Opinion: You can’t love Skye without loving its crofters
© Adobe Stock “I didn’t move here for the people, I came for the place.” I was surprised by this statement from the pleasant lady I met on a dog walk.
A recent arrival, I’d asked her if she was enjoying local life in our crofting township – and this was her unexpectedly offensive response.
Shocking enough to me, as a naturalised incomer, her statement was deeply insulting to my Sgitheanach husband.
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As this lady seemed otherwise affable and apparently oblivious to her transgression, we gave her the benefit of the doubt and tried some soft re-education.
But discussing the interaction later with locals – native crofters – we all agreed that what she had said made no sense. Here, the people are the place.
Crofters built these townships, whether over many centuries or – as in my area – carving a community by hand out of a bracken-infested peninsula after the First World War.
These crofting townships thrived because everyone worked together, sharing the labour and benefiting from pragmatic co-operation. It’s a cliché, but no one locked their doors.
Everyone spoke the same language, viewed life through the same cultural lens. The township’s children were everyone’s responsibility.
My husband remembers wandering off the croft as a toddler, getting as far as the boundary of the next township before he was picked up by a relation and returned home.
It was no bother – in a hefted world where lives were co-dependent, there was little risk of harm.
There’s a local saying: “An tìr, an cànan, ’s na daoine” – “The land, the language, the people”. They combine with the same necessity as your head, neck and shoulders.
This saying was an early land reform slogan, so there’s some irony in the increasing number of people buying property in Skye’s crofting areas who are either uninterested in this core heritage, or actively opposed to it.
I know an estate manager who’s received correspondence from wealthy new residents complaining about traditional crofting.
Sheep and subsidies should be got rid of. The hill and inbye should be planted with trees. Croft land is barren, they say, and Gaelic is a hated waste of time and money.
Their ignorance is as astounding as their arrogance.
You can’t truly love Skye without loving the crofters who made and maintain this cultural landscape
Deliberately moving into a crofting township and refusing to engage respectfully with established local life – or worse, actively trying to remake it in their own egotistical self-image – is not just inexplicable, it’s immoral.
It is damaging our social fabric.
When native folk are priced out of housing and agricultural land, and replaced by those who think people and place are entirely unrelated, one of the last UK outposts of pastoral indigenous culture becomes ever more fragile.
And this matters, because so much that is good in our world is dependent on that culture – the open hill providing habitat for red-listed birds, the herbal pastures producing the country’s best red meat, the genuine concern for your neighbour’s wellbeing, the music and poetry that rise from the land like a clear burn pouring from the Cuillin mountains.
I understand why people want to move here, saying they’ve fallen in love. But it’s disastrous to love something because of what you think it should be, rather than for what it is.
And you can’t truly love Skye without loving the crofters who made and maintain this cultural landscape. One can’t exist without the other.