AND ANOTHER THING
Fish-, water- and wind-power for lairds worth their feathers
PAUL JOHNSON
The Highland area of Scotland forms a large proportion of the total land surface of the British Isles but there is really nothing there except beauty and wildness. That, of course, is why I love it so much and go there whenever I can. I was roaming around it last week, drenched to the skin for much of the time and clocking up, at a rough calculation, a total of 68 miles in five days' hard walking (the number of feet climbed is too difficult to compute). For me, that is what the Highlands are for: a huge pleasure-garden, a gigantic play-pen, with all the illusion of nature untamed but in reality with a high degree of safety.
If you own chunks of this wonderland, however, there is a problem. Some of the chunks are considerable: Highland estates often encompass hundreds of thousands of acres. One of the Dukes of Argyll, in the days when they were princes in south-west Scotland, used to murmur about his king- dom: 'The amount there is of it. The little there is to it.' His tone was pessimistic, almost despairing. Up to the first half of the 19th century, when these domains were inhabited by thousands of clansmen practis- ing subsistence agriculture, a system of bas- tard-feudalism worked after a fashion, and the lairds built castles, held high revel and dispensed hospitality on incomes which many English squires would have sneered at. Then the crofters were largely 'cleared' into the emigrant boats, to make way for sheep, cattle and red deer. The Highland pasture-and-sporting estate lasted a century or so, and it too worked after a fashion, though it absorbed increasing sums of cash derived from industry and town rents in the south.
That age, too, is ending, as subsidies for agricultural products taper off and the laws of the market apply. There is little or no money in forestry. Sheep pay if you crowd the poor brutes enough, and specialised herds may make money or at least win Prizes at shows. But today Highland cattle are bred largely for zoos and most tradi- tional forms of laird agriculture can only be run at a loss. Even first-class sporting estates are hard to rent at a profit and that is the reason why they come on the market once on average every four years, or so I am told. Lairds have long racked their often far from capacious brains to discover ways of gouging a few honest pennies out of vast tracts of hillside and glen. Could not the bracken, somehow, be turned into cash — or the heather? A.J. Balfour, the Tory premier, who inherited a big Scots estate, lost his fortune trying to transform peat into liquid fuel. Over the decades many similar schemes have come to grief or been abandoned for lack of capital.
Now at last the tide may be turning, thanks to advanced technology. I am glad that I have been able to witness this moment of history at close quarters. My friend with whom I tramp the hills has been among the most adventurous in trying to marry modern science to the natural resources of his estate, and has often been criticised for his audacity. First came fish- farming. Salmon fishing in the great High- land rivers has long been commercialised but there is little money in it now, especial- ly where the rivers have been harnessed for hydro-electricity, and the runs ruined. But salmon can be bred and farmed with suc- cess, and, despite intense international competition, a large Highland estate is well suited to the task, being big enough to effect the essential economies of scale and justify the technical back-up, yet sufficiently small to ensure the personal supervision without which salmon-farming does not work.
Critics, who love to go for the lairds, have been vocal. Not long ago I saw a mis- leading television documentary which asserted that fish-farms bred new diseases, transmitted by escaped domesticated fish to the wild breed. The truth, as I know well, is that farming now pays the wages of scores of marine biologists whose research- es, for the first time, are unveiling the mys- teries of fish pathology. A new science is coming into being from which all fish, and those who live by them, will benefit. Nor is there much substance in the claim aired at this month's North Atlantic Salmon meet- ing in Edinburgh, that escaped farmed salmon, interbreeding with wild ones, are 'It seems to be "retreat".' threatening what is pretentiously called the `genetic integrity' of 'natural' fish. Ulti- mately, all breeds of salmon will be improved as a result of farming, just like sheep, cattle and poultry. Even more important, just as chicken, still a luxury even when I was a boy, has been brought within the daily reach of all, so this magnifi- cent fish, which can be prepared for eating in so many mouth-watering ways, will soon be enjoyed by multitudes all the year round. My friend is rightly proud of the social function of his farm, as well as the fact that it has created highly paid jobs for 40 people, a lot in the Highlands.
More recently, he has invested heavily in bottling his estate spring water, among the purest and most delicious in the world. This involved building, at a cost of £7 million, a glittering new production-line. Watching it work full-tilt, operated by young Highland men and women who, until now, had no future for their skills and intelligence but the bare, harsh land, is an uplifting experi- ence. One young fellow I know of, who hitherto had failed to hold a regular job, is now the master of one of the most complex electronic control systems on earth, and loving every minute of it — for the first time he has a task to stretch his talents. Here are another 35 or so good jobs, with more to come as the supermarket chains take this fine water to the mass markets.
The next task my friend has set himself is to harness the wind, of which the Highlands has a limitless supply, to judge by the tem- pests which battered us as we trudged the hills last week. Wind-power is the safest, least pollutant and in the long run will be one of the cheapest methods of producing energy. I recently saw a wind-farm in Den- mark which makes a regular profit, thanks to the massive power of the new propeller mills, whose main gear-boxes alone weigh four tonnes each. They need not be ugly either, even in dense ranks; in America, big farms, with thousands of mills, are now the fifth-largest tourist attraction. My friend showed me a site in an exposed upland where a wind-farm may operate profitably without damaging the skyline. So cost stud- ies are under way. In time, then, he hopes to bring into the service of its people and of the rest of us, too — all three of the great elementals of Highland life: wind, water and fish, using all the bountiful resources of modern invention. That is a noble aim for any laird worth his feathers.
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