While community is a powerful reason to stay, if young people do feel the need to leave, then what might encourage them to return?

After exploring their deep connection to home, the students of Farr High School now confront the reasons they might have to leave.

To understand their options, they get firsthand accounts from two people who made the journey back, learning what it takes to forge a career here.

The students also tackle the tough issue of affordable housing in a frank conversation with a local council officer.

This episode gets to the heart of what needs to change for the next generation to build a future in Mackay Country.

Highlands Reimagined is an Anya Media production, commissioned by Strathnaver Museum and published in partnership with the Wild for Scotland podcast. Find out more at highlandsreimagined.com

I’m

at Strathnaver Museum, which is located in the northern

Scottish Highlands, in one of the most sparsely populated

regions of Western Europe.

I'm with a group of students from the local high school

and I’m asking who thinks they're likely to still be

living here in 10 years time?

We've got one, yes, three, not sure, up 2,

3, 4, 5, probably nos.

Five out of nine of the group think they won't be here and

of the remaining four, only one thinks they definitely will be.

As Mackay Country struggles with population decline, this

3 part series commissioned by Strathnaver Museum, and

published in partnership with the Wild for Scotland

podcast, asks what will encourage its young people

to build their futures here?

You are listening to Highlands Reimagined

episode 2, Home Truths

I want to go to uni for chemistry, so that's not

really an option right here.

And even then, jobs are also an issue with them

all being seasonal.

There's just nothing really stable.

In episode one, I asked the students of Farr High what

makes them want to stay here.

Now I'm passing a small audio recorder around the group

asking what makes them feel like they need to leave.

It would probably be to be, get a better job and

to get money and, you know, start like a new life somewhere

else when I become older.

If you want better opportunities for after

leaving school, you probably have to go pretty far away

from like where you live.

Most of the work is seasonal and if you want

a career or anything other than hotel work, it's really

not gonna happen for you.

Something that I've learned whilst doing this

project is that for some of the students, it's not so much a

lack of work that's the issue here, but more the variety - or

rather lack of it - that makes them feel they need to leave.

Across the whole of the UK it's actually pretty common for young

people in rural areas to leave the place where they grew up.

So perhaps there’s a different question we can

ask… If young people do leave Mackay Country - what might

encourage them to come back?

Dylan and Aaron are chatting with Joanna and Lara, two

people from Mackay Country who grew up here, moved

away and then returned.

Here's Joanna.

Growing up here was brilliant.

It was a case of you went home when it got dark,

everywhere was pretty safe.

The roads were much quieter and it was just a great

fun place to grow up.

It was a given that once you got to a certain age, you started

applying to universities.

It wasn't really questioned you did anything else.

If you had the academic grades, then that's what you were doing.

So I did it.

I went.

I followed what I was supposed to do, went off to university,

studied for four years, but I always wanted to come home.

We had the croft, so my intention was always to build

a house in that croft from when I was a little girl.

And here's Lara.

I. I also suspected I would leave.

It was always expected that I would kind of go to university

at some point, and I always thought I'd come home at some

point, but I wanted to travel, so I went to university at

Strathclyde in Glasgow, did four years there, and then I

went traveling to Australia, New Zealand for a couple of

years, and then I moved to Bristol and then to London.

So yeah, I really enjoyed living away in cities.

And I guess in terms of coming home I always thought

I would eventually, but it was having children that made

me want to come back home.

Was there a moment when you decided

to actually come back?

I think I was always looking for the job advert that

was gonna take me back north.

I remember really clearly the day that my auntie sent me,

it was from The Telegraph, it was for a graduate surveyor

post in Orkney, and that at the time was as close as I

felt I was gonna get to home.

I had an excellent postgraduate opportunity in Edinburgh with

a really renowned company.

I'd already worked there for a year.

I had the world at my feet, but my heart was here.

