Scotland’s selling an island, which is a pity for tourism

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