It's not the land, it's the people: deconstructing the cultural heritage of community land buyouts in the South of Scotland.

Today just 432 families own 50% of Scotland’s private rural land, which makes up 98% of Scotland’s total land area. Thus the welfare and prosperity of large swathes of Scotland’s rural communities, are left to the responsibility of a small number of private landowners, with little democratic accountability. The concept of ownership is therefore deeply connected to ideas about power and control, concepts inherent in the exercise of democracy. Until now, most studies of land ownership have been confined to a crofting dynamic, where community right-to-buy purchases have been driven by a grievance or harkening back to a time when land was owned by the community. This narrow inquiry into Highland history has prevented historians from establishing a broader view on the nature of rural identity in Scotland and presents a clear gap in the literature that needs addressing by forwarding the experience of communities in the South of Scotland, where this crofting or grievance dynamic is largely absent. Furthermore, the clear emphasis on top-down legislation and ownership-driven approaches in the current literature indicates the need for more studies grounded in the experiences of the communities affected by land reform themselves. That is what this paper intends to do by constructing an oral history of the cultural heritage of community land ownership in the South of Scotland.