There is drizzle on the windscreen as we drive into the Cairngorms.  My guide is an activist from the SNP, whom I’ll call Alex. “Don’t quote my real name, or put my job,” he pleads. “When you live in the country lots of your work depends on these lairds.  It’s not just me, but the builders, the joiners, the electricians and gamekeepers. They’re all SNP. They all want land reform. But they keep it quiet. You can’t fall out with the laird — that’s your job gone.” 

Alex keeps talking as the road turns into Forestry Commission firs, miles of identical green clones. He pulls up, crunching over gravel at a cow-gate. His hair is thinning, his eyes are blue, and at the nadir of his career he managed a local authority team of lawn mowers. Above all, he hates Tony Blair and thanks the SNP for turning him into someone who reads books.

“When you’re a working-class Scot,” he sighs, “you always get this feeling when you go into the land. That you don’t belong there. That it’s not yours. Oh, I can’t go here. I can’t go there. I shouldn’t be fishing here. I shouldn’t be walking there. Maybe I should hurry up and leave now. Maybe I’m disturbing him. Maybe the laird’s guys are coming and they’re going to shout at me.”

We drive on, into the glens. But we are 40 years too late for the countryside. The villages are gone. One, after another, in whitewash, all shuttered up. “That’s a holiday home, that’s a holiday home, that’s a holiday home, that’s stayed in, that’s a holiday home, that’s just been sold to be a holiday home.” The acquirers, for the most part, are English.

The lane curls and curls, but this is not the Highlands that used to be printed on the biscuit tins. There are still farms, but they are light-industrial zones, and ever more of them are manned through the harvest by seasonal Romanians and Poles. As we pick up speed, I begin to notice things: how the blackberries grandmothers used to pick for cakes, and the sloes, are rotting on the bushes.

“We can’t afford to live here any more, all these holiday homes have pushed the prices up to like half a million pounds for one of these cottages and they’ve killed ’em off, all the shops.”

This means the Highlands look open, immense, but actually for the people here the little slivers where they really live are cramped and narrow. You can’t build here, that’s an estate. You can’t build there, that belongs to the laird. Year by year, ever more lights in these cottages are turned off, taking the prices for them higher and higher, pulled up by money from Edinburgh, Glasgow and London. It is hard to live here. Wages are a third below the Scottish average, but prices come out a third higher.

Where the road passes a ruined Hanoverian fort, we pull up for a chat to the builders. They hear my English voice: “Are you here to buy?” An old cottage is coming on the market. But even the old foreman is not from here. Neither is Alex: he was born in Glasgow. “There’s not a single person in this glen who’s from here. They’re all gone. We don’t know where they went. The people here, they’re almost all retirees — English folk, Glasgow folk, Edinburgh folk.”

The old fort looms behind us. “That’s where the redcoats were — we were like Ireland then.”