Land Reform and the Gentrification of Braemar

Regular readers will by now have (hopefully) picked up an odd and perplexing intellectual lacuna at the heart of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill.

Ministers have got themselves into a spot of bother in attempting to justify why someone can be the second largest landowner in the country owning tens of thousands of hectares of land and yet, because no one parcel exceeds 1000 ha in extent, their landholding is outwith the scope of the Bill’s key provisions.

Here again is an exchange from the Stage One scrutiny. [1]

Michael Matheson:
 If we get to the point where someone is the third-largest landowner in the country but does not have a land management plan to their name, while someone who happens to have one piece of land that is just over the threshold has to go to the extent of having a full land management plan, there will be a real inequity to that. That needs to be addressed.

Mairi Gougeon:
 We would have to give greater thought to how that could be done and to the evidence base that we would use if that was to be the proposal.

The idea that concentrated landownership is only a problem if it directly impacts on an identified community flies in the face of 40 years of scholarship. My understanding is that the Scottish Land Commission only ever intended that this be a proxy for the impact that scale and concentration can have. Yet that relationship has never been tested by any empirical studies or evidence and has now found its way into a key piece of legislation as the supposed ‘evidence base” for the core proposals.

This blog highlights once again how the 1000 ha threshold chosen as the trigger for the various interventions in the Bill is arbitrary and fails to address other impacts on communities at a smaller scale. In my previous blog on this topic, I pointed out the impact that a 204h a landholding has historically had on a small village where the owners (who live in New Zealand) own almost all the land around it and all the streets within it. [2]

The example I want to highlight today concerns the village of Braemar in Aberdeenshire.

For those who know what has been happening here, this will not be entirely new. A very wealthy couple – Swiss art dealers, Iwan and Manuela Wirth – took on a lease of Invercauld House on Invercauld Estate. There was nothing unusual about that but, as Manuela said in an interview in The Gentlewoman in 2016,

“We have this house in Scotland, and we had no way to entertain our guests,” Manuela says. “We love a big table full of guests and family, but there is no possibility to invite these people to Scotland because there is not a single good restaurant or hotel near us. So when we heard about this hotel in Braemar which was for sale we thought, Why not?”

The Wirths acquired the Fife Arms Hotel in 2015 under their company Artfarm Property Ltd. They invested significant sums of money in the hotel and it is now a favoured destination of celebrities and royalty.

The Braemar Literary Festival will be held this coming weekend. It is billed as a “literary escape to the Highlands” – a neat summation of the distinctly metropolitan flavour of the event over the years.

But whilst private investment in the Fife Arms is to be welcomed (although much of the historic clientele of ordinary tourists, walkers and climbers have been replaced by a more monied class), the scale and pace of the property portfolio built up by the Wirths is staggering and has impacted on the local tourism industry.
Following their acquisition of the Fife Arms in 2015, they have purchased a further eleven properties in Braemar and five in Ballater. These are illustrated on the map below in blue.

Prominent among them are the following.

The Invercauld Arms
The only other large hotel in town has now been closed and is to be covered into self-catering apartments with swimming pool, spa and gym facilities.

Schiehallion Guest House
A popular guesthouse in the village, it was bought in 2016 and is now closed.

Braemar Kirk
This Church of Scotland property was bought by Artfarm in May 2025.

Most of the remaining properties are domestic dwellings and former guesthouses which have been acquired as staff accommodation for the 110 or so staff employed in the Fife Arms and the 50 or so who will be employed in the self-catering apartments in the former Invercauld Hotel. [3]

I don’t know if this development of high end tourism is what the residents of Braemar want or need and it is not the purpose of this blog to debate the pros and cons of rural gentrification. However, the owners of these 16 properties, have been able to acquire them all with no questions asked. No doubt more homes will be bought in future to accommodate this expanding hospitality empire.

What is beyond question is that existing guesthouses have closed to make way for staff accommodation for the Fife Arms. This represents a form of creeping monopolisation of the hospitality offering in Braemar with the vast wealth of the Wirths being able to outbid anyone else who may want to provide holiday accommodation for other types of visitor to Braemar.

The extent of these holdings in Braemar extends to 3.7 ha but there is no doubt that the ownership of this extensive collection of properties is having and will have an impact on Braemar. Whether that impact is regarded as positive or negative or somewhere in between is irrelevant to the fact that there is an impact.

Should there be similar powers of intervention for Scottish Ministers in such cases where one owner buys up such an extensive property portfolio in a village comprising both main hotels and converts existing hospitality businesses into staff accommodation?

If not, why not?

NOTES

[1] Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee Official Report Cols 17-18 18 February 2025

[2] See blog of 3 July 2025.

[3] This document (5.2Mb pdf) submitted as part of the planning application to create staff accommodation in the former Inver Lodge Hotel sets out the logic of the property portfolio being assembled in Braemar.