In Conversation with Jim Hunter

The first CLAN (Community Land Academic Network) conference took place at UHI in Perth on 16-17 June 2026. The lead organiser was Dr Bobby Macaulay from UHI Centre for Mountain Studies and co-ordinator of the CLAN network of researchers. You can read a summary from Bobby here.

I was delighted to participate as a panellist together with Professor Chris Whatley, Professor Annie Tindley and Dr Ryan Dziadowiec exploring the history of community landownership.

The concept dates back to pre-feudal times and emerged as parish commons and common good land in the 13th and 14th centuries before being re-imagined by the Chartists, Highland Land League and others in the 19th century. The development of modern community landownership dates back to the acquisition of the parish of Stornoway by the Stornoway Trust in 1923 and the more recent acquisition so the 1990s in Eigg, Assynt, Knoyart and Gigha and the expansion that took place in the early 2000s in places such as North Harris, Galson, Melness and Langholm.

I presented a poster on Common Good Land – 500 years of community landownership which you can download here (523kb reduced jpeg) or here as AO pdf (5.1Mb).

The highlight for me, however was an In Conversation event with the eminent historian, Jim Hunter whose work on Highland history and active role in public life is well documented. Just the previous week, UHI’s Centre for History held a two day conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jim’s seminal PhD thesis, the Making of the Crofting Community.

It was a pleasure to explore how Jim’s interest in history emerged and his perspectives on land reform in Scotland both before the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and since. Jim has documented the contemporary development of community landownership in Scotland in his book, From the Low Tide of the Sea to the Highest Mountain Tops, published in 2012 by the Islands Book Trust.

You can watch or listen to the whole event in the video above.

Enjoy.