Ferry Rights and the Skye Ferry

The image above appeared on the front cover of the Sunday National on 16 August 2026. The story highlighted the ongoing charges faced by the Isle of Skye Ferry CIC, the community company that operates the Glenelg – Kylerhea ferry and the impact this could potentially have on the viability of the community run ferry service. You can read a transcript of the story on the walkhighlands website here.

This blog explores some of the background to this situation, how it came about and how it might be resolved.

First of all (and to get this off my chest) this is yet another story about an archaic aspect of Scots land law that joins a long list of topics that have not yet been addressed in any of the land reform legislation of the past 25 years.

It is is closely related to the need to modernise the law of the foreshore and the seabed, a topic referred to the Scottish Law Commission by Jim Wallace in 1999 as part of the Scottish Executive’s land reform action plan. The Commission published its report together with a draft bill in 2003. It included proposals to strengthen public rights in the foreshore and seabed. In the 23 year since, nothing has been done to implement these recommendations. Had they been implemented, many people and businesses would have benefitted.

FERRY RIGHTS

So what is all the fuss about?

In Scots law, ferry rights are “a separate tenement” in land alongside such things as salmon fishings and minerals. In other words, they can be owned separately from any land. In addition, ferry rights (the exclusive right to convey passengers and their baggage) is, by default a Crown right. This is reflected in Scotland’s most famous historic ferry crossing between South and North Queensferry. The clue is in the name. Queen Margaret exercising the powers of the Crown, established a ferry across the Forth.

By default, the Crown still owns the right to ferry across any stretch of water unless it was alienated to a third party. In practice this is what has happened in the majority of contemporary and more recent ferry crossings. The rights were conveyed to Royal Burghs and Burghs of Barony who exercised the rights and which in turn were transmitted down the centuries to current local authorities.

Most of the public ferry routes today operated by Calmac have their origins either with private companies established before David MacBrayne Ltd was nationalised in 1948 (including railway companies). Alternatively, they were established without seeking a Crown grant and the Crown appears never to have objected (or perhaps they consented without the need for any conveyance of the right).

A helpful blog explaining all of this was published by retired solicitor Neil King back in 2013. The only part of his analysis that I would disagree with concerns his assertion about the role of the Crown Estate Commissioners (now Crown Estate Scotland) in relation to ferry rights. Like a number of Crown property rights, the granting or exercise of the Crown right of ferry has got nothing to do with the Crown Estate. Any grant of a Crown right to ferry awarded today would have to be sought from HM King Charles directly.

KYLERHEA FERRY RIGHTS

In the case of the Glenelg to Kylerhea crossing, this is an ancient route named after Reatha, a Fingalian hero who is said to have vaulted the fast flowing Caolas an Lamhachaidh (the strait of dextrous handling) in the third century. For centuries it was used for driving cattle to lowland markets and for conveying passengers long before Kyle of Lochalsh existed as the modern crossing point.

The ferry rights on the mainland (the Glenelg side of Kyle Rhea) were owned by the Burton Property Trust, the family trust of the Baillie family of Dochfour, who acquired the Glenelg Estate from Lord Glenelg in 1837 with the proceeds of slavery compensation monies. Lord Glenelg in turn had acquired the lands from Macleod of Bernera who had been granted the lands around the 14th century (early chiefs were sometimes formally designated as Macleod of Glenelg).

On the Isle of Skye, the lands historically belonged to Lord Macdonald, Lord of the Isles. The lands would eventually be held by Crown charters with the most recent being that of 1727 when Sir Charles Macdonald was granted a charter restoring Jacobite-era forfeited estates.

Whether through inclusion in these charters by express terms or through the simple fact that the Macdonalds on the Skye side and Macleods on the Glenelg side owned the land, they came to be possessed of the ferry rights and were in possession of them when Boswell and Johnson made their famous visit to Skye in 1773 crossing the Kyle Rhea by ferry.

The ferry rights were then transmitted to successor owners over the intervening years. The Burton Property Trust transferred ownership of the ferry rights on the Glenelg side to the Isle of Skye Ferry CIC in 2025.

On the Skye side, the small estate of Kylerhea was sold by the Executors of Lord Macdonald following his death in 1970 as part of the vast sale of the Macdonald Estate (large parts of which were acquired by Sir Iain Noble and the Clan Donald Lands Trust).

In 1972, 225 acres in Kylerhea were sold to Reginald Godfrey Laurence Oliphant. A further 40 acres were sold to him in April 1975. Kylerhea Estate was then inherited by his son (now current owner) Richard Eric Laurence Oliphant in 1991.

Revealingly, in 1998, there was then a corrective disposition (1.9Mb pdf) specifically conveying the ferry rights as they had not been conveyed back in the 1970s. All of this is to confirm that Richard Oliphant is the owner of the Kylerhea Estate (see map below) and of the ferry rights, a heritable property right originally granted by the Crown to Lord Macdonald. [1]

RICHARD OLIPHANT

Speaking to a long time resident of Kylerhea, I was told that Reginald was a lovely man. On one occasion he had approached this resident and pointed out that he didn’t really have much room beside his croft house to park his car and would he like another quarter of an acre? Yes please, said the resident and Reginald conveyed it to him for £1.

