…the blog and website of Andy Wightman
On 29 August 2025, the Clan Donald Lands Trust announced that it had received a “large number of offers” for the Clan Donald Estate that was put up for sale in August 2025 (see BBC report here). According to the
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In my previous blog highlighting the £25.2 million sale of Scatwell Estate to Strathconon Estates Ltd, I mentioned a third interesting feature of the sale. You were never meant to know about it. I have been meaning to write this
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As readers may be aware, I run the Who Owns Scotland project. It documents the ownership of over 76% of rural Scotland. The information is updated annually and where there is a change I often need to order a deed
Continue readingI have sent a final briefing on the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill to MSPs this morning. After a delay last week, the final session on Stage 3 amendments is taking place today (4 Nov) and the debate on whether to
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Guest Blog by April Cumming April is currently based in Melbourne and works for the Australasian Housing Institute supporting workers in the community and social housing sector. She worked for Malcolm Chisholm in Holyrood from 2011 – 2016. In 2026
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I am publishing this blog to provide a link to the Stage 3 Briefing I have prepared for MSPs in advance of consideration of Stage 3 of the Land Reform (Scotland) Bill. The debate on the 392 Stage 3 amendments
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As readers of Land Matters are aware, I take a close interest in the changing face of landownership and the issues that arise from it. Scotland’s land market has been in place for centuries and the underlying dynamics of who
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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
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In October 2024, I published a blog highlighting the sale of a 2539 hectare (ha) portfolio of 16 woodland properties across Scotland owned by a French investment fund, Woodland Invest, based in Paris. The largest single investor owning 25% of
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In extracts from Nicola Stugeon’s forthcoming memoir, Frankly, published in the Times newspaper, the former First Minister makes a remarkable claim about one of the most shameful episodes in the whole Sturgeon-Salmond drama. On 23 August 2018, the internal Scottish
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