Beside one loch, a hind’s neat skeleton,
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather
Two things already dead and still to die.

I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue, or the spitting grey,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.

Time adds one malice to another one –
Now you’d look very close before you knew
If it’s the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.

‘So Many Summers’ by Norman MacCaig

Although he was born in Edinburgh and worked there as a schoolteacher, the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig will always be closely associated with the wilderness region of Assynt in the Western Sutherland region of the Scottish Highlands. It is here he spent every summer since 1947 living in simple cottages, first at Achmelvich, then at Inverkirkaig, north-west and south-west respectively of the small township of Lochinver. A great deal of his poetry was written here, reflecting his deep attachment to this sparsely populated region famous for its row of idiosyncratically shaped mountains, Suilven, Stac Pollaidh, Canisp, to name a few, made up of some the oldest rocks on Earth which, due to continental drift, have travelled all the way from the South Pole.

Indeed, it was study of the geology of Assynt that led to the theory of plate tectonics. The first attempt at deciphering Assynt’s rock formations was made by James Nicol, Professor of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen. His 1861 paper 'On the Structure of the North-Western Highlands' proposed an Earth far older than assumed and, in an era of wide belief in scriptural truth, was widely ridiculed. Thirty-six years later, however, Ben Peach and John Horne of the British Geological Survey largely confirmed Nicol’s ideas, demonstrating that the geology of Assynt was not continuous but riven by thrusts, faults and intrusions with Pre-Cambrian rocks atop Cambrian rocks, something that could only have taken place over an interminably long time-frame. This was the first comprehensive demonstration of plate tectonics and, along with Darwin's still relatively fresh notion of evolution by natural selection, served to drive yet another nail in the coffin of the doctrine that the Earth was the product of an abrupt creation, no more than a few thousand years ago. A monument to the work of Peach and Horne was erected at Inchnadamph, Assynt in 1980.

Norman MacCaig had no particular interest in geology though. He saw his task as having “to woo the mountain, till I know the meaning of the meaning, no less”. Scattered among Assynt’s mountains are the hundreds of lochs and small lochans considered by many to offer the finest wild brown trout fishing in Europe. Most of these small bodies of water are accessible only to those with a robust cardiovascular system (which unfortunately MacCaig did not have in his later years) with visits often requiring an hour or so walking across peat bog, or perhaps a couple of hours of hill walking and scrambling. It was in these desolate places that MacCaig would spend hour upon hour, day upon day, fly-fishing in that unique ambience of silence interspersed only by the calls of moorland birds and the soft slap-slap of the water at the loch’s edge. One only has to read the in-the-moment, Zen-like mood of much of MacCaig’s Assynt poetry to damn forever the lie that atheists can never possess any real meaning for their lives.

And so despite how much he loved the sport of fishing – he considered his honorary life membership of the Assynt Angling Association to be the highest honour he ever achieved, and he achieved many - it was really his excuse for simply ‘being here’, “If you can’t enjoy fishing all day and catching nothing, you are no fisherman”. Or as the mountaineer and fellow fly-fisher Mal Duff once put it, “........it’s about the right kind of waiting”. Fishing as meditation.

In Assynt MacCaig wrote not of lofty and learned subjects such as politics (with the possible exception of ‘A Man in Assynt’) or philosophy, but of things elemental; the rotting carcass of a deer, or an abandoned dinghy, the comings and goings in the village shop, dogs, frogs (lots of poems about frogs): “he loved everything that accepted the unfailing hospitality of his five senses” as one old friend remarked. And the elemental things are just what they are. There is practically no metaphor in these writings.

Nevertheless, MacCaig would have been keenly aware that others did not appreciate Assynt in the same poetic way as he. For centuries Assynt had been owned in feudal fashion by wealthy absentee landlords who used the region for indulging their pastimes of trout and salmon fishing, grouse and deer shooting with scant regard for the lifestyle or welfare of the crofters (tenant farmers) who had lived there for generations. Worse, in many cases it was the taxpayer who subsidised these playgrounds for the rich as Highland estates invariably make a loss which can then be used to reduce the tax burden resulting from the profits accruing from other business interests. Similarly, corporate away-days, spent shooting and hunting, are also tax-deductible. Estates are also eligible for a number of farm subsidies and grants, again provided by the taxpayer.

In 1913, however, attitudes toward the crofters looked like they might take a turn for the better when William Stewart, who was himself born to a penniless crofting family in the Assynt village of Nedd in the early 1860s, purchased the 24,000 hectare Assynt estate from the Duke of Sutherland, followed a few moths later by a neighbouring parcel of land known as Edrachilles. Emigrating to Canada in 1882 with savings of only 10 shillings and starting his new life as a farm labourer then a surveyor, Stewart had gone on to make a fortune working as a railroad engineer in British Columbia, Canada becoming a partner in Foley, Welch and Stewart, then the largest North American railway contracting firm who had built much of the Grand Trunk Pacific, the Pacific Great Eastern and the Canadian Northern Lines. He was also a partner in Bloedel, Stewart and Welch, then one of the largest logging companies in the world.

