Campaigners hoping to buy the tiny Hebridean island of Ulva have been given more than £4.4m in Scottish government funding, nearly meeting the full cost of the buyout.



The grant from the Scottish Land Fund enabled campaigners on Mull to submit a formal offer on Monday to buy Ulva, off the coast of Mull, fromowner Jamie Howard for about £4.2m and bid for Ardulum House, a large home owned by Howard that has been used as a hostel for holidaymakers and was not included in the initial buyout.

The campaign, led by the North West Mull Community Woodland Company (NWMCWC), which already owns part of neighbouring Mull as a community enterprise, aims to repopulate Ulva and regenerate its local economy after decades of depopulation.

The 2,000 hectare island estate has only six residents, including Howard. The island, which has links to the writers Beatrix Potter and Sir Walter Scott, includes cottages, a country house, a little-used Grade II-listed church and Neolithic standing stones. It shares a type of basalt column with the nearby island of Staffa just to its south west.

The islanders plan to market Ulva’s natural beauty, trading on its wildlife tourism, tranquility and seafood, which stocks Ulva’s seasonal cafe with locally caught crab, langoustine, lobster and, if available, hand-dived scallops.

Rebecca Munro, who runs the cafe, welcomed the land fund grant. “It’s showing confidence in our community, that we are best placed to take Ulva forward,” she said. “They looked at our feasibility study and they’ve gone ‘yup, this is sound, this is definitely workable’. It’s more than we could have expected and obviously it will contribute hugely towards what we want to do.”

The grant is the largest allocated by the fund and its first towards buying an island. Community buyouts of entire islands are rare and this is the largest bid of any kind for some time, even though they are underpinned by radical Scottish legislation which gives residents the right to block the sale on the open market of land where they live.

Just two Hebridean islands have been bought by their residents – Eigg in 1997 and Gigha in 2002. The Ulva bid was lodged after Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, announced at the Scottish National party’s annual conference last October that her government had blocked its sale on the open market to allow a community buyout to take place.

Until now, the NWMCWC, which already owns part of Mull as a community asset, had been focusing on buying the estate which covers most of the island and a small area of Mull used for Ulva’s ferry.

The purchase of Ardulum House would enable the NWMCWC to increase its options for offering visitor accommodation or homes for new residents. It hopes to complete the deal by 9 June.

The company is keeping open a crowdfunding appeal, which has raised £30,000, and is also in talks with possible sponsors to raise money for a substantial programme of renovations and improvements to upgrade Ulva’s homes and facilities.

If the sale goes ahead, the islanders and NWMCWC will eventually need several million pounds to modernise the cottages and develop its facilities. Boosting tourism will be another priority. Under Howard’s ownership, the estate was apparently losing about £100,000 a year.

Colin Morrison, the chairman of the NWMCWC, said: “Our top priority is to renovate the existing buildings and provide secure leases for present and new residents and businesses. We aim to have 20 or more people living on Ulva within two or three years, rising to as many as 50 or more in time as new houses are built.”

The buyout will give residents security of tenure for the first time. Munro said the lease to their family home and her restaurant was on a one-monthly rolling contract, reducing the impetus to invest heavily in their properties.

She said their immediate goals were to renovate homes for six new families and update the visitors centre for the first time since the 1990s. New families would help boost Ulva primary school which sits near Ulva’s jetty on Mull and has only eight pupils.