The stalker points down to Loch Rannoch. Most of the landlords here are now foreigners: Belgians, Swedes, Dutch, Germans. Further afield are Danes, French, Arabs. “The worst thing that could happen,” he says, “would be the politicians in Edinburgh to destroy the lairds, who really are Scots, part of us for centuries, and hand this to some oligarchs. Or even worse, the politicians could destroy the sporting industry with an enormous and jobless national park.”

The longer I spend in the hills, the more stories I hear. The farmers mumble about how the sheep always return to the ruined villages, but they can never understand why. The electricians refuse to go into one of the stately homes alone, because they feel they are being watched. Some of them, point out the local SNP, are the old Hanoverian barracks.

I find tension round the loch. The rise of the SNP is unsettling the tiny rural communities around the great estates. Most of the people interviewed are too afraid to give their names.

If they support land reform, they say they could lose their jobs. “He’ll sack me on the spot if he knows I want his land for the people.” If they oppose independence, they say the local SNP would be aggressive down the pub. “They’re so hotheaded, I say I’m not into this plan, they call me an English stooge.”

Country lanes have been filled with scandal. During the referendum, according to the campaign organiser, 80 per cent of the rural “Proud To Be Scottish, Delighted To Be United” posters were burnt down or defaced. Vandalism injected a distrust between the cottages which did not exist before. I find creeping unease in the country homes. Most of those I speak to who belong to these grand lodges, lined with roebuck skulls and antlers, are unsettled, and decline to speak on the record: “It’ll make things worse, me speaking in an English accent.”

In these grand lodges, they sense nationalists’ vitriol for aristocrats and disdain for private property. One landowner in Jura, who happens to be the Prime Minister’s stepfather-in-law, has warned the SNP may bring about a “Mugabe-style” land grab. There is a sense of battening down the hatches.

“We’re a family. We’ve lived here for centuries. We know and love this village. We care. But if they decide to tax us till the pips squeak a new community land trust won’t pop up but some sheikh who won’t give a damn,” is a common refrain.

The landowning families around Loch Rannoch know that the SNP’s proposals rejected at conference were not terribly worrying. What unnerves them are the yells from the new members to put their estates through a meat-mincer and call it land reform. Like everyone else in Scotland, they don’t know what direction the swollen, empowered ranks of nationalists are marching in: “British politics is so unstable. In ten years they could be Scottish New Labour or they could be Scottish Sinn Fein.”