From Issue Seven of Hidden Scotland Magazine
People Power
An island, a pub, a cinema and a wood, all owned by their communities.
Words by Lucy Gillmore · Photographs by Jack Cairney
Printed in Issue Seven of Hidden Scotland Magazine, Autumn and Winter 2023–24.
What do the Hebridean island of Eigg, the mainland’s most remote pub, an Art Deco picture house, a patch of woodland above Loch Ness and the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve down in Dumfriesshire have in common? They are all community owned - and examples of what can be done when people pull together.
It’s an 18-mile hike across rough, unforgiving moorland, a two-day trudge broken by a night in a bare-bones bothy, or a choppy seven-mile sea crossing from Mallaig to get to the Knoydart peninsula. There’s no road in and, when you’re knee-deep in mud and midges in the country’s ‘last wilderness,’ what spurs you on? The pub: shining like an amber beer-bright beacon in the distance. If you live in this cut-off coastal community, the village pub is even more of a lifeline. So what happens when someone threatens to close it?
Anyone who knows the history of Knoydart will realise that was never going to happen - not if the 110-strong community had anything to do with it.
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