This is a simmering revolution. Land reform was not a topic discussed in Scotland’s polite society before devolution. Raising the issue of the most concentrated land ownership in Western Europe was met with looks of scorn at conferences and seen as an attack on private property. Today it is a constant refrain; the referendum campaign has got people thinking not only if they want Scotland to be independent, but what kind of Scotland they want to live in. Long-bottled frustrations have released something emotional and a little utopian.
In the Highlands, I find dreamers everywhere, even in Aviemore. There has never been much politics here, 130 miles north from Edinburgh. Or at least not outside the ballrooms and billiard rooms of the Georgian manors. But something quite remarkable is now happening in this town with a big Tesco and less than 3,000 people: tenant farmers and boiler repairmen are talking about history.

Before the referendum, a couple of crusty old folk would meet as the SNP, but since then the party in the area has swelled from 60 to more than 260. This is happening everywhere. There were 25,000 members before the vote; there are 115,000 now. This momentum, and the SNP’s sweep of 56 out of 59 seats in last May’s general election, is why two-thirds of  Scots now think independence is inevitable. 

In Aviemore, the SNP is now an evangelical little world: a book club and a supper club, with its fundraisers and fêtes, trips to the party conference and walks around the loch. This has filled the town’s void of association and faith. Protestantism no longer means what it once did; kirk attendance has been in decline for generations. The Highland Regiments, their prestige smeared, are not the mass recruiters they once were. All the icons are tarnished; the Royal Family has been ridiculed for decades by the Scottish press, any pride in the imperial past is felt to be impossible, akin to pride in racism.

It makes this social knitting together so precious to those in the SNP that they wave away any critique of its policy or politicians.  At the lounge bar opposite the railway station, I sit and eat sandwiches with some of the local branch: a Christmas tree salesman, an electrician and an office manager, who is a single mother.  How they love their party. “I was never reading before,” says the Christmas tree salesman, “And now I am. I’m watching Question Time.” As they talk, quite breathlessly, I realise how this sudden, much-longed-for movement is not something the SNP really controls. It matters what three random people think in Aviemore, because these new members can overrun the party machine. “We’re a democratic party,” says the office manager. “And if we don’t like it, we’ll push Nicola to go tougher.”

The SNP has become, in this small country of 5.3 million people, something enormous: more than one in 50 people in Scotland are members, a rate akin to that of a one-party state. So quickly has it grown so huge, it is unclear how this giant will now walk. Will these 95,000 new members, the vast majority of them leftists, overwhelm the party’s centrist financial instincts? Or will the SNP turn into another grand institution where they scarcely matter at all? Land reform will be a litmus test. The more the movement reshapes the SNP, the more radical what happens on the hills will be.