Voices: The rise in remote working and ‘buy to Airbnb’ is killing our Highland culture

I’m going to make some statements that will seem completely unrelated: my grandfather built our house with his own hands. In the village I’m from, 15 per cent of the homes are Airbnbs. In a loch just outside of my village, there’s a kelpie.

I’m not playing a (very easy) game of two truths and a lie; all these things are true in their own way, and they are, in fact, all related. Things are changing in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and the effects are so far-reaching that even my tiny village in the Outer Hebrides hasn’t gone untouched.

During the first peak of the pandemic, working from home became a necessity and the normalisation of working from home has, for some, been life-changing. For some people, it’s not practical, which is why hybrid models are so vital, making work more accessible for many. It opens up new possibilities for people with caring responsibilities, child care needs, disabilities, or even just a difficult commute.

It has the potential to reduce pollution as more people opt to stay at home and avoid the drive to work, and it might also finally offer a solution to the skyrocketing cost of living in urban centres of commerce. If houses in London are no longer essential, then perhaps the property market can finally start to settle down. Now you can work in London but live, for example, in the Outer Hebrides.

Ah, there’s the rub. The Highlands and Islands of Scotland are idyllic. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to live there because that would make me a hypocrite. But where once houses on the islands were priced within a range that meant young people who grew up there could potentially get a mortgage, the sudden introduction of interest from those parties no longer tethered to London – parties generally capable of making far higher offers – means that house values are creeping up, and the likelihood of a 20-year-old from Lewis getting to stay on the island they grew up on is creeping down.

If young people can’t afford to buy a house where they grew up, they’ll have no choice but to move away, particularly in villages like mine where renting isn’t an option. If everyone moves away when they reach their twenties, you’re left with an ageing population and a culture slowly evaporating.

My grandfather, having lived and worked on the island his whole life, built a home for his family. He placed the stones we still live safely sheltered by. Were he to have tried that now, his salary from working as a headmaster wouldn’t have been enough to pay for the land, let alone the materials.

Even more galling are the houses that disappear from the market because they’ve been bought to become Airbnbs. As the popularity of Scotland as a place to work in rural, windswept and peaceful surroundings increases, so too does the popularity of remote areas in Scotland as holiday spots.

Much as I can see the good of decentralising places of work in some circumstances, I’m also quite happy to acknowledge the benefits of tourism to an economy. But when tourism is used as the excuse to buy up houses in tiny rural villages by people who can price local young people out of the bidding with ease, it becomes an exercise in decimating communities and creating ghost towns.

An Airbnb in the Outer Hebrides can earn £5,000 a week, so it’s big business. My village has 26 houses and four of them are Airbnbs. To be fair though, these properties are still owned by people from the village and they’re following all the rules that people ought to when putting their house on Airbnb. Essentially, they live in the house themselves the majority of the time.

But even as villagers are putting their houses on the app correctly, whispers have begun about people from the south of England eyeing up patches of land to build new, luxury, self-catering accommodations in our tiny village that will pay for themselves in a few years and will change our way of life forever.

My village continues to be the kind of place where no one locks their doors because everyone knows each other. With an everchanging cast of visitors appearing each week, that trust will at least be eroded if not disappear entirely. But that won’t be the only thing.

Many people in the Highlands and Islands speak Scottish Gaelic. What you might never have considered is that within that language, there are many dialects. A Lewis Gaelic speaker is as distinct from a mainland Gaelic speaker as a Geordie is from a Londoner. Our language isn’t taught in schools, so if speakers of Lewis Gaelic are scattered to the winds by unaffordable house prices, or their villages are made home to so many people without Gaelic that they find themselves always speaking English, then our language, our specific dialect of Gaelic, could easily vanish in a generation.

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More than that, there’s our kelpie. Every child that’s ever grown up in my village knows that the Loch of the Sea Horse has a kelpie in it. We’re told the story to scare us to bed from the moment we’re old enough to argue we’re not tired. We know about the fairy wisps called teine biorach that haunt the Field of Blood; we know about the elves that try to lure bad children away at the Hill of the Stranger.

None of these stories are written down, but they are a rich part of the spoken word folklore of our village, and many villages like ours across Scotland will have stories of their own.

I’ve made it my personal mission to protect these stories and to tell them in such a way that they might survive a little longer. In my BBC Radio 4 play The Knock Of The Bean-Sìth, broadcast later this year, I retell a myth about banshees, but with the nuance that exists only in my village and has never been near a Wikipedia article.

In my novel The Tick And The Tock of The Crocodile Clock, I tell a story about two Scottish girls in their early twenties struggling with the impossible task of hitting milestones that previous generations took for granted, in a world where young people can work their lives away and yet still be unable to afford a home.

Even so, there’s little I, or anyone, can do in the face of marching, unchecked homogenisation. If our stories die, and our language dies, then the kelpies, fairies and elves die too. Looking to the future, it’s far too easy to see a time when the people left in my village think the Loch of the Seahorse is just a loch, the Field of Blood just a field, the Hill of the Stranger just a hill, and the house my grandfather built with his own hands to shelter his family just an investment opportunity.

Kenny Boyle is an award-winning writer and actor. His debut novel ‘The Tick And The Tock of The Crocodile Clock’ is available now