A VERY IMPORTANT PRIVATE MEETING OF CROFTERS AT THE LAIRDS LODGE

The invite arrived some weeks ago. In capitals. Capitals are funny - and those I use below are those used in the briefing document sent prior to the meeting.

Capitals or no, the turn-out was poor - 15 out of 52 eligible to attend. Surprising, in that the meeting was about money. It was also about solidarity and common purpose and standing up for our rights and making sure we get a good fair deal. The aim of the meeting was to reach consensus so that we could encourage the Scottish Land Court to overturn precedents they had set in the past.

It was about the proposed Wind Farm and how to share a fund to be set up by the developer. As the law currently stands (according to precedent) the funds would be shared amongst Crofters by Reduced Souming rather than Shareholding, a system that discriminates against those who have taken their Shareholding as Apportionment and therefore have a reduced Souming.

In other words, under this system, those who have an Apportionment (and who, generally, have invested (Government grants) heavily in improving it), would lose out on a share of the pot of gold the Wind Farm is hoped to generate. Those who have no Apportionment would get a bigger share. The meeting was an attempt to get all Crofters to agree to division of the funds by Shareholding (and therefore those with Apportionment would get more than the reduced amount they would get if the division was by reduced Souming).

Mmmm - maybe the 15 was dominated by those with Apportionments, and the absent 37 don't? I don't know the answer - the individual driving the proposition last night has Apportionments but claims that under the system proposed he would lose out. There was a strong sense in the meeting that this was about being fair to all, honouring the spirit of a Four Party Agreement made in 2003 (before the troublesome Scottish Land Court Rulings). But I honestly can't say.

Ok - I know you are following me so far. It all gets a bit more complicated because apart from the Original Common Grazing, there was an Enlargement to the Common Grazing (in 1819 apparently), and then a further addition followed the disbanding of a local sheep club in the 1960s. So therefore a complication arises because of the different Shareholdings people have in the different Grazings. Indeed some Crofters have shares in some parts of the Grazing but not in others, and the Soumings attached to the Shareholdings differ in each Grazing. Furthermore, the location of the boundaries between these Grazings are uncertain. There is a map, but it was made a long time ago and no-one trusts it. There is a ditch and peat dyke that someones grandad showed him many years ago and has now disappeared, and there is the remains of a stone dyke which runs up from Ally's Pool but which is also now largely gone.

The Original Grazing has 252 and 7/8th shares. "The traditional registered area is 1196 hectares" (2,955 acres) - all local Crofters have a share. Each share has a Souming of 8 sheep.

The Enlargement carries 85 shares ("according to the current register"), and "traditionally" has an area of 635 hectares. Each share carries a Souming of 9 sheep. Some Crofters have shares in this area.

The 1960s extension carries 31 shares with each share carrying a Souming of "20 sheep plus 4 cows (ie 36 sheep). Does anyone know how big this is? Only some Crofters have shares in this extension.

A further complication arises because of mathematical anomolies exist on how the Scottish Land Court has ruled over Apportionments. At its simplest the Shareholding is Apportioned by Shareholding as a proportion of total shares and total land area. The anomoly is, if each Crofter had an equal Shareholding, each successive Crofter seeking Apportionment is entitled to Apportion a % reduction over what the previous Crofter was entitled to. For example, if there were 10 Crofters each having one share in a total Grazing of 1000 hectares, the first Crofter would get 100 hectares - ie 10% of the total. The second Crofter would only get 810 hectares though - this is because, after Apportionment, there are still considered to be ten Crofters sharing the Grazing, but the total area of the Grazing is considered to be 900 hectares. The last Crofter to Apportion in this scenario gets 38 hectares. Under this methodology, in some ways the Apportionment is considered Common Grazing, but in other ways it is not - in the same breath.

Apparently, our Grazings have not been Apportioned in this way, but equivalent (and more complicated) mathematical anomolies are present. In addition, in the case of Apportionments in our Common Grazings, irrespective of which Common Grazings on which an Apportionment was located; Souming reductions were applied to both Original and Extension Grazings. These Souming reductions did not folloow a mathematic formula although apparently this is reasonable as sheep are not mathematicians and "do not respect which grazing they heft on".

And all that is before you start to try to factor in the relative quality of the land Apportioned.

Fortunately, the Clerk of the Grazing Committee to whom responsibility for making sense of all this has been delegated (by the Grazing Committee of the 1960s Grazing extension) has particular 'expertise in the uncertainty of measurement', an expertise that extends to the 'complex mathematics of the Allocation of commingled hydrocarbons in shared Pipelines'. As you would expect he has lots of letters after his name, and quite a few in front to boot.

He would like to see an Allocation based entirely upon the size of Shareholding (ie number of shares) as any deviation would breach the ""Fair & Equitable" principle."

As stated in his briefing document: "The core issue is just what constitutes a Common Grazing." Are Apportionments technically a part of the Common Grazing? He goes on to argue that even though Apportionment extinguishes the Souming, it should not extinguish the Shareholding. The reasoning behind this strikes me as sound and basically boils down to the fact that even though a Crofter may have extinguished his Souming he is still responsible for his share of the costs of maintaining the rest of the Grazing, such as fencing etc.

I know you've followed this. But there is a flaw which appears to be being ignored and which stands up and shouts way before you start worrying about Apportionments. The Crofters are assuming that they should be sole beneficiaries of the Community Fund, that is because they have sole rights over the use of the Grazings and they will lose out over the Resumption of the Grazings. But in every other wind farm community fund I know about it is the whole community that benefits, not just the directly affected landowners and tenants.

And lordy me - that is going to be a much bigger fight. Oh yessirree.

Ooops - I forgot to describe the meeting - and the odd sounding remarks made about other people who weren't named and that I didn't understand but that sent ripples of quiet derision across the floor, and the somewhat indelicate remarks made by the legal representative about incomers, the northern divers question and oh so much more. And you may be interested in these but I don't believe you are still awake. And anyway I am not.