The Royal Society of Edinburgh Henry Duncan Prize Lecture: The Highlands: Scotlands Great Success Story By James

Hunter (Director, UHI Centre for History) Monday 3 September 2007 In 1979, just prior to that years unsuccessful devolution referendum, the paper I worked for despatched me to Sutherland. There, one evening, I was in conversation with a crofter, an elderly man, a bodach as is said in Gaelic. He was, this man, devoted to the Gaelic language, to much else thats distinctively Highland. Which is why I assumed that, like me, hed be voting for Scottish home rule. But no, not at all. He was unalterably against it. Why, I asked. Well, he said, in London they might not give a damn about Highlanders. But in Edinburgh they hate us. There are good historical explanations, some of which Ill touch on later, as to why that crofter thought the way he did. Once Highlanders were hated here in Edinburgh. At other times, theyve been feared, thought inferior, romanticised, pitied. Now, or so Im going to argue, its time that Edinburgh, that all of Scotland, began to think of the Highlands, and of people who live there, in a new, a different way. Todays Highlands and Islands are a place of great achievement; a place of enterprise, initiative and growth; a place in which the rest of Scotland can take pride. Suppose I were to ask you, on your leaving here this evening, to make an inventory of everything you own. A comprehensive inventory. Each book, each cup, each plate, each piece of cutlery; each picture, rug, chair, pillowslip and duvet. Your car, your clothes, your CDs and the like. An item by item inventory of all of your possessions. The task would take you a long time. But back in 1844, when members of a royal commission then visiting the Isle of Skye, made just such inventories of what they found in island homes, the job took minutes. Here are the commissions notes of their meeting with Murdo MacLeod, a crofter at Colbost, not far from Dunvegan: Has one half of a croft. Four children. No stock of any kind One bedstead with straw and very poor bedding A little bit of something like an old horserug One course earthenware dish, one half of a plate. No furniture to be mentioned. Two of the children nearly naked. Today absolute poverty of this kind is nowhere found outside the most afflicted parts of Africa. But as that 1844 commission discovered, it used to be characteristic of much of the Highlands and Islands. There, on the tiny plots left to them after clearance and eviction, people like Murdo MacLeod grew just one crop potatoes. Potatoes are of high nutritional value, tolerant of poor soils, high rainfall. Throughout the Highlands and Islands, whole populations had become reliant on them. Then, in the summer of 1846, and in several summers following, the potato crop in all of this large region was almost totally destroyed by blight. Conditions of the kind the royal commission had found two years before conditions that had then seemed little short of desperate were now recalled as a longed-for age of plenty. In August 1847 a Lowland clergman on a fact-finding trip to the Hebrides crossed the ford between North Uist and Benbecula encountering there a crowd of people scavenging, at low tide, for the shellfish that were just about their only source of sustenance. The visiting clergyman wrote this: The scene of wretchedness which we witnessed was heart-rending. On the beach the whole population of the country seemed to be met, gathering the precious cockles I never witnessed such countenances starvation on many faces the children with their melancholy looks, biglooking knees, shrivelled legs, hollow eyes, swollen bellies God help them, I never did witness such wretchedness! Children with melancholy looks, big-looking knees, shrivelled legs, hollow eyes, swollen-like bellies: we know them from a thousand Oxfam posters; from media coverage of faraway disasters. But in the 1840s, a precamera era, the Lowland minister Ive quoted had no inkling of what hunger does to kids until, in the Highlands and Islands, he saw its impact at first hand.

