Lochinver Village Hall. Wednesday evening. It had been a lovely day – warm and still. By evening a band of rain seeped in from the West. A rough night to be out. Still…people came. The show went on.
Assynt is one of my favourite areas in Scotland. A magnificent, sculpted and tragic landscape. Striking prominences of quartzite-topped Torridonian sandstone rise from the bedrock of Lewisian gneiss. Nunatuks which resisted the glaciation of the last ice age. At the Proterozoic Unconformity on Suilven, 1 billion year old sandstone lies directly on 2.5 billion year old gneiss. The intervening 1.5 billion years has been erased.
The area we now call Assynt was acquired by the Duke of Sutherland in 1757 and remained in his family until 1893. Starting around 1812 the Sutherland factors began to clear the indigeneous inland population of Assynt onto coastal crofts to make way for more profitable sheep ranches. Less than 70 years later, the sheep ranching tenants were cleared from the land and the area redesignated a ‘shooting estate’, providing recreational hunting and fishing for the super-rich of the Belle Epoque.
In 1936, Assynt was bought by the Vestey family – global agribusiness oligarchs – once again as a shooting estate and plutocratic fiefdom.
From the 1890s, the family of butchers made their fortune from owning cold stores across the UK, Russia, the Baltics, and Western Europe and supplying meat, poultry, eggs and fish. They ran a huge egg processing enterprise in China, using their own fleet of Blue Star Line refrigerated vessels to supply egg mix to the bakery trades in Europe and the USA until the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Their income from meat production, processing and distribution came mainly from South America. In the 20th century, they owned household brands such as Oxo, Fray Bentos and Dewhurst Butchers.
The Vestey family was reputed to be the richest in the UK after the British Royal Family during the 1930s. [1]
Their first international expansion was into China, in the early 20th century. In 1911, the Vestey brothers expanded into meat production, processing and distribution, with pastoral properties as well as meat-works in Venezuela, Australia and Brazil, and meat-works in New Zealand and Argentina. In the UK, they bought market stalls on the Smithfield Market in London, and butcher shops throughout the UK.
In 1912 they purchased the Ord River cattle station in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia from investor Sam Copley. In 1914, they established the North Australia Meat Company in Darwin, Northern Territory in Australia. In the same year, they bought the 3,000 km2 Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory of Australia.
In 1915, after being refused a request for income tax exemption, the brothers moved to Buenos Aires to avoid paying income tax in the UK. The family later administered the business through a Paris trust that enabled it to legally avoid an estimated total of £88m in UK tax until the loophole was closed in 1991.
In 1924, Vesteys bought the Liebig Extract of Meat Company in Uruguay and created Frigorífico Anglo del Uruguay which marketed Fray Bentos meat extract spread.
Vestey Brothers was the largest privately owned multinational company and the largest retailer of meat in the world in the 1980s.[2]
In 1993, the Assynt community began a slow process of recovery of the land, commencing with the purchase of the North Assynt Estate by the Assynt Crofters Association, followed by a community buy out of the Culag woods and finally the area South of Lochinver in 2005 by the Assynt Foundation.
Lochinver itself has been a fishing port for over a century and, during the late 2000s recorded the biggest fish-landings in Scotland after Peterhead – often from Spanish and French boats which transferred their catches (Vestey like) to refrigerated trucks for export to Europe.
Increasingly tourism is a mainstay of the local economy, much of it driven (excuse the pun) by the NC500 . The North Coast 500 was launched in March 2015 by the Tourism Project Board of the North Highland Initiative in an attempt to bring unified benefits to tourist businesses across the route. A survey commissioned by HIE suggested that the NC500 led to 29,000 more people visiting [towns along its route] in its first year. These visitors “collectively spent £9 million.”
The increase in traffic led to problems on local roads[…] Journey times for locals are up to three times longer during the peak driving season than at quieter times. During 2016 – the first full year of its operation – the number of deaths and serious accidents on the main roads forming the route increased by 45% compared with 2014. [3]
It was great to perform Pibroch in such a special and portentious place. After the show, as always, some of the audience joined me to discuss Climate Justice.