Reginald did lament the fact that his two sons were “the bane of his life”.

When Richard inherited the estate, everything changed. Suddenly, he wanted every penny in income he could get. Locals describe him as a pompous buffoon and one reported that he was widely detested.

From the beginning of the Isle of Skye Ferry CIC, Oliphant has been charging a fee to allow the Company to use the ferry rights. Initially set at 2.5% of turnover, it is now 5% of the gross annual turnover and can never be less than any previous year’s fee regardless of the income of the Company. The potential for this to cause severe financial difficulties to the Company was the reason why it took the decision to speak to the media. In the latest accounts for the Company these liabilities are noted (see below).

Up until the community took over the ferry, Richard Oliphant had leased the slipway to Highland Council and the Council appeared to have looked after any costs. I was told that he previous operator, Roddy Macleod, had told Oliphant where to shove his claims for ferry fees.

To secure the necessary loans and other compliance, the Community Interest Company had to demonstrate that they had a right to ferry. The only way to secure this was to agree a lease with Richard Oliphant. They had no alternative. The lease grants the Isle of Skye Ferry CIC the Kylerhea slipway, the heritable but non-exclusive right to the landing rights at the slipway and the heritable but non-exclusive rights to the whole ferry rights to and from the pier.

Despite him doing nothing to support the business and having invested nothing in it, he secures an annual income in excess of £15,000 and rising in perpetuity for as long as the ferry continues to operate. He also secures free pedestrian and vehicular passage at any time for himself, his spouse and children and any guests at any time.

As the article in the National notes, he has refused the company permission to upgrade the run down shed and dilapidated telephone box at the top of the Kylerhea slip to provide a welcome notice, timetable, and opportunity for merchandise sales.

In short, Richard Oliphant is holding the Company to ransom.

I contacted him to ask for his response to the media reports and to ask him why he felt the obligation to skim off a percentage of the Company’s turnover in exchange for nothing. I asked him the following four questions.

1. What is your response to the attached media article?

2. Why do you insist on charging 5% of the gross turnover of the Skye Ferry Company for the right to exercise ferry rights and use the Kylerhea slipway?

3. In particular do you think it right, proper and moral to charge for the exercise of ferry rights which you paid nothing for?

4. The media article describes you as “super-rich” and a “millionaire” absentee landowner. From what I can gather you are neither. Can you confirm that this is indeed the case?

5. Are there any circumstances in which you would agree to convey the ferry rights and the slip to the Skye Ferry Company as has been done on the Glenelg side?

I asked him to respond within 24 hours and followed by by leaving a message on his mobile. I have received no response.

THE FUTURE

As noted above there are numerous issues with the Scots law of property that have not been addressed by land reform which, instead has focussed on land tenure reform (abolition of feudal, leasehold reform etc.) and providing rights to community bodies to acquire land. [2] Across Scotland, for example, there are examples of new lairds inheriting substantial estates and jacking rents up, demanding excessive payments for the right to take utilities and across ransom strips to a new housing sites (John Swinney should ask around the next time he visits Tiree about the activities of Argyll Estates), or demanding fees for access to the foreshore for seabed businesses that previously had taken such access for nominal or no fee.

Even as I put the finishing touches to this blog, another story reaches me of a community company deciding to wind up as it can no longer provide internet services due to the intransigence of a new local landowner who is refusing to enter into a new lease

The exercise of such monopoly power cannot be resolved only by expecting the community as a whole to take ownership (which in most case they never can anyway as the land is not for sale). Land reform should also be about promoting rural development and allowing individuals, households and businesses to go about their business without a monopoly laird demanding payment often for a right that they themselves (like Richard Oliphant) never paid for themselves.

It is a measure of how far we have to go to modernise land law that in 2026, it is lawful for privately owned ferry rights to be owned and exercised in such a way as to frustrate the financial viability of widely admired, valued and historic modes of transport such as the Glenelg to Kylerhea ferry crossing.

I don’t propose to publicise here the possible ways forward. I will be discussing these with the Company. Suffice to say, a strategy is required to ensure that Oliphant cannot continue to profit from the monopoly control of ferry rights and threaten the future of the Skye Ferry.

The historic and ancient rights that Oliphant is controlling may not in fact prove to be everything they appear to be. Hold on for a potentially rocky and bumpy ride testing the limits of the Crown right to ferry.

Finally, it is worth concluding by noting that Richard Oliphant is the Chief of the Clan Oliphant whose motto is Tout Pourvoir – Provide For All.

So far, he is providing for nobody but himself.

NOTES

[1] Oliphant’s title is recorded in the Land Register INV52798.

[2] It is with noting that I was a member of the very first Scottish Land Fund which, unlike the current one, was entirely independent of the Scottish Government. We approved funds to enable the community to acquire the ferry but it was conditional on the community as a whole agreeing to do so in a ballot which they failed to do by a margin of 60 to 39.

I felt strongly at the time that such funds should be available to a community company and social enterprise consisting those members of the community (and others) who DID want to proceed and should not have to rely on the whole residential community. I still feel this is a big weakness in land reform legislation giving people with no interest or who are hostile to community acquisitions an effective means of thwarting those who have the energy and drive to make it work.