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In those years in this city, sums worth millions at present-day values were forthcoming for famine relief for famine relief in the Highlands and Islands. This money was spent on oatmeal. Adult males got one-and-a-half pounds daily, women three-quarters of a pound, children below twelve rather less. From Skye, this account of how those rations were doled out: At the appointed time and place the poor creatures troop down in hundreds, wretched and thin, starved and wan. Some have clothing, some almost none, and some are a mass of rags. Old and young, feeble and infirm, they take their stations and await their turn. Not a murmur, not a clamour, not a word but they wept aloud as they told of their miseries. All ages ago, you might think; another world. And yet this world, if approached by way of family background, can look suddenly quite close. I come from the North Argyll locality of Duror where I was born in 1948. Sharing our home for my first fourteen years was my late mothers father, John Cameron. Hed been born in 1872 and his father, Allan Cameron, my great-grandfather, was born in 1815 in a community towards the foot of Gleann na h-Iubraich near Strontian a community which, not long after, would cease to exist when Gleann na h-Iubraich, all of it, went under sheep. Allan Camerons photograph hangs on my wall. Stories of Allan Cameron reached me from his son, my grandfather. And so theres just one other person in the three-man chain that has myself at one end and, at the other, a nineteenth-century Highlander for whom hunger, clearance and the like were everyday matters of fact. Sometimes, travelling through the Highlands and Islands, observing indications of our areas newfound success, reflecting simultaneously on all thats gone before, I find it almost miraculous that prosperity is at last arriving in places of the sort where, just a couple of lifetimes back, Allan Cameron and his wife raised my grandfather and his several siblings in a home only its walls now standing with a total floor space smaller than the floor space of my sitting room. In part, perhaps, my amazement at whats happening now in the Highlands has to do with history being my business a circumstance, I guess, that makes me more than usually aware of how far we have come, and how quickly. But if youre a Highlander of my age, its not necessary to know much history in order to grasp the extent of the change thats occurred. After all, much of whats altered so dramatically in the Highlands has altered in my lifetime. As I said, I was born in North Argyll in 1948. I grew up there in the 50s and the 60s. In much of Britain, Western Europe, North America, those were what Eric Hobsbawm, my favourite historian, has called capitalisms golden years; a period of unprecedented plenty; a period when a British prime minister could truthfully tell his electorate that theyd never had it so good. But from this boom the Highlands stood apart. To be sure, the horrors of the previous century had faded. Highlanders no longer starved; neither were they forcibly deprived of homes and homesteads. Relative to the rest of the UK, however, the Highlands and Islands in the twenty or so years following the Second World War were doing very badly. Although Shetlands population was collapsing, as family after family quit 1950s Shetland for New Zealand, the island groups unemployment rate remained one of Britains highest. In the Hebrides and on the Highland mainland, a similar mix of joblessness and out-migration had hollowed out entire communities. In north-west Sutherland, where total population had fallen by a quarter in just twenty years, a crofter named Kenneth MacKenzie, giving evidence in 1952 to yet another royal commission, pointed to the Assynt township of Clashnessie as an instance of a wider, and grim, trend. In 1910, MacKenzie said, there were 138 people in Clashnessie; now there are only twenty. The youngest boy is 28 and the youngest girl will not see 45 again. Given facts like these, its not at all surprising that those of us then starting school in the Highlands and Islands were everywhere encouraged to believe that, if our aim was to get on in life, we had best begin by getting out. So it had been for generations.

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1773: Stornoway. On a single day, between seven and eight hundred Lewis folk, some 10 per cent of the islands population, take ship for Britains colonies in America. 1923: Stornoway again. On a further single day, exactly 150 years later, 260 people leave for Canada on a liner called the Metagama. Their average age is 22. During the 1980s, when working for the Scottish Crofters Union, Id find myself in houses that were home to ageing couples. Often, on the mantlepiece or on the dresser, were framed photos of the couples sons and daughters.. This is Donald, Id be told. Hes a doctor in Vancouver. This ones Margaret. Shes teaching now in Glasgow. Heres Neil. Hes in Brisbane, doing well out there with the police. Advancement, in the Highlands and Islands, had become synonymous with being elsewhere. To be still in your own locality in your mid-twenties was, almost by definition, to have failed. And externally of course from the perspective, for example, of policy-makers or opinion-formers here in Edinburgh Highland prospects looked no better than they did from the inside. We might have scenery; but we had no worthwhile economy. We might have had a stirring past; we certainly had no future. Such was the almost universal perception of Scotlands Highlands and Islands. Its a perception so well founded on so much that went so badly wrong that its proving hard to change. But its also a perception, I suggest this evening, thats now seriously out of date. Todays Highlands and Islands are no longer a disaster area. Theyre Scotlands great success story. And so to Gigha. Much of whats happened historically on Gigha conforms to a wider pattern. Like the rest of Argyll, this little island, between Kintyre and Islay, was colonised some fifteen hundred years ago by Gaelic-speaking immigrants from Ireland. Next came the Vikings; then the Lordship of the Isles; then, following the lordships fall, various chiefs