Skift Take
Better a tourist business than a rich person's hobby.
If selling an island, always advertise it for sale on a bank holiday weekend. Newsrooms are at their quietest then, and what might on a different day have been the lead item in a property column becomes a news event – a story. Last weekend, listening to the Radio 4 news, I was astonished to hear that the small Scottish island of Tanera Mor was up for sale; not surprised by the fact itself – I knew the owners had been trying to part with it – but because the future of 800 acres of rock, heather and bog had been deemed of national interest. It was in several newspapers and even reached the Huffington Post.
Let's not, however, give all the credit to the estate agent's timing; a sheikh or an oligarch could buy a hundred times that acreage on the Scottish mainland and barely raise a ripple outside the Aberdeen Press and Journal. Simply by being an island, Tanera Mor stakes a far bigger claim to our sentiment. The agencies of foreign governments cause little fuss when they buy up tracts of agricultural land in Africa the size of small countries; but when a Russian buys a Greek rock, everybody gets to know. Of course, as Europeans we may be naturally more interested in Greece than in Africa, but there is also this question of island-ness, with its suggestion of isolation and natural sovereignty as well as of romance and – in Tanera Mor's case – cheapness. With the 800 acres come nine houses, three jet
