Aristocracy still owns a third of Britain's land

More than a third of Britain's land is still in the hands of a tiny group of aristocrats, according to the most extensive ownership survey in nearly 140 years.

Stately: The Duke of Buccleuch's Drumlanrig Castle

In a shock to those who believed the landed gentry were a dying breed, blue-blooded owners still control vast swathes of the country within their inherited estates.

A group of 36,000 individuals - only 0.6% of the population - own 50% of rural land.

Their assets account for 20m out of Britain's 60m acres of land, and the researchers estimate that the vast majority is actually owned by a wealthy core of just 1,200 aristocrats and their relatives.

The top 10 individual biggest owners control a staggering total of more than a million acres between them.

These figures have been uncovered by the 'Who Owns Britain?' report by Country Life Magazine, thought to be the most extensive survey of its type undertaken since 1872.

The top private landowner, not just in Britain but Europe, is the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury, whose four sumptuous estates cover 240,000 acres in England and Scotland

But while his land is the most vast, it is not the most valuable, as the net worth depends on how much is farmland, as well as the value of the property and sporting and heritage activities on it.

The most valuable land belongs to Number 4 on the list, the Duke of Westminster, whose Grosvenor Estate, worth a whopping £6bn, takes in the wealthiest areas of London, including Belgravia and Mayfair.

A third of Britain's land is still in the hands of just a few toffs - see our list of who owns what?

Second on the list of the most land owned is Scottish magnate the Duke of Atholl.

His 145,700 acres have pushed Prince Charles, who as Duke of Cornwall has 133,000 acres, into third place on the list of individual owners. Yet all are dwarfed by the incredible reach of corporate land-ownership, which barely existed 100 years ago.

As the biggest 19th-century landowners such as the Church have been sidelined by economic and social changes, their land has been snapped up by the state, charities and the private sector.

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More than 2.5m acres - 4% of the country - is in the hands of the Government-run Forestry Commission, which the Coalition plans to privatise. Second on the list is the fast-expanding National Trust, with 630,000 acres.

Catching up swiftly are foreign investors and even supermarkets.

Waitrose owns a 4,000-acre estate in Hampshire, which it runs as a farm, while Tesco's 2,545 stores alone take up 770 acres.

Most of the report's information has been uncovered only in the past five years after a registration campaign targeting huge landowners who had previously avoided disclosing their assets.

Three other big landowners you might not expect...

Pension funds: 550,000 acres

Many of the UK's 2,800-plus funds have invested in land for centuries and they snapped up struggling farms in the 1980s.

The RSPB: 321,237 acres

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds owns 200 reserves, and its landholding has rocketed in the past ten years.

Defence Estates: 592,000 acres

Over two-thirds of land owned by the MoD's property arm is used for training. It also owns 50,000 service personnel homes, and 800 listed buildings.

The report's author, Kevin Cahill, who has been researching land ownership for ten years, told the Daily Mail: 'A small minority still own a huge amount of Britain's land and what surprises many people is that over the last 100 years, not a lot has changed.

'For the rich the pursuit of land is as important as it's ever been. They receive subsidies and most of their assets are held in trust, avoiding inheritance tax.

'The biggest change in land ownership in the past 100 years is that people who live in cities now finance the countryside whereas it used to be the other way around.'