Category: Highland Titles

Highland Titles has just celebrated 12 years as part of the local Glencoe, Duror, Kentallen, Ballachulish community.  We moved in a neglected spruce plantation in the autumn of 2007, full of exciting ideas for transforming into a nature reserve.  Is it any wonder that some people had their doubts?  Nothing like this had ever been tried before.

The first few years were difficult but as we began the transformation from sterile plantation to nature reserve, the doubters were increasingly won over.  Our first volunteers joined us in 2008 and good friend Stanley Cameron, with various heavy plant, constructed the main track and car park. We began brashing the spruce in earnest to help with access and set up feeding stations for a variety of wildlife.  We undertook baseline ecological surveys and took advice from various bodies.

Annual gatherings began in 2013, initially set in magnificent Glencoe House, but latterly moved to the Isles Glencoe Hotel to accommodate the massive interest. We have sold out every year for many years now.  We extended the main track to help with increasing visitor numbers and created two magnificent lochans. Stewart Borland joined us and to deal with the growing quantity of equipment kept on site we constructed our award winning Tool Store.  This also provided shelter for our volunteers and staff.

Local school children increasingly visit, either to help plant or as part of their education. Their involvement in our beekeeping project has been particularly satisfying. They have also been able to help nurture tree seedlings in our polytunnel.

We joined the Glencoe Marketing Group six years ago and improved our links to Visit Scotland, who graded us three stars and then four stars. After consulting our lairds, we moved our shepherds hut “Reception” and the Lairds Lodge onto the site.  Such improvements help all visitors, but particularly those with reduced mobility. The recent new surface to the main track finally makes access possible to disabled visitors.

For ten years now, we have distributed a five figure sum to local good causes and charities. But perhaps more important is the money we put directly into the community by employing staff and buying services. And even more valuable than that is the 10,000 visitors a year who come to walk in our woods and visit their plots.  The value of that to local businesses in incalculable.

Recent years have seen the creation of the wildcat rehabilitation centre and most recently, the Forever Home for injured hedgehogs and the Hedgehog hospital.

Highland Titles staff have been working overtime recently shipping extra orders to Germany in what is often a quiet month. The reason; advertising.

During the 2018 gathering Highland Titles welcomed an independent journalist who spent time with us, met us and learned about the work we are doing. The result was an excellent little film advertising our work, which was published in the prestigious German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine . We were indeed fortunate that the video featured, in addition to myself and some of our happy lairds and ladies, the famous author Andy Wightman MSP, who has advocated wider land ownership for many years.

Of course Andy has no training in Scottish law, so offering advice on Scottish law concerning the sale of Scottish souvenir plots was rash to say the least. However we thank him for taking time out of his busy schedule, as a member of the Scottish Parliament, to contribute to one of our advertising features.  His appearance is especially brave as we are aware that he personally faces significant legal troubles concerning previous inaccurate comments that he has made.

Despite it being unclear to what extent he endorses our work, I would like to show our gratitude and my appreciation of his appearing in our film and for his campaign for more diverse Scottish land ownership. So there is a square foot of Glencoe Wood waiting for the future “Laird Wightman” if he would care to let me know where to send it.

Like other business minded conservation groups, we rely to some extent on the help and advice of public relations companies. Our biggest opportunity in the marketplace, apart from the good work that we do, is our exciting and novel way of raising money. Who doesn’t want a bit of land in Scotland?  Much more fun than a membership card. Unfortunately, our biggest problem is the cost of advertising what we do. Of the 7.6 billion people on the planet, conservatively 7.5 billion have never heard of us. When people realise what we are selling and how we use the profits from those sales, we do very nicely.

Enter BML Public Relations, our American PR company. Last year they had the original idea of giving everyone in Scotland, Connecticut a free square foot.  I liked the idea. The worst that could happen was that we would give away product to 1,694 people and make them very happy. Could be worse. At best, they would all then buy a plot for Uncle Duncan (most of our sales are repeat business), and we would get some free publicity (the sort we prefer).

Ragan’s PR Daily described it thus 

“The story of a town full of lairds and ladies was an easy pitch to features, lifestyle and seasonal writers from the top 100 designated market areas. By targeting writers at national outlets that covered hyperlocal beats, BMLPR secured an article on APNews.com, which was shared by more than 125 outlets throughout the country, including FOXBusiness.com, ABCNews.go.com, CNBC.com, NYTimes.com, BostonGlobe.com and more.

Ultimately, the stunt delivered 268 media placements and close to 1 billion impressions, along with a holiday sales increase of 34 percent. It’s a great example of taking a typical holiday gift guide pitch to a new level.”

And we are pleased to say that Chicago based PR Daily awarded BML Public Relations and Highland Titles first place in their annual  Ragan Awards program, which celebrates the greatest campaigns, initiatives and one-offs in the communication, PR, marketing and media industries.

We are used to accolades for our conservation work but this is the first time that our advertising has been recognised. Full marks to our Marketing Director, Styephen Rossiter, for making this happen.

Highland Titles has always recognised the importance of our nature reserves, not just to the benefits to wildlife and the wider community, but to the quality of life of individual visitors , and the impact that these special places can have on them.

A memorial bench is a means of connecting people with their favourite location, place, or viewpoint. We also benefit from being able to provide a place to rest whilst touring the reserve and we therefore fully support memorial benches on our sites.

Thus it was that in late 2013 we began to evaluate suitable benches and after visiting several manufacturers we decided to offer the 5ft (1.6metre) Athol bench manufactured in pressure treated redwood by Scottish Prison Service (SPS) Industries.

The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) is an agency of the Scottish Government and the manufacture of timber products is part of their duty to provide rehabilitation services to Scottish prisoners.

Their principal objective is to contribute to making Scotland Safer by Protecting the Public and Reducing Reoffending. The SPS aims to achieve this by ensuring delivery of secure custody, safe and ordered prisons, decent standards of care and opportunities for prisoners to develop in a way that help them reintegrate into the community on release.

We believe that this is a laudable aim and The Athol Bench is a quality product which is manufactured from sustainably grown timber and which with some care will last for many years.