Throughout his time in Canada, Stewart had maintained the tenancy of his croft at Nedd, which was farmed by his nephew, Donald MacCauley. One of his two sisters also resided all her life in Assynt, in the village of Drumbeg. Although he was well-liked and fondly remembered as 'JW' or 'the General', Stewart’s philanthropic vision for Assynt never came fully to fruition. His plans were waylaid by the First World War, when he gave financial assistance to the 72nd Battalion Seaforth Highlanders of Canada and served himself by constructing railways behind the trenches and in Palestine. On the outbreak of war he had this to say to a Vancouver newspaper:

“Rather than my country should be beaten in this great war, I will go back again to day labour and small wages where I began and there are thousands of wealthy Scotsmen in all parts of the world who would do the same.”

In 1935, Stewart’s wife died, he himself was in failing health, and so Assynt was again put up for sale. Stewart himself died in September 1938 and in a tragic turn of events his daughter and grandson were killed a month later in a car accident on the Glanville Street Bridge in Vancouver. Ironically, Stewart had surveyed the site of that same bridge three years after arriving in Canada.

Two bidders emerged, the Vestey family who had large landholdings in Argentina and Australia, used for rearing beef, and William Filmer-Sankey whose father-in-law was the anti-Semitic Nazi-sympathising Duke of Westminster who owned the Kylestrome Estate which bordered Assynt to the north. The Duke of Westminster, one of the richest men in the world, had a reputation as a playboy and bon-vivant. He had a 10-year adulterous relationship with the similarly anti-Semitic French fashion designer Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel to whom he gifted extravagant jewels, expensive artworks, and a home in the Mayfair district of London. He also gave her, in 1927, a parcel of land in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, Monte Carlo where she later built her villa. Earlier, the Duke had served under Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in the First World War. To perform his duties he equipped himself with a Rolls-Royce fitted with a Hotchkiss machine-gun. After the war he had a naval destroyer converted into a steam yacht. The contrast in attitude between the Duke of Westminster and J W Stewart when serving their country was surely not lost on the families of the men from the crofts who laid down their lives for King and country.

There exists a popular story that the Duke of Westminster intended to buy the estate as a wedding gift for his daughter and son-in-law but as they had already been married for eleven years and had two children it appears to have been a peculiarly belated wedding gift and therefore untrue. Although Filmer-Sankey won the bid, he soon after split the estate down the centre of Loch Assynt, selling Glencanisp Estate & Lodge  to the Vestey family. After divorcing his wife, Ursula, in 1940 and remaining unmarried for two decades, 60-year old William married a 19-year old German woman, Waltraud Wirsching, known as 'Traudel'. They had three children within six years, and both died in Assynt, he in 1985 and she in 2005.

It would be no exaggeration to say that the Vestey family proved to be deeply unpopular with the inhabitants of Assynt for the next almost 60 years. To put it bluntly, they treated Assynt as if it were an overseas colony and the inhabitants as if they were natives. As one crofter put it:

“They'd been used to dealing with native Argentineans and Australian Aboriginals, and they were amazed that the local people here wouldn't do what they were told”.

So in Australia too, the Vestey family have a terrible reputation, not only for their attitude to land ownership but for their attitude to the people who live on that land. In 1914 the Vestey family business acquired the lease of 93,000 square kilometres in the Northern Territory and East Kimberly district of Western Australia for beef-rearing at an incredibly low rent, so low that in 1980 their rent on the 16,000 square kilometre Wave Hill station, 600 kilometres south of Darwin in the Northern Territory, was was only £1,650 per annum. The vast majority of the workers on these cattle stations were aboriginal stockmen from the local tribal communities. Initially they were paid no wages, receiving only food and lodging. Later, when aboriginal workers were paid, they received only 20% of the wage given to white stockmen.

In 1946, the Vestey cattle stations found themselves running short of labour. Concerned, they commissioned a report from the anthropology department of Sydney University. The report was scathing. The aboriginal workers were found to be living in shacks made from scrap iron and sacking. There was no provision for either a regular supply of clean water, proper sanitation or rubbish disposal. Rations were limited to flour, tea, sugar and bits of beef like the head or feet of a bullock. Their working hours were at the discretion of the station manager and child labour was widely used.

Not surprisingly, in 1966 the Aboriginal Lands Rights Movement began on land owned by the Vestey family when, on August 23rd, Vincent Lingiari led 200 members of his Gurindji tribe off the Wave Hill cattle station. They walked to the Victoria River and set up camp where they stayed until the end of the year. The Gurindji plan was to set up a co-operative venture to catch and break in wild horses and to contract their services to the Vesteys for cattle mustering, fencing, branding and other station work. Legally, however, although it was their traditional tribal land, the Gurindji were squatting on Vestey owned land and risked being thrown off the land of their ancestors. Before that could happen, however, the national media ran the story and the Gurindji people received widespread support from a range of organised groups including trade unions, student unions and several church groups.