and lairds of Hebridean background until, starting in the 1860s, Gigha, like much of the rest of the Highlands and Islands, began to be bought, sold, bought and sold again by mostly new-made men from England. Of these, say Gigha folk, the best and most benevolent was James Horlick who arrived in 1944 and who spent heavily on the place. But paternal ownership of this sort, however beneficial in the short run, is invariably unstable. And so it was on Gigha. Between 1972 and 1992, the ownership of Gigha changed three times. One laird, Malcolm Potier, lasted just three years before first going bankrupt and then being jailed in Australia where hed hired a hitman to kill his ex-lover and her boyfriend. Potiers successor, Derek Holt, was a nine-year proprietor, placing the island once more on the market in August 2001. Gighas community, by that point, seemed headed for extinction. The islands population, 400-plus a century before, had dipped below one hundred. Reasons for this exodus are clear. On Gigha almost everything, not just the land but virtually all the housing stock as well, belonged to a single, privately-owned estate. This estate, after the Horlick era, became increasingly run down its proprietors lacking the capital, the inclination or, because ownership changed so often, the time to engage in meaningful development. When, in 2002, the 42 estate-owed homes on Gigha were professionally surveyed, three-quarters were found to be below the officially tolerable standard. Of the remainder, all bar a single dwelling were in serious disrepair. Its understandable, then, that Gighas people were one by one quitting an island where economic activity was minimal and opportunity next best to non-existent. Its also understandable that, on Gigha being put up for sale by Derek Holt, and on the notion of its people bidding for it first being floated, this notion failed initially to find much backing. In contracting and demoralised communities, risk-takings hard to contemplate. In such communities, pessimism is more prevalent than its opposite.

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Gighas asking price was just below 4 million. At a meeting in August 2001, fourteen of Gighas residents voted for the proposition that they should make an offer for their island. Many more than fourteen were either hostile to community ownership or thought it wouldnt work. But in ensuing weeks, following much exploration of the possibilities, opinion shifted. At the beginning of October, a postal ballot of the 89 people on Gighas electoral roll was organised by Argyll and Bute Council. 82 of 89 voting papers were returned. And 58 of the 82, a 71 per cent majority, now wanted a community bid to go ahead. With financial backing from the Scottish Land Fund, and from Highlands and Islands Enterprise, which as it happens I then chaired, the necessary funds were raised. The bid was made; it proved successful; and, in March 2002, Gigha came under the ownership of a locally-elected grouping, the Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust. Shortly afterwards, at a Scottish Land Fund meeting, Kenny Robison, a Gigha farmer, reflected on what had occurred. As a community, Kenny said, we had lost the feeling that we could control anything Our population was declining Our tenanted farms were being abandoned. When I came to the island twenty years ago there were 28 children in the primary school and now there [are] only six. We had reached a point when we were faced with collapsing completely as a community or taking our destiny into our own hands. But as Kenny Robison well knew, buying Gigha, as Heritage Trust chairman Willie McSporran put it, had been the easy part. As Willie said on the day that Gigha became the property of its people, We are at the outset of an enormous challenge. One immediately challenging task was the requirement that, within two years of taking charge, the Trust had to repay a Land Fund loan of 1 million. This was done. Much else has been accomplished since. Earlier this year, the Heritage Trust reported on its first five years, starting with Gighas previously disastrous housing situation. At that point, six months ago, nine houses had been refurbished; nine were being or were about to be refurbished; twelve more refurbishments were in the pipeline. On an island where, prior to community ownership, just one new home had been built in thirty years, eighteen new houses for rent had been completed or were well on their way to completion. And in an island where previous lairds had refused to sell sites for houses, a number of such sales had gone ahead with five new owner-occupied homes resulting. Among the Trusts own business ventures were Britains only community-owned hotel and Britains first community-owned and grid-connected wind farm. The latter consists of three turbines, known in Gaelic as Faith, Hope and Charity and in English as the Dancing Ladies. In its first full year of operation, this wind farm made a profit for the Trust of more than 100,000 all of it destined for local reinvestment. After five years of community ownership, moreover, ten new privately-owned businesses were up and running. Farmland had been reorganised. Sixteen jobs had been created. And a two-centuries-long decline in population had been spectacularly reversed. Gighas primary school roll, previously down to six, was over twenty. Total population, was up by more than 50 per cent. And on an island formerly bereft of anyone in their twenties or their thirties, there was a growing number in this economically most active age-group. Even if Gigha was a one-off, it would deserve attention. But hearteningly, intriguingly, Gighas transformation though exceptional in its rapidity is by no means unique. In a manner, I repeat, that sometimes seems to me miraculous, and to an extent that Scotland as a wholes been slow to cotton on to, the Highlands and Islands are today on the way back, on the way up. Some successes. Orkney. A homegrown jewellery industry think Ortak thats trading internationally. Food products that are doing really well. A container mega-hub potentially in Scapa Flow. Plus EMEC, the European Marine Energy Centre at the forefront of trying out tidal and wave energy devices.

