IT is the oh-so-familiar Scotland of picture postcards and tourism marketing posters. The Highlands, for much of the world, have come to symbolise a whole nation.
And yet Scots rarely understand the challenges facing our mountainous north and those who live there.
For nearly 30 years one journalist explained the real Highlands – not the sanitised shortbread tin version of the region to the rest of us.
Now that reporter, retired Herald Highlands Correspondent David Ross, can tell the stories behind his stories.
In a new book, Highland Herald, Reporting The News From The North, Mr Ross goes back to some of the biggest issues affecting his beat over the last three decades. In doing so, he discovers new insights into how decisions were made about land far from Edinburgh and London.
HIGHER LEARNING
More than 20 years ago, the last Conservative Secretary of State to rule Scotland before devolution made one of the most important announcements about the future of the Highlands and Islands. The region, Michael Forsyth, said would get its own university. No longer would all students have to go south to learn after school.
Mr Forsyth was speaking at a 1996 meeting of the Scottish Grand Committee of MPs in Inverness. But he was not,- Mr Ross has discovered, saying things that Scotland’s senior civil servants and all its established universities wanted to hear.
Mr Ross wrote: “I received a phone call from a Scottish Office civil servant after the meeting asking if I had notes of what exactly Mr Forsyth had said onthe subject, as he and his colleagueshad no detail.
“We later learnt Mr Forsyth had asked an opposition MP to ask a question about the university.”
For his book, Mr Ross went back to Mr Forsyth, now Lord Forsyth of Drumlean. “On the University of the Highlands and Islands, I just couldn’t get anywhere. The universities were all lobbying against it, the officials were against it. I could just see the whole thing disappearing into a three-year review. I thought we will just announce we are doing it, then they will have to get on with it. So that’s what I did.”
David Ross on his Herald beat
Now the institution has 13 colleges, with more than 50 local learning centres and thousands of students. The old Scottish Office as recently as 1993 had described a campaign for a Highland university as “premature and prejudicial”.
BRAVEHEART, CULLODEN AND THE TORIES
He was the Scottish secretary who returned the Stone of Destiny to Edinburgh. But, Mr Ross reveals, Lord Forsyth had another huge fight with civil servants over how to remember the last great battle on British soil and one of events which defined the Highlands of today: Culloden.
In Highland Herald, Mr Ross describes how the then Mr Forsyth wanted to commemorate the battle’s 250th anniversary in 1996 as part of a civil war. But, the politician told Mr Ross, officials were “desperate to keep it as low key as possible, because they thought it was sensitive”.
Lord Forsyth added: “And I had to cope with the film Braveheart as well. It became apparent that people confused the Wars of Scottish Independence in the 14th Century with Culloden in the 18th Century, and had no understanding as to what this was all about.”
Mel Gibson
This was the era of high polling for Scottish independence and even higher support for a new parliament in Edinburgh, a body that was to materialise three years later.
THE LAND QUESTION
Conservatives may have been seen as the party of the lairds but Lord Forsyth told Mr Ross a different story. “We have had some horrendous examples of horrible landlords,” he said, “mainly from outside Scotland.”
Community buy-outs became one of the biggest stories Mr Ross told about the Highlands over 30 years. In his book, he hears from a senior official that development agency Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) had been initially dubious about supporting the Assynt Crofters’ historic and ultimately successful campaign to win their land 25 years ago.
Andrew Thin, who was Chief Executive of Caithness and Sutherland Enterprise and today is Chairman of the Scottish Land Commission, recalls the early HIE approach was: “Quiet moral support behind the scenes perhaps, but not a suitable use of public funds.”
However, an article in The Daily Telegraph, he had been told, heralded an instruction from a high level in Whitehall that Assynt was exactly the sort of demonstration of local initiative and enterprise that should be supported. HIE’s attitude changed thereafter and the agency in the end contributed £50,000, as well as giving the Assynt Crofters advice and encouragement.
Other communities, such as Eigg, Knoydart, Gigha followed. Now well over 500,000 acres are under community ownership
THE CLEARANCES CONTROVERSIES
The Assynt crofters drive to take back their land reflected generations of hurt over who owns Scotland - and the Clearances of the poor, often Gaelic-speaking, from the Highlands in the centuries after Culloden.
This year the historian Sir Tom Devine has revisited the issue and clarified that the Clearances were far from just a Highland issue, taking issue with the traditional take of popular historian John Prebble, who Mr Ross knew.
John Prebble
In Highland Herald, Mr Ross looks at the legacy of Mr Prebble, whose work was once dismissed by a late historiographer royal as “utter rubbish”.
Mr Ross said: “Whether or not the Highlands and Islands suffered worse depopulation numerically compared to other parts of Scotland, I have never felt was the most important issue. Rather it was the impact on the people, which Sorley MacLean described as the “phenomenon of phenomena”.
Mr MacLean was Mr Ross’s father-in-law and his book includes praise to the late bard which Mr Ross says he would have found “excruciating”.
TONGUE LASHING
Mr Ross back in 2003 came in for a not always gentle Fleet Street ribbing when he was covering the manhunt for a 15-year-old girl and her 22-year-old boyfriend. He spotted the pair near Tongue but called the police rather than try to get a scoop and speak to them.
In his book, the reporter explains that ethical rules of his trade meant he could not interview a child without a responsible adult present. The man with the girl, he says, was the “antithesis of a responsible adult”.
Highland Herald: Reporting The News From The North is published on Wednesday by Birlinn (£12.99, paperback).
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