Pride of Place

Events all over Scotland this summer and autumn will salute the sixty glorious years of the most peculiar Iandlord north of the Border. The National Trust for Scotland (NTS) is celebrating its Diamond Jubilee, with a recently held special thanksgiving service at St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, numerous other church services, concerts and harp recitals at NTS houses and an exhibition at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow of pictures, furniture and assorted items from NTS properties. The exhibition is appropriately titled 'Pride of Place'. The longest lasting of the tributes will be the planting of 100,000 trees throughout Scotland.

The equivalent of the older National Trust in England, but founded independently and with a vigorous life of its own, the NTS owns a remarkable collection of properties. To it belongs a great chunk of dark Glencoe, that forbidding gorge where Britain's most notorious massacre was carried out on a freezing winter night in 1692. It owns the battlefield of Bannockhurn where Robert the Bruce gave the might of English mailed chivalry a roasting in 1314. In its care is the Glenfinnan Monument at the head of lonely Loch Shiel in the Western Highlands, where the Young Pretender's standard was raised with high, defiant hopes in 1745. In its charge also is the battlefield of Culloden, where these hopes were shattered.

The NTS owns the island of Iona, where a formidable, bad-tempered Irishman named Columba arrived in 56A, and where Macbeth lies buried, with Kenneth McAlpin and the kings of Scots of old. It owns fairytale castles like Craigievar and Crathes, which might have been made by magic for Sleeping Beauty, and the Georgian grandeur of Haddo House and the vast Scots Baronial pile of Fyvie Castle. It owns the remote islands in the western seas of St Kilda and Staffa (Fingal's cave, Mendelssohn, and all that); the 200 foot Grey Mare's Tail waterfall in Annandale; the delicious daffodil garden at Threave in the Stewartry .

The NTS protects remote fastnesses of the golden eagle, the wildcat and the pine marten; forests where the capercailzie struts; cliffs where the seabirds wheel and scream in their thousands and their tens of thousands; the ravishing Torridon estate in Wester Ross, where the snow-capped mountains are reflected in glimmering lochs. Just the names alone are enough to send anyone misty-eyed.

This is all run with a Scottish blend of shrewdness and sensitivity for the general public benefit – more than two million visitors went to NTS properties last year.

The NTS was founded in 1931 by a small group of Scottish aristocrats, among them the Duke of Atholl and the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres. The lead was taken by Sir Iain Colquhoun of Luss, on the banks of Loch Lomond, egged on by the great Border house of Maxwell in the person of Sir John Stirling Maxwell of Pollock. The founders saw the need for a National Trust in Scotland, but did not want to see an English institution get its Sassenach hands on Scots land and Scots history. Eleven people attended the first general meeting in Edinburgh, to hear the Duke of Atholl announce that the cash in the kitty amounted to all of £100.

A lusty infant had been born, however, and it showed a boldness and resolution befitting its Scottish ancestry. Already in 1932 the Trust laid down half its first legacy to buy the sixteenth-century palace at Culross in Fife, where it has subsequently restored many other buildings. In 1945 the NTS took the brave and far-sighted decision to accept ownership of Culzean Castle – the tremendous Robert Adam