The strike lasted for nine years and proved very costly for the Vestey family who had to ship in non-aboriginal workers who were entitled to receive proper rates of pay. It culminated in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. This act gave the Gurindji and other indigenous Australians freehold title to their traditional lands in the Northern Territory with rights over mining, agricultural and other forms of development. Vincent Lingiari was awarded the Order of Australia and had a federal electoral district named after him. He died in 1984.

Although the Vestey family had considerably less power in Assynt than the Northern Territory of Australia, consider the similarities in the local perception of their attitude, as described by John MacKenzie of the Assynt Crofters Trust in the mid 1990s:

"Peter Hay [the Estate Manager] was from Ayrshire. He was ex-Army, and he was a game warden in the national parks of Kenya before he came to Assynt. He treated the people here as he would have done the natives in Africa. It was utterly unacceptable. He was a blustering, bombastic individual with a loud voice. His booming voice and his southern accent would engulf a shop when he entered it. People despised him.''

And further, speaking of Edmund (Lord) Vestey:

“His attitude to the place is to keep it as it is. He wants to come up here for a month in August and enjoy it as it is. He might come to the summer games occasionally. But he has no involvement whatsoever in the community. Except for resisting development.''

Lest it may be said that people who make statements such as these are simply envious of the Vestey family’s enormous wealth, consider the patronising tone of this statement from Edmund Vestey in 1993:

“Who was it said, the day central heating comes to the Highlands, that’s the end of the Highlander? They’re that sort of people.”

The sort of people Edmund Vestey represented, on the other hand, can be summarised in merely two words: 'tax-dodgers'. In 1980 it emerged that, by shifting money to overseas accounts, the Vestey family had not paid a penny in UK tax for at least 60 years. Unrepentant in the least, Vestey even had the audacity to claim that by not paying tax, his family were actually doing the country a favour:

"We have certainly kept to the letter of the law. Let's face it, nobody pays more tax than they have to. We're all tax dodgers, aren't we?...........I believe that it has been to the benefit of this country."

According to the Fraser of Allander Institute's 2010 report 'An Economic Study of Grouse Moors' highland estates supported 260 permanent positions (less than 3 per estate) and 445 casual jobs, with a total wage bill of £9.7 million (averaging £13,750 per person; compared to the then Scottish average of over £19,000) and contributed a mere £15.6 million to the Scottish economy. In comparison, another traditional highland industry, that of whisky, employed 35,000 people and contributed £4 billion annually to the Scottish economy as well as managing £10 billion worth of exports. They also paid their taxes.

Preventing the local community from having any say in the development of their own community, however, was the most common complaint made about the Vestey family. Examples include refusing the building of a swimming pool in Lochinver, despite the innovative idea of it being heated by the waste heat given off by the ice plant at the fishing harbour; preventing the Highland Council from developing a site for small businesses; preventing the building of any social housing that could be seen from any property that might be owned by or used by the Vestey family; preventing the building of a new tourist centre in Lochinver; the list goes on and on.

Perhaps the worst example of the Vestey’s as unscrupulous landlords, however, involved the case of the cottars. A cottar was a homeless person who had built a house on estate land by their own hand and then lived in it. Under the crofting laws cottars have the right to buy the deeds to their house from the estate and so bequeath it upon their death. If, however, they decide to enter into a formal tenancy agreement with the estate owner, this right of inheritancy is lost. The estate, in effect, then acquires the house for free. The Assynt Estate, through their Estate Manager, were found to have targeted a number of elderly cottars and convinced them into signing formal tenancy agreements. The Vestey stranglehold over the local housing market was made worse by the number of homes that were not (and are still not) available for use by the local people. The North West Demographic Survey of 1989 found that 31% of all the housing stock in Assynt was available only as a short-term holiday let. In some areas this was as high as 50%. Such a situation has dire consequences for local people by reducing the available housing stock to rent or buy, and having the further effect of driving up prices.

In 1989 the Vestey family portioned off the coastal crofting strip comprised of 13 villages into three lots (Torbreck, Drumbeg and Stoer) totalling 9,000 hectares and renamed it the North Lochinver Estate. Only 20 hectares of this newly fashioned estate was not used as crofting land. Nevertheless it was advertised as a traditional Highland ‘sporting’ estate for salmon fishing, grouse shooting and deer hunting with little mention made of crofting. The description of the estate in the brochure prepared by the agents John Clegg & Company of Edinburgh was particularly distasteful to the crofting community:

“One need only enter Assynt to see the great sphinx-like mass of Suilven to sense the atmosphere of unreality, almost fantasy, which permeates even the character of the people who live there. Mountains such as Quinag, Canisp, Ben More Assynt, Cul Mor, Cul Beag, Stack Polly and Conival all have the immense power to impress, and all serve to emphasise that man himself is perhaps the alien element in this landscape.”