Squatting in Scotland

History

A 1960 article in the Agricultural History Review noted instances of Iron Age squatting. Squatting was criminalised in 1865 by the Trespass Act. The number of cases which come to court are small: between 2007 and 2011, the average number of prosecutions was 13; between 2005 and 2010, there were 26 convictions. Adverse possession does not exist in Scots law, but a similar concept is positive prescription, which only applies to land. In order for positive prescription to be successful the applicant must firstly hold a deed in either the Register of Sasines or a title in the Land Registry, and secondly must have had possession of the land for a time of ten years, meeting various conditions. According to author and politician Andy Wightman, Scotland has seen four waves of squatting in which powerful interests stole land from the Scottish people. He names these as feudalism, the reformation, the division of the commonties and the foundation of the royal burghs.

Following the Highland Clearances, land raids occurred across rural Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Irish land reform proponent Michael Davitt was enthusiastically received when he did speaking tours in 1882 and 1887. The Vatersay Raiders lived in bad conditions on the islands of Barra and Mingulay so they decided to occupy land on Vatersay. The absentee landlord Emily Gordon Cathcart took them to court and they received two-month prison sentences in 1908. After an uproar they were released and Cathcart paid their travel home. Eventually the state purchased the island and it was divided up into crofts by the Congested Districts Board. The Seven Men of Knoydart carried out a land raid as late as 1948 as part of a publicity campaign for land reform on the Knoydart peninsula. The Colony was a squatted commontie in the Bennachie hills for 100 years starting in the 1930s. In 1946, a squatters movement rose up similar to the one in England and Wales in places such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Peterhead and Wigtown. Derelict army camps were squatted as well the ex German consulate in Glasgow. The 1865 Trespass Act was used to prosecute squatters.