The remains of stone houses were slowly crumbling into a rocky beach. Where there had once been thatched roofs, peat fires and people speaking Gaelic, there were now only ferns bobbing in the wind.
I was walking along stone walls, looking for signs of recent habitation. Finding none, I hopped down and marched across the moor. Four startled herons beat their wings. The animals, empty hills and crumbling stone houses all felt postapocalyptic, as if the countryside were being reclaimed by nature. And yet on Ulva, a small island off the coast of Scotland, it’s the people who are doing the reclaiming.
In 2025, the idea of settling anyplace other than Mars might seem anachronistic, but the people on Ulva are pioneers of a different kind. They are giving new life to places left behind by the industrial and agricultural revolutions, imagining a 21st-century settlement built not on extraction but on connection — to nature, vegetable gardens, art, community and a life away from screens.
I came to Ulva wondering if, by establishing something new by resurrecting something old — small, self-governing communities — we might find an antidote to the atomization, disempowerment and environmental degradation of modern life. What I found was messy, incomplete and inspiring. If places like Ulva succeed, they could offer a model for reversing rural flight, re-establishing local democracy and revitalizing local economies not just in Scotland but anywhere.
In 2017, Jamie Howard, whose family had owned the island for several generations, put all roughly 4,500 acres of Ulva up for sale. With the help of land reform laws and Scottish government funds, a community group from the neighboring Isle of Mull (population: less than 3,000) bought the island for around £4.5 million, or about $6 million. The goal was ambitious: to repopulate Ulva and rebuild its economy.
On the 200-yard ferry voyage from Mull this summer, I told the ferryman Rhuri Munro that I had first visited Ulva in 2018, right after the purchase. “Things are a wee bit better,” he replied.
In a little over six years, the islanders’ homes have been renovated with double-glazed windows and heat pumps. The pier has been upgraded, the old hunting lodge transformed into a busy hostel, and the population has more than tripled, rising from five to 16 — still tiny, but a significant move in the right direction in a place where the trend is usually one toward loss.
Ulva, like much of the Scottish Hebrides, has been inhabited for millenniums. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of human life that dates back to the Mesolithic period, and the population peaked in the early 1800s, when there was huge demand for kelp, which was used in the manufacture of soap and glass.
Francis William Clark, a lawyer from Stirling, bought Ulva in the 1830s, but his timing was not propitious. The kelp industry was collapsing and Mr. Clark, like many Scottish lairds, or landowners, demonstrated ruthless indifference toward the islanders, displacing many of them in favor of more profitable tenants: sheep. By the time of his death, the human population of the island was around 50, with many of the remaining elderly islanders apparently confined to Starvation Terrace, the crumbling homes that now house only fern fronds and blackberry vines.
Today, Scotland’s legacy of wealthy lairds persists in one of the most unequal patterns of land ownership in the Western world. In 2019, a report from the Scottish Land Commission stated that about 400 landowners control nearly half of rural Scotland. (In America, the 100 biggest landowners own about 42 million acres, twice the size of Scotland and close to 2 percent of the United States’ landmass.)
In 2003, the Scottish government, in an attempt to address this imbalance, passed land reform laws that gave rural communities the right to register an interest in buying land and the right of first refusal should the land come up for sale. Subsequent laws created the Scottish Land Fund to help communities buy land, extended the right of purchase to urban communities and, quite radically, gave communities the power to force a sale under special circumstances.
Today around 500 communities own over 500,000 acres of Scottish land. Some of them — the Isle of Eigg off the west coast in particular — have become a model of what’s possible. Under community ownership, the islanders of Eigg built a renewable energy system that now powers the island 24/7, with about 90 percent of the energy coming from renewable sources. They rent out affordable community housing and almost doubled the population, from 65 to 115.
“Community purchases unleash creativity,” Ian Cooke, the former director of Development Trusts Association Scotland, told me. “For the last 60 to 70 years, you’ve had top-down regeneration, invariably in the poorest communities,” Mr. Cooke said. These same communities “are still the poorest communities despite all the top-down intervention,” he said. “Community needs to be at the center of this, not agencies or local authorities or governments.”
Ulva has not avoided growing pains. The North West Mull Community Woodland Company, a charity, was largely responsible for the purchase. At the time, there was just a handful of people living on Ulva, one of whom was Barry George, a retired laborer who said he’d moved there 28 years ago to work at a nearby fish farm.