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I knew that I

wanted my child to have the same upbringing as I did,

and I knew I wanted her to be part of the community and

have the connection with the place and the land and the

community that I have here.

What kind of work do you do now and what are

the benefits and challenges of doing it in the far north?

When I was pregnant with my first, I made a big

decision that I threw myself into my own business instead

of going back to employment.

And a few years later, that business spawned

into another business.

I don't like to think of it as management.

I like to think of it as leading because it tends to

get better results from people if you're not telling them

what to do, but you're kind of working for the same goal.

And now I have three businesses that keep me really busy, employ

quite a lot of people up here.

And I find the benefits of that is that it's like a

lifestyle business for me, that my, my children come first.

If the school call me because someone's fallen over, I

can be here in a heartbeat.

I have ties, but we have like a really good

team of staff as well.

So for me to move home and to create a network that

supports my lifestyle, supports my family, and

ultimately the community, I just think that is where

I've wanted to be and where I see myself continuing to go.

I work for a high street bank.

I work in like digital marketing and customer

experience, and it's the same job I was doing down in

London before I came home.

And I transferred and I work from home here.

The benefits are that I can live here, that I can work from

home, that I can kind of work it around my children to an extent

that I can do like a four day week and I can do nursery drop

offs and stuff, which I'm quite lucky to do; wouldn't be able to

do that with every type of job.

And I get to travel down to London or Bristol and

places when I need to.

I guess in terms of the disadvantages, I do miss out

on that kind of interaction and cross-the-desk chat.

And also I think in terms of career progression, if I'm

looking to move into a different area, it's harder for me to have

that kind of, raising my profile and to have relationships with

new people when I'm home-based.

So I think that puts me at a bit of a disadvantage,

but there's also advantages to working from home.

And for me, I've got as good connection, wifi, et

cetera, than I had in London.

So, you know, it's, it's really easy to work from home for me.

What do you think helps young people stay or come

back to build new lives here?

Having the opportunities, education,

college, apprenticeships, career opportunities, and

I think a diverse range of careers depending on

what people want to do.

Accommodation is a big issue and there's not much

of it at all around here.

I think you really want to have a busy, thriving, active

community with… You know, the heart of a community is, you

know, schools, halls, pubs, hotels, cafes, um, so we need

to have all those kind of things for young people to want to

stay and to want to come back.

And then also childcare.

That's not so relevant when you're very young, but you

know, if you want to have your family here it's very hard.

Even if you have family here, it's still very difficult,

but it's very hard if you don't; to manage if you

want to work when there's very, very limited childcare

outside of nursery and school.

In

the first episode, we explored how the romanticised view

of the highlands as a remote wilderness compared with the

lived experience of young people in Mackay Country today.

We heard from Dr. Elizabeth Richie, senior lecturer in

history at the University of Highlands and Islands.

She's keen to remind us that a lack of community resources

in rural areas isn't something that just happens by accident.

It's the result of choices that have been made by people with

power; whether understandable or not; whether justifiable or not;

they are choices all the same.

Within the first two minutes of the podcast episode one,

I describe the place that I'm standing in as quote remote, and

I promise I wasn't doing that to troll you, Elizabeth, I promise.

Let's unpack this word “remote”.

Yeah, this is my bug bear because the word

remote is inherently talking about a place from the

perspective of somewhere else.

In order to describe any place as remote,

you have to be standing somewhere else to do that.

So

it's clearly the perspective of somebody

who's not from that place.

An inherently disconnected perspective

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.

Inherently disconnected from, from the place and doesn't

really do much useful to describe what the place itself,

So is remoteness about geography or is it

really about inequality?

Perhaps a place only remote when it's being denied the

infrastructure, investment and opportunity that more

urban areas take for granted?

The far north is a good example of where

if you have to go to a hospital appointment, you

might have to travel for two, even three hours to get

to a hospital appointment.

And that is a really serious, practical issue, and

that's because of choices.

It's not because of anything inherent about Durness or

Melness or Kinlochbervie or anything like that.