Here are some of the things I heard about Climate Justice in Lochinver.
I heard that 30,000 overseas tourists visit the Highlands of Scotland every year and spend £21,000,000 in the local economy.[4]
I heard that fish landings in Lochinver declined by 45% between 2017 and 2021.[7]
I heard that the Coigach Community Trust have set up a Wind Turbine. March 2017 this turbine is owned and operated by the community for the benefit of the community generating clean power from a resource [the area has] in abundance.
I heard that the long range energy transmission architecture, design and built around fossil fuel generation, is inadequate to accommodate the amount of renewable energy currently being generated in the North of Scotland and will not accommodate future capacity.
I heard that “the main impact of [the community] becoming Scotland’s 17th biggest landowner is that we have established thousands of hectares of new native woodland and set up a community-owned tree nursery, repaired damaged peatlands, built all-ability paths, a nature trail, and totally re-built the path up Suilven, training lots of local people in rural skills and creating a load of land-based employment in the process. We manage large tracts of land in ways that are both environmentally and socially far more responsible than the previous landowners ever did.”
I heard that in 2019, 2,448,000 British visitors spend time in the Highlands each year and bring about £575,000,000 Into the local economy.[5]
I heard that we subject to the tyranny of growth. So long as financial markets – including pension funds – need high levels of growth to support short term profits we cannot control climate change.
I heard that the shift from subsistence communities to large scale regional trade, increasing demand above the bearing capacity of specific regions, was the beginning of the process.
I heard there has been and remains insufficient scientific research into energy storage and green science generally.
I heard someone say that there were too many people: that we have to accept and address the issue of over-population.
I heard about the sanctity of provenance. That objects are sacred – precious – when we know personally who made them and how.
I heard that humans are the greedy species.
I heard someone say that the assertion that there were too many people was only an opinion – that it was a rather grand statement and somewhat sinister.
I heard that tourism accounts for around 5% of Scotland’s total Gross Domestic Product.[6]
I heard that some people regard areas like Assynt as scenic national assets and their future cannot be left in the hands of local communities who might perceive they have different interests.
I heard that Scottish windfarms are paid to shut down at periods of peak supply (or premiums wholesale pricers) in order in order to keep their energy out of the grid not to glut the market. Meanwhile, the transmission capacity is filled with fossil electricity generated farther South.
I heard someone say that improving technology and increasing production will meet demand
I heard that there is fuel poverty amidst the extractivist energy industry, just as there is in Shetland.
I heard that installation of microhyrdo capacities and batteries can be cheaper than buying from the grid
I heard that we can only do what we can do as individuals.
I heard that the energy from windfarms (and tidal arrays) in the North of Scotland is channelled into the grid at Dounreay and transmitted South bringing no benefit to communities in the Highlands.
I heard that the Assynt Crofters Association are highly dependent on the micro-hydro scheme for their financial stability.
I heard that the woods on Ardroe burned because the world was dry. In moister times, the initial ignition – however it was caused – would not have spread so fast or so far, would not have affected so many lives.
I heard that the grid needs a 30% baseload which cannot come from renewables because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun does shine all the time.
“I heard that historically the woods on ardroe “were too moist to burn, but as the traditional dry spell in May seems to have shifted earlier – this year we had four weeks with only two days of rain from late March – it happens before the leaves are out so there is no shade for the understory, so the woods are dryer in spring than ever before. When the fire broke out it burned right through the woods in Ardroe, even burning the mosses off the boulders and up the bark of trees. The ecosystem is usually damp all year round so there are many species in there that have not evolved to be fire-tolerant. “
I heard that technology only improves
I heard that there is always the human factor in any system.
I heard that no-one wants to lower their standard of living.
[1] Glencanisp Lodge | Assynt Foundation
[2] Vestey Holdings – Wikipedia
[3] North Coast 500 – Wikipedia
[4] Leisure and tourism – Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)
[5] Highlands – Tourism Statistics & Visitor Numbers | VisitScotland.org