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Inverness. Lifescan Scotland. Integral to a Highlands and Islands health science sector involving twenty separate companies and institutions. Lifescan employs about eighteen hundred people 150 of them in cutting-edge R&D. Inverness. Near Lifescan. The Centre for Life Sciences. A 22 million project with world-class facilities for healthcare training and for biotechnology research. North Harris, Assynt, the Isle of Eigg, Abriachan, Galson, South Uist, Knoydart. Some more of the localities accounting for 370,000 acres where, as in Gigha, lands gone into community ownership. Kintyre. Where Vestas, a wind turbine manufacturer, employ 200 people. Great Glen House. New base of Scottish Natural Heritage. Completed under budget and an exemplar of sustainable design attracting the highest environmental rating ever awarded by the relevant assessment body. Some famous brands. Walkers shortbread. Baxters soups. Plus Talisker, Glenmorangie, Bruichladdich, Highland Park, Laphroaig. Viking Energy. A Shetland Council partnership with Scottish and Southern Energy, SSE. Looking to build one of the worlds largest wind farms and to provide the council with development funds akin to those derived from offshore oil. Glendoe. The site of Scotlands first big hydro scheme in forty years. Inverness Airport. Passenger numbers double those of 1999. Soon to have a major business park. The Highlands and Islands Community Energy Company. Investing widely in community-controlled renewables. Eden Court Theatre. Reopening shortly after a rebuild thats Scotlands biggest arts sector project of this decade. Taigh Chearsabhagh, Lochmaddy. An Lanntair in Stornoway. Two of numerous arts centres and performance venues of tremendously high quality. Fis an Eilein; InvernessFest; Bls; Tartan Heart at Belladrum; Celas; Touchwood; Celtic Media Festival; The Outsider; Rock Ness; Mountain Bike World Championships; Fort George Military Tattoo: all helping make up Scotlands Year of Highland Culture. UHI. The prospective University of the Highlands and Islands. A region-wide partnership. Now providing 7,000 students with university-level education. Already a UK research leader in marine and environmental science. Developing research capacity in fields like health, renewable energy, fisheries and dare I say it history And finally Sabhal Mr Ostaig in Skye. A UHI partner. Thirty years ago a derelict farm steading. Today a stillexpanding set of splendid buildings. Where more than a hundred full-time students take degrees taught through the medium of Gaelic. Where hundreds more come for short courses. Home to several spin-off businesses. Accounting altogether for 85 full-time, and as many part-time, jobs. Sabhal Mr is in the Sleat penisula, once the most depopulated corner of a desperately depopulated island. This from a study published in 1955: [Population] decline has continued without a break [in Skye] since 1841 In Sleat the population is down to a fifth of its maximum Further decline in population is inevitable. In the mid-nineteenth century, Skyes population was 24,000. By the 1960s, it was nearer 6,000 and this downward trend, as that 1950s study emphasised, seemed set to last indefinitely. In fact, the opposite has happened. Thanks partly to Sabhal Mr Ostaig, Skyes population, just like Gighas, is up by some 50 per cent and not just Sleat, but the whole island, is awash with new-built homes. Whats true of Skye is true of much of the Highlands and Islands. During the last forty years, a period when Scotlands total population has mostly been static, or even in decline, the population of the Highlands and Islands has risen by around a fifth. During the last five years, to be sure, Scotlands overall population has started to edge upwards. But in the Highlands and Islands, the rate of increase has been three times faster than that of the nation at large. In Skye and neighbouring Wester Ross, the rate has been seven times greater. Of course, the star performer demographically is Gigha doing nearly a hundred times better than Scotland. But then, as youll have gathered, Gighas very special.
