“The estate system does not belong in the new Scotland,” says the electrician. “We want the land used for the common good.” It is a clue from the future that at their first conference as a swollen party a Land Reform Bill presented by Nicola Sturgeon was rejected. The proposed legislation was intended not only to force sporting estates to pay business rates but to strengthen tenants’ rights, install a permanent land commission and give Holyrood the power to force sales to certain community buyouts. 

Party radicals now want land reform to go further: not only to make community buyouts impossible to resist, but to ban landowners leaving their estates to a single heir, breaking them up over time. They want punitive taxes to force sales. They may not couch it in these terms but they want Scotland to follow Ireland, where before independence more than half the country was owned mostly by absentees in estates of 3,000 acres or more. A meat-mincer called land reform has all but eliminated them.

To nationalist activists, this is a tempting crusade. With Scottish independence off the agenda for the next few years, and these little platoons hungry for the ruling party to set about doing radical, transformative stuff, the grouse moors and deer forests are sitting targets. The new campaign, “Our Land”, is growing in popularity.

“We now run Scotland and we will manage this land a different way.”

But you cannot talk land reform without talking history.

“That happened after the dark . . .”

I’m sorry, what?

“Oh, I meant the Act of Union.”

Without prompting, the SNP activists begin talking constitutional history. I am told how the Statute of Westminster in 1931 returned sovereignty to colonial subjects like Canada and Australia and should have been applied to Scotland. I am told that the United Kingdom is the remains of the British Empire and must be broken up to be fully democratised, above all to crush the landowners’ club that is the House of Lords. Again and again, the Clearances are alluded to.  

“You know what,” says the Christmas tree salesman. “I know these hills, I know them, these bare places, and when you drive around there’s nothing. Miles and miles of nothing. And when I went to England, it’s like this, bam, bam — village after village after village.” He pauses, and catches his breath. 

“When I’m up the hill, I can see it now — there’s a ruined croft, there’s another ruined croft, there’s the rubble of a village, there’s another. And that’s when I got it. That before the Clearances, we were not a wilderness, we were full of villages like England up here. I’m dreaming, really, that in the land reform it should say every little shieling [tiny hamlet] should be repopulated, with futuristic little villages with solar panels."