A benefit from being around so long is that memory sometimes serves as a better research tool, even than Google, when it comes to history and lessons to be learned. I had that feeling on reading about plans by Clan Donald Lands Trust to flog off 20,000 acres of Skye for “offers over £6.75 million”.

In the early 1970s, I alighted on Skye with university friends to launch the West Highland Free Press. The Lord Macdonald of Sleat had recently died. One of the great panjandrums of Highland local government, lampooned by Compton Mackenzie as the Monarchs of the Glens, he had been careless about death duties and the Macdonalds were broke.

They put half the estate in Sleat up for sale and it had just been bought by an Edinburgh merchant banker, Iain Noble. He got 20,000 acres plus a nice hotel in Isle Ornsay for £120,000 – £1.4 million in today’s money. Crofting land was cheap because the rights of landlords were heavily constrained for as long as crofting regulation was enforced. There was very little market in crofting estates.

This led to a remarkable sub-plot, which Iain described to me the first time we met. There was so little demand for land in Skye that the lawyer handling the sale threw in a job-lot of title deeds just to get rid of them. As a result, Iain learned subsequently that he had acquired a range of assets without knowing it, some of which proved in time to be very significant.

He told me this story outside an old farm steading in Sleat which had been a particularly odd inclusion in the job-lot since it stood in the middle of the remaining Macdonald lands. What will you do with it, I asked. Iain replied: “I thought it might be rather fun to turn it into a Gaelic College”. And that was the genesis of Sabhal Mor Ostaig, now a much expanded seat of Gaelic learning.........

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