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A few more facts and figures. In recent years, Inverness has been one of Britains fastest growing cities. In the Highlands and Islands, proportionate to our population, we have more business start-ups than does the rest of Scotland. Our regional unemployment rate, once a multiple of the all-Scotland figure, has for several years been well below it. The Highlands and Islands are the UKs only region where more than 80 per cent of the potential workforce is employed. This compares with less than 70 per cent in London. Total Highlands and Islands population is approaching 450,000. Its one of HIEs aspirations, as the agencys chairman Willy Roe states strongly, to have this figure reach half-a-million by 2020. Can this happen? Absolutely. For the first time in centuries, after all, many more people are moving into the Highlands and Islands than are leaving. Some from the rest of Scotland; more from other parts of the UK; large numbers from further afield. Among kids now in Highland Council primary schools, first languages other than English now total more than fifty. And last year in the Highlands and Islands, over a six-month period, national insurance registrations involving immigrants from overseas were averaging eleven or twelve each working day. As Ive said, my trade is history. And its in historys nature, its what keeps historians in business, that our perspective on the past is constantly in flux. Someone I know is an authority on Russia. Back in the 1980s, he tells me, he could produce a dozen explanations as to why, whatever happened in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union would endure. Now, he says, hes equally convincing on why Soviet disintegration was inevitable. Which isnt to accuse this man of intellectual dishonesty. When Soviet power gave way to Soviet collapse, prior events required a lot of re-examining. The outcome of any excursion into history, then, depends on where you start from. In a Highlands and Islands context, for reasons that Ive touched on, new starting points, I think, are overdue. And it isnt just historians, incidentally, who could benefit from fresh perspectives on the Highlands. Social scientists, policymakers, media commentators could benefit as well. When the Highlands and Islands looked to be heading for hell in a basket, as they did in the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth as well, it was reasonable to focus both on failure and its causes. There are no end of published explorations, then, of clearance, famine, population loss and other calamities of that kind. But look for comparable analyses of why the Highlands have of late been doing better, and youll find little of real substance. Thats why I welcome the Royal Society of Edinburghs decision that, over the next year or two, current developments in the Highlands and Islands will constitute one of the societys key themes. Quite what this will mean in practice has still to be nailed down. But in broad terms the Royal Society is looking to: Engage with people central to the transformation thats been happening in the north; Celebrate this transformation; Account for it, and from it learn lessons relevant to other parts of Scotland.

Taking forward this agenda will necessitate debate. By way of an initial contribution, I now move on from the fact of Highlands and Islands renewal to a tentative identification of some factors that have made renewal possible. One of the most basic of these, I believe, has been the longstanding willingness of successive governements whether British or Scottish and irrespective of party to involve the state in the cause of Highland betterment. This, I know, is an unfashionable thing to say. To attribute Highland success, even in part, to state intervention in our regional economy is to be at odds with much of the recent thrust of economic theory, and economic policy, across the the western world and beyond.

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Nevertheless, its my conviction that, had governments not done what they did in northen Scotland over the last 120 or so years, the upturn Ive described could not have happened. The actions that I have in mind include: The granting in 1886 of security of tenure to crofters by a Liberal government; The establishment in the 1890s of our first development agency by a Conservative administration which also embarked on large-scale public investment in railways and other infrastructure; Early twentieth-century land reform much of it Conservative in inspiration which led to thousands of new crofts; The setting up in 1943 of the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board brainchild of Tom Johnston, a Labour minister in Winston Churchills wartime coalition; The creation in 1965 by Labour of the Highlands and Islands Development Board.