It's because of choices which have been made to remove

services locally, or even if we go back further in

time, to establish services in urban centers, which

again, is understandable.

So in thinking about how these places are constructed

as “remote”, both mentally, you know, as we look at maps

and have our stereotypes and all the rest of it, but also

practically how those places are increasingly made to be

remote as services are, are removed or never created

in them in the first place.

One of the things I hear regularly from people I speak

to in Mackay Country is how distant they sometimes feel, not

from London, which is a given, not even from Edinburgh, but

from the headquarters of their local council in Inverness,

only 70 or 80 miles away as the crow flies, but which can

take up to three hours by road.

So let's look at those practical realities: housing, schools,

jobs, and so on, and what needs to be in place to make coming

back a real option for the students of Mackay Country.

In their series on what they called the “New Highland

Clearances”, Scottish newspaper The Herald suggested that a

lack of jobs is not the issue.

It's that when people take up those jobs, they can't find an

affordable house to live in.

Boyd Alexander is settlement officer for Highlands Council.

The key to any settlement is you need a house.

If you don't have a house, you can't have a settlement.

In the Highlands.

The key issue is that there isn't enough housing, so

there's no point in trying to have a settlement officer if

we don't have enough houses.

So the main point of my work is to work with communities

to identify locations where housing could be built

Boyd is chatting with students, Jamie and Kai.

Here's Jamie.

Do you think that the reason why the houses are so

expensive up here is because people buying second homes

for like holidays and that?

[Pause] … I think it doesn't help.

So back in 2018, the average house price was one of the

lowest in the country, but it used to be about 120,000.

When you look over it in the 2023 statistics, you will

see that average price of a house in Tongue and Bettyhill

has gone up and now the average price is over 200,000.

Uh, so that's a significant difference.

Boyd shows Jamie and Kai various charts and graphs

which highlight changes in Mackay Country in terms of

population, house prices and school rolls over the years.

One chart shows that between 2018 and 2023 house prices

in Tongue and Bettyhill - the Community Council area where

the school is located - have increased three times

more than the average for Scotland as a whole.

A 73% increase in the space of only five years.

You can see that definitely there has

been more of a demand for houses in the North West.

I think one of the problems is the affordable

housing is not there.

It's not that you aren't able to buy a house, it's the fact

that there's not the affordable housing to move in to.

There's not very many areas where you can put housing quite

easily, which are beside a road.

Less than 5% or less than 10% in steepness

with services going by.

And that would be the ideal place.

So it's, it's really quite hard to pick these areas.

So it's a challenge, but it's an interesting

challenge and it's great to be working with communities

Obstacles to building more houses include various

land use restrictions that reserve it for particular

economic uses or conservation.

Kai talks about inby land, which refers to more

fertile, enclosed cropland, traditionally used for

cultivation and grazing.

With inby land, what I find interesting about that is

that the rules were changed, at least for my community

recently, so that that is considered common grazing and

cannot have houses built on it.

So you've got the common grazing.

You then got the NSA, the National Scenic Area, and then

you have the triple-S-I: Site of Special Scientific Interest.

So you have all these designations on bits

of land, which makes it so much, much harder.

And even if you do find an area of common grazing, which

the community's prepared to give up, to resume the

common grazings, it's at least nine months to a year.

So if you're thinking about the length of your project,

you are already adding an extra year onto it, which

is if you need houses today.

Yeah, it's really hard if you have all these delays.

I think a lot of the problem is the state of some

of the houses that are up for sale at the minute as well.

'cause there's a house nearby to me that is not

very up to date at all.

All the windows are really all not glazed to what the ones are

now, and yet it's ridiculously expensive for both the size and

the energy efficiency of it.

Which is a shame.

I used to wonder why I always saw so

many campervans up here.

Then I realized the housing market.

So yeah, that makes a lot more sense now.

You mean because people are living in camper vans?