I took a roundabout route from the hostel to Mr. George’s house, around the Beinn Chreagach mountain, past a Neolithic standing stone and through a broad-leaved forest of rowan and hazel, which sat next to columnar basalt cliffs that descended into a frothy sea. Arriving at a pebble dash cottage, I felt like I’d traveled through an entire continent’s worth of landforms in about 20 minutes.
Mr. George relishes Ulva’s solitude and its history. His cottage walls were lined with rows of history books. “There’s a lot of weird on this island,” he said. “Not modern-day weird, but Norse weird.” Ulva means “wolf” in Norse, and Ulva, like many islands in the Inner Hebrides, may have been raided and settled by Vikings. Mr. George, who said he had Nordic heritage, feels a mystic connection to the land. He told me of finding bipedal hoof prints in his garden, and of feeling a ghostly hand pressing between his shoulder blades as a warning to leave a meadow.
Mr. George has had his struggles with the community trust board that governs Ulva. He remembered the last laird’s family fondly, and told me that Mr. Howard’s mother, known as Lady Howard, would often come to his door during the winter to check if he had enough firewood.
Although Mr. George used stronger language than other islanders, some expressed frustrations. People on other community-purchased sites often remark on how governance is slow, decisions are mired in bureaucracy and, as is often the case in small communities, local politics can be pretty fractious. But, as Anne Cleave, a 77-year-old volunteer who serves as chair of the North West Mull Community Woodland Company, said, “You would not be a member of this board if you did not want everything to succeed.”
And life for all the islanders can be tough: the ferry commutes, the slow deliveries, the difficulty of getting to the mainland, the lack of a local dentist and the weather — parts of the west highlands of Scotland get around 200 inches of rain annually. Andy Primrose, who lives on the nearby island of Gometra and, with his wife, Yvette, has renovated a hunting lodge on Ulva into a hostel, put it this way: “We do it because it’s hard.”
As an American who lived for years in North Carolina, I saw firsthand the decline of rural communities. The boarded-up shops, political disengagement and “No Trespassing” signs of rural America may be less picturesque, but in important ways they’re not so different from the stone ruins and abandoned fields of Scotland’s Highlands and islands. Could community ownership let people reclaim control over their land and their futures in rural America?
Some think it might. In the United States, federal and state governments can claim land using eminent domain, but we rarely see communities take control to provide affordable housing, let alone empower local residents to make it happen themselves. “It is impressive,” said John Lovett, a law professor at Louisiana State University, who studies Scotland’s land reform laws. Scotland is “trying to achieve something that we just don’t even think about in the U.S. It’s creating a way for the government to enable or facilitate the disassembly or the decentralization of landownership. We’ve never tried that in the U.S.”
If funds were provided to communities to make purchases, as they are in Scotland, perhaps small American communities could develop affordable housing or communally run stores. Urban communities could buy abandoned or derelict property and repurpose it, preventing speculators from sitting on it waiting for values to rise.
Critics might argue that experiments such as Ulva’s are too small and too remote to be replicated in the United States. But in an age where we’ve grown used to tackling issues with sweeping infrastructure bills and large-scale projects, there’s something refreshing — and also quintessentially American — about small-scale, community-led development.
These tiny Scottish democracies are not so different from the self-governing communities established by the people who created the blueprint for much of American settlement, blending private property with communal spaces like schools, libraries, churches and parks. Recreating these experiments in the United States could give something back to Americans that we’ve lost. They might help us reimagine growth: how to build slowly, grow sustainably, reestablish local democracy and deepen our relationship with the land. And in our atomized, secularized and screen-addled age, they could help address our modern-day yearnings for connectivity, spirituality and nature.
I couldn’t find any memorials for the villagers who were once forced off Ulva, but there is one for William Francis Clark — a marble gravestone on a hilltop. When I climbed that hill in 2018, I looked over the island and saw nothing but remnants of a vanished civilization. But on this visit I could see Highland cattle grazing and cozy-looking homes. I heard a farmer’s A.T.V. rumbling across the land to help a tenant with her water problem.
A “wee bit better,” indeed. There is hope in small but meaningful improvements — not just for Ulva, but for communities everywhere.
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