Many of those measures, to be sure, were anything but instantly effective. Making further clearance impossible, as happened in 1886, or creating new crofts on land bought for this purpose by the state, as happened in the 1920s, was all very well. But only with the more recent growth of the wider economy of which crofters are part has it begun to be apparent as we see today in Skye that a smallholding system of the crofting sort can be the basis of a countryside thats simultaneously prosperous and, in comparison with places like the Borders or Dumfries-shire, thickly peopled. Similarly with Johnstons Hydro Board. Its determination to take mains electricity to every home in the Highlands and Islands didnt, of itself, stop out-migration. But in the absence of whats now a basic service, more people would have left and all sorts of later developments just couldnt have occurred. Of course, the Hydro Board, and the still more critically important Highland Board, were products of an era of big government. But even when that era ended, even when government elsewhere was in retreat, politicians some of them otherwise committed to the market were as interventionist as ever when dealing with the area beyond the Highland Line. Thus Margaret Thatchers ministers ensured that the HIDBs sweeping powers, to which Ill return in a moment, were inherited by Highlands and Islands Enterprise subsequent Tory governments going on, in the person of the devotedly Thatcherite Michael Forsyth, to launch the Convention of the Highlands and Islands, to endorse the beginnings of community land ownership, and to back the push for UHI. More recently, post-devolution governments of Scotland have behaved in much the same pro-Highland fashion. Thats why SNH is based in Inverness, why theres been additional land reform, why we have a Year of Highland Culture why, last month, our new government committed itself to the introduction of Road Equivalent Tariffs on island ferries. And so to an intriguing question. Bearing in mind that a lot of expert opinion, including civil service opinion, was hostile often very hostile to several of the measures and initiatives Ive mentioned, from William Gladstones Crofters Act, by way of Michael Forsyths support for UHI, to jobs dispersal of the SNH variety, why have such policies so frequently prevailed? Obviously, reasons varied over time. But of these reasons, one has been remarkably consistent. Its most explicit in a comment made by the late Willie Ross when introducing to the House of Commons the Bill that ushered in the Highland Board. For two hundred years, Ross said, the Highlander has been the man on Scotlands conscience. Read Gladstone, read Tom Johnston, read the Scottish Parliaments debates on land reform always, in one guise or another, that sentiment is present. At its core there lies a still-enduring sense that, irrespective of the writings of revisionist historians, the Highlands and Islands, in the past, were dealt the rawest of raw deals. Moreover, this raw deal, its widely thought, was such, as Willie Ross implied, to have imposed on the wider nation of which the Highlands and Islands are part, whether that nation is Britain or Scotland, a continuing need to attone for previous neglect or worse. Personally, Im suspicious of the notion that todays rulers are responsible for actions taken by long ago predecessors. Many things are arguably the fault of Tony Blair. But the Irish Famine, for which Mr Blair apologised in 1997, isnt one of them.

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That said, I can see where Willie Ross was coming from. For when you take account not just of the nineteenth-century horrors mentioned earlier, but of the Highlands and Islands experience over a thousand or more years, its hard to avoid the conclusion as expressed, youll recall, by my crofter friend in Sutherland that Highlanders, from the middle ages onward, suffered more than somewhat from antiHighland thinking here in Edinburgh. Once the Highlands and Islands had their own self-governing principalities the Kingdom of Moray, the Earldom of Orkney, the Lordship of the Isles to name but three. And by contemporary standards, these performed most successfully. Read the Orkneyinga Saga, or go look at Castle Tioram, if you doubt this. The earldom, the lordship and the rest were swallowed up by an aggressive, an expansionist, an imperial Scottish state. And its inherent in imperialism, Scotlands brand included, that imperialists disparage the societies they take over for only by so doing can they argue, as empire-builders always do, that their mission is to bring enlightenment, civility and progress to places where such qualities were formerly unknown. From the middle ages forward, then, first Scotlands ruling orders, then those of the UK, whether King James VI or Patrick Sellar, endeavoured to devalue and dehumanise the clans that James was out to crush, the communities Sellar cleared. Sellar and James were separated by three hundred years. But both thought Highlanders barbaric people whose Gaelic culture merited nothing but contempt. Imperialist success, of course, is followed by romancing the now safely neutered enemy. Once, in the US, the only good Indian was a dead one; today that self-same Indian is a sort of pioneer ecologist. Likewise in Lowland Scotland where tartan, formerly detested, has become the national dress. But as with Native Americans, so with Highlanders what began, in the nineteenth century, to be romanticised was a supposedly heroic tribal past, not life as it was lived on Indian reservations or in postclearance crofting townships. In Victorian times and later, Highland misfortune, Highland poverty, were frequently put down to Highland failings failings rooted, it was said, in the Gaelic culture that King James and Patrick Sellar so confidently dismissed. Which brings me back to Willie Ross and to the Highland Board. When people are