Yeah.

If you can show that there are people living in

temporary accommodation, like static caravans,

that's a really key point.

That's people who should be in housing, certainly up

here where it's a bit windier and a bit colder in a bit.

Yeah, I imagine it must get quite cold in those sometimes.

Boyd gives an example of a couple who were offered

jobs in the northwest but were unable to accept them.

Why?

Well, one factor was the lack of housing, and this is a

story I've heard a few times.

But it wasn't only that

… Boyd: They would like the job, they accepted the job and they

would be coming as a couple.

I don't think they had children, but they were thinking

of maybe having children.

But, at the time, the early learning center, the

childcare, had been mothballed.

And so they thought, well, one, we can't necessarily

get a house, but also if the childcare is removed, then

that would be a key issue.

So is it just housing?

No.

It's not just housing.

It's one of the keystones.

But again, education and the school is a keystone, and unless

you have young people, your community is not sustainable.

So children aren't the be all and end all, but they're

certainly a very key, important part of your community.

Let's just pause for a moment to unpack

what Boyd is saying here.

I mean, it's sort of obvious when you think about it,

but firstly, in order for a community to exist, it

firstly needs some houses for people to live in.

In order to attract young families of working age to

live in that community, you need a school and childcare.

Once those children grow up, they may leave, but in order

for them to come back later and maybe start their own

families, those houses and that school still need to be there.

It's a self-sustaining cycle, each part dependent

on the others to keep the community alive.

Young people can receive their entire primary and secondary

education without having to board away from home.

That has certainly not always been the case.

Here's Rosemary, who you heard in the first episode.

When I look back, I just think, gosh,

I just remember coming home at weekends and

saying, “please, can I just not go there anymore?”

I mean, obviously I got used to it, but did I enjoy it?

No, no.

When Rosemary started senior secondary education,

she had to go to a school in Golspie, around 65 miles away.

We would leave home Sunday lunchtime.

You would get there at four o'clock or something, and then

when you went home on a Friday, you would get home maybe about

8, 8, 9 o'clock at night.

Uh, so.

You are only really getting one day at home on the Saturday.

Is there anything you look back on at your school

days in Golsby and think those are good moments?

Leaving school?

No, it wasn't a bad time.

I did get used to it.

I think it probably took me about a year.

I was never a mollycoddled child, don't get me wrong.

I mean, my mother was as tough as nails, but I mean

school itself, I made some lifelong friends who I'm

still in touch with today.

It was just strange.

I remember when I used to go away just for school trips.

That was just like, for an overnighter, I would hate that.

The fact that you'd never been away from home and

you know, you didn't travel back then, so it was kind of

being sent off to the unknown.

[Music break]

Well, I'm a lot, a lot less loquacious than I was.

What does loquacious mean?

I dunno, but it's the right word.

[Laughs] I was thinking to myself, “oh

no, Jim's already using words. I don't understand”.

I'll try not to

I've called in on Jim Johnston, who was the head

teacher of Farr High School when I first started working

here in 2012 and is now retired.

Originally from Shetland, Jim also had to board

when he was a student.

It prepared you in a way, it gives you

a kind of resilience.

I think it might be outweighed by the, the disadvantages,

which are disconnection from your parents, your, your

community, your grandparents, and also disconnection

from your siblings.

Would you say that when it was commonplace for young people

to move away at later stages of education, did that facilitate

them then moving away for good from the area that they're,

they were from, do you think?

Yeah, it, it definitely does because there, there

are far more of my former pupils living at a distance

than are in the vicinity and you never see them again.

That doesn't necessarily mean that they never come back,

but they rarely come back.

Jim's career at Farr High School spanned a pivotal shift

in Highland education policy.

When he began teaching.

It was common for students to leave for boarding

school in the later years of secondary education.

However, during the 1980s and 1990s, the Highland Council

introduced a new policy to upgrade or build schools

capable of supporting students throughout their entire

secondary education, eliminating the need for boarding.

