Hugh MacLeod Owns the Cuillin

In March 2000, the late John MacLeod announced that he intended to sell An Cuiltheann (the Cuillin). Savills were appointed as the selling agent and advertised the land at offers over £10 million.

There followed a public outcry. Some questioned how someone could own such mountains. Others railed at the exorbitant price tag.

And some of us wondered whether MacLeod owned the Cuillin in the first place.

MacLeod had been granted land in Bracadale in a Charter of 1611.

It described the lands as four unciates of land in Bracadale, an old form of land measurement that equated the the extent of land that would yield 4 ounces of silver in rent. Since the rocky wastes of the Cuillin had no economic value to any pastoralists, they were excluded from this Crown grant. An expert in such matters noted that this equated at the time to around 240 acres of arable land – enough to support around 240 cattle. [1]

This was consistent with the observations of Cosmo Innes who, in his Lectures in Scottish Legal Antiquities wrote,

Looking over our country, the land held in common was of vast extent. In truth, the arable – the cultivated land of Scotland, the land early appropriated and held by charter – is a narrow strip on the river bank or beside the sea. The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving. They were not thought of when charters were made and lands feudalised. Now as cultivation increased, the tendency in the agricultural mind was to occupy these wide commons, and our lawyers lent themselves to appropriate the poor man’s grazing to the neighbouring baron. They pointed to his charter with its clause of parts and pertinents, with its general clause of mosses and moors – clauses taken from the style book, not with any reference to the territory conveyed in that charter; and although the charter was hundreds of years old, and the lord had never possessed any of the common, when it cam to be divided, the lord got the whole that was allocated to the estate, and the poor cottar none. The poor had no lawyers.

Appropriately, this passage is the origin of the title of my book in which I devote a chapter to the Cuillin sale.

In response to public concern, the Scottish Office invited the Crown Estate Commission to investigate the validity of MacLeod’s title. Alan Menzies, the Crown Estate solicitor in Scotland drafted an advice memorandum in June 2000.

James Drummond Young QC then prepared an Opinion.

Both Menzies and Drummond Young concluded that, although it was unclear what extent of land had been granted to MacLeod in 1611, subsequent deeds conveying lands to successors were capable of including the Cuillin. MacLeod and his predecessors had thus fulfilled the key tests required to claim title through prescriptive possession.

John MacLeod never sold the Cuillin but in 2020, legal agents acting for his son, Hugh MacLeod (who had succeeded his father following his death in 2007) submitted an application for voluntary registration in the Land Register.

The application contained detailed plans of the land to be registered.

The application has now been processed and the Keeper has decided that Hugh MacLeod has a good title to the Cuillin. She has registered its ownership under title INV54866 with the lands around Dunvegan registered under title INV47843.

Simplified maps are published below and show, in addition to the Cuillin, ownership of extensive foreshore to the west of Glen Brittle, around the island os Soay as well as to the north of Dunvegan.

Thus, after much debate and rummaging around in the MacLeod muniments, it can finally be stated that Hugh MacLeod owns the Cuillin.

NOTES

[1] his observations are buried in my boxes of files on the topic and I cannot locate them.