told, as Highlanders were told for generations, that everything about them, starting with their Gaelic language, is second-rate, of no account, those people cant but end up lacking self-esteem. And where there isnt self-esteem, there cant be enterprise, initiative, advancement. Thats why a key contributor to renewal in the north has been the realisation, on the part both of the Highland Board and HIE, that, in a Highlands and Islands context, developmental measures shouldnt be confined to building factories, aiding business and the like. Because of whats gone before in the Highlands, policies of that sort have had to be accompanied by a commitment to restoring our formerly demoralised populations sense of worth. And so its mattered greatly that the HIDB and HIE were equipped, both by Ross and his Tory successors, with the capacity to engage in ventures well outside the strictly economic sphere to which most development agencies are limited. Hence HIE investment in Sabhal Mr Ostaig, Gaelic playgroups, folk festivals, book festivals, the Year of Highland Culture, community facilities of every type. Such investment encourages folk to take pride in their background.And it shows that the Highlands and Islands, so long and so habitually dismissed as backward and benighted, are actually rich in music, literature, archaeology and much else. Equally critical in this regard has been an overturning of the previously prevalent and deeply cynical notion that nobody can live on scenery. Instead, its widely realised that, in our landscapes, our environment, we Highlanders have assets of great value some part of this value deriving, of course, from surroundings of the Highland sort having elsewhere been despoiled. Across the Highlands and Islands, then, a growing appreciation of the many merits of our heritage both cultural and natural is helping people to once more feel good about themselves. Thats making for enhanced self-confidence as evidenced by phenomena as varied as our business startup rate, our flourishing music scene and whats been going on in Gigha.

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At the same time, and just as crucially, the advent of new communications and new information technologies has made it easier than formerly to be in northern Scotland with its increasingly attractive lifestyle and, from the same locality, do business in a global market. Its in this sense that todays Highlands and Islands need to be seen, whether inside the region or beyond, as a place of tremendous opportunity. Internationally, after all, the most advanced, the most exciting, enterprises are more and more located in areas where people can both earn a good living and have access to environments of the very highest quality. Hence the success of American regions like the Pacific North West or Colorado. Hence my belief that where those areas have led, the Highlands and Islands can follow. Indeed are following already. The former Labour minister, Brian Wilson, tells how he once accompanied the late Donald Dewar on a visit to Lewis. After the political formalities, it was decided that the party should call on Brians mother-in-law at her home in Uig on the islands west coast and at the end of many, many miles of single-track road. On Mr Dewar being shown into the house which, as Brian puts it, is the last home this side of Newfoundland he stood for a while by the window, looking at the Atlantic; then, turning to Brians mother-in-law, he said, with all the feeling of a man as urban as he was urbane, Youre very remote here. The old lady, not trying to be cheeky or smart, something no island woman of her generation would think of for a moment, replied, in genuine puzzlement, Remote from what? Earlier I touched on the Lordship of the Isles, the Earldom of Orkney. Now something from much further back something that, like Brians story, subverts the way that most of us have thought about the world. This something is the Book of Kells the wonderfully illuminated manuscript thats perhaps the most significant surviving artefact from Europes early middle ages. The Book of Kells, now on display at Trinity College, Dublin, was created in the Abbey of Iona. This matters. If, nearly fifteen hundred years ago, a Hebridean monastery could be as Iona then was an internationally significant centre of learning and of creativity, then its demonstrably not the case that the supposed peripherality of the Highlands and Islands is an unalterable fact of geography. What marginalised the Highlands what made the area prone to famine, clearance and the rest was not where the region is located on the map. What truly marginalised the Highlands and Islands was the way they were governed in the centuries following the destruction of Ionas abbey, the demise of Orkneys earldom, the overthrow of the lordship centuries when power, decision-making and, ultimately, people were drained away and concentrated elsewhere. Now all of this has begun to be reversible is beginning, indeed, to be reversed. Where that process will end, I dont know. But it has the potential, I believe, to go very, very far. It could make of Inverness a Scottish, a UK, Seattle. It could turn Scotland, almost literally, upside down. One of the greatest of English historians, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the grandson as it happens of a Highlander, famously imagined a future traveller from New Zealand [who] shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Pauls. I dont say that another New Zealander, en route for some metropolis in the Highlands, will pause on a deserted Mound to sketch the broken-down remains of Princes Street. But this I do say. Theres no reason why, in the century just starting, Scotland shouldnt have new centres economic, cultural and otherwise to rival Edinburgh and Glasgow. New centres in the north.

Opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the RSE, nor of its Fellows 9