Farr High School was amongst the first to make this transition.

Whilst Mackay Country's other high school, 60 miles away at

Kinlochbervie, was one of the last to be built, in 1995.

One of the things we tried to do in the school was

to, uh, direct pupils to, uh, the kind of thing that would

get them a job that would enable them to come back here.

And the, the kind of thing that we selected was things

like, um, going to sea.

Uh, our training in the oil industry.

And quite a lot of, uh, former pupils did exactly that

and many of them come back.

Jim tells me that the introduction of local schooling

for all ages has undoubtedly had a positive impact.

There's been a definite impact on our community here in

that the people have come into the community for the school.

They've come here so that their children can go

to a human sized school.

The people who would've gone off to school and would never

have been seen again, they also stayed here, had their

full education here, went to university, came back again and

are making a difference here.

There's several people like that, including my own daughter.

There's loads of them and I think that the success of

the school and the success of other small schools around

the periphery have made the periphery more sustainable.

There's ongoing population decline.

I hear about primary schools really struggling with their

numbers and having only a tiny handful of kids.

That's gonna have a knock on effect to the secondary schools.

I mean, do, do you imagine that the policy of young

people being able to school locally is here to stay?

Or, or, or could we find ourselves in a situation

where it has to go back to the hostel system?

Yeah.

I really wonder, I, I have often reflected on that because

there is depopulation going on in our area and in peripheral

areas all over the world.

But although it costs a great deal to educate the pupil

in Bettyhill, it would cost far more in terms of common

humanity to go backwards.

When you say it would cost far more in common humanity…?

I think it would finish these, these areas totally.

Because they would then become more unattractive and

it would make it less likely that people, people who left

would want to come back.

I certainly hope that it will continue.

And I don't see why not really, because everything

costs more in remote areas.

Every single thing.

And Britain is one of the biggest economies, one of

the richest countries in the world, and it really has to

take care of all its people.

And we on the edge here, deserve to be treated the

same way as everyone else.

After finishing school, Rosemary decided that it wasn't

time to go home quite yet.

I went to university in Edinburgh from Golsby.

And I was there for five years, and I landed in London

because when I finished my degree in Edinburgh, I didn't

know what to do with myself.

So I landed in London doing voluntary work just to get

a feel for … until I knew what I really wanted to do.

Do you think that the fact that you boarded away

from this area for high school, did that have any impact on

you deciding to go away and stay away from the area?

No, I think really, I mean, all the work that I did

at home was in local hotels, so it was seasonal work.

It's not that I didn't want to come home, I didn't

see how I could come home.

I'd just finished a degree.

Was I gonna go home and work in the local hotel

for the rest of my life?

Mm-hmm.

There weren't options.

In order to move back home after university, I would've

had to find somewhere to live, have some form of transport.

But how could you afford that when you're not working?

It's a vicious circle, really.

So I didn't see going home as an option.

One of the focuses of this podcast is why is it

that so many young people want to leave the Highlands?

I didn't want to leave can I just point out?

I didn't want to leave at all.

I tried everything to get out of even going to university.

But again, what was I going to do?

Years later, Rosemary did return to Mackay Country - at

first to take over a local hotel - and she has stayed ever since.

Rosemary’s story reminds me of something someone once told me

was a common saying when they were at school: “To get on, you

need to get out.” And while that may hold true for some, I don’t

want to give the impression that it’s inevitable. In the next

episode, we’ll meet someone who never felt the need to leave

Mackay Country — and explore the work being done right now

to make staying or leaving feel like a real choice, both options

defined by their opportunities rather than their drawbacks

Speaking with Joanna and Lara, students Dylan and Aaron learn

how by spending time away, you can broaden your experiences

and bring back skills that strengthen the community

- should you choose to return.

Going away is so valid.

It is so important.

I would really encourage anybody that has the opportunity or

the inclination to really seize it with both hands

and make the most of it.

