October,” he says.
This Thursday represents a vital step on the road to national park designation for Harris, but it could well be a long road. Being mindful of St Kilda’s example, what kind of Harris remains at its end should concern us all.
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