As I've talked about, I felt really lucky to be

from this area, and I think that's been solidified by

going away and coming back.

I think for me it was really important to go away and it's

something I always wanted to do, and I don't think I'd

be so content as a person if I hadn't gone away and

travelled and experienced other things, I would probably

feel like I was missing out.

And that's a very personal thing, but for me it's

definitely made me happier now because I feel like I've had

that experience and it's been brilliant, but I love being here

again, I love being back in the community, but I would encourage

going away and experiencing a bit of different life outside

of the Highlands, but then hopefully with a view of coming

back and, and settling and you know, if they wanted to bring

up their own families here.

I sometimes think people that go away are slightly

different, not in a weird way, but slightly different

to people that haven't been away because you have to go

away to realize what you miss.

You visited countries like Australia,

New Zealand, and America.

Do you ever regret not moving away and

building a family there?

No, I don't think I do because I love travelling and

I still love travelling, but I feel like wherever I've lived,

I've always missed home a lot.

Do you think that if you hadn't gone away and

experienced outside of the Highlands, would you have

been where you are now with your businesses and banking?

I think it very much depends on what

sector you're in.

I know people that have moved to new roles and new companies

and do that working from home without having to have been

physically in a building.

I think for me, being able to build the start of my career,

like in an office, face to face with people and build those

connections and relationships has made it easier then to work

from home and be able to have, I guess, the best of both worlds.

I mean, a big part of my degree was economics, so I

did a lot of supply and demand, and then there was business.

And I think that if I didn't have that grounding, running

a business that is effectively based on supply and demand would

be, I might have got to where I am now, but it certainly

wouldn't have been as easy or without as many hurdles.

Lara has a question for Dylan and Aaron.

How do you both feel about the area?

Is there any kind of competing feeling around staying or do

you feel sure of what your path will be once you leave school?

Take it away Dylan.

I feel like it's been more normalized to stay rather

than to have to leave, but it's still kind of pressurized.

'Cause there's not much, like the only college, they

don't offer the widest range.

So you've kind of gotta like steer out and like

look for more opportunities.

So I think it's probably better to leave so that

you can grow and like get more, more opportunity.

Yeah,

I mean, I've got a sense, it's not like I definitely

wanna go away and do X, Y, Z, but like I do probably, like a

lot of young people up here, I want to go down south and go to

the colleges and the unis and get some work there in that.

And I've always thought, oh, I want to move to like

abroad to another country and see what all that's like.

But ironically enough, doing this podcast stuff

has made me consider if I want to stay there or if I

want to come back later on.

And I do think it is good for people to go away to get all the

experiences of being elsewhere and being in big places and

lots of everything really.

But it's good for them to come back and keep the

community up here going.

So what are your hopes for the future of up here, for

your family, your community, and for anyone else who's

thinking of coming back?

I think my hopes for this place is that a lot of

the action that's happening right now comes to fruition,

so around repopulation, around affordable housing in the area,

around having a more kind of empowered and engaged community.

I’m now a member of our local community council

because we want to try and drive forward those issues,

try and encourage accommodation because it is really difficult.

The school struggles to attract teachers, and a big part of that

is because they have nowhere to live if they do come here.

So we recognize that.

And doctors; people wanting to get on the property

ladder or just to return home unless you have family

or some roots already here, it's really difficult for

people to establish themselves in these communities.

And I think also on some of the other issues that we're

facing that are not unique to here over tourism and how the

community deals with that.

And also things like large landowners that the

community can work with these people for benefit

for the future generations

This episode has highlighted what needs to change

in order to build a resilient future for Mackay Country.

In our third and final episode of Highlands Reimagined I

will be asking who has the power to make this change?

Who gets to decide the future of this part of the

North Western Highlands?

What role do each of us, including visitors, have in

helping rather than hindering efforts to build a sustainable

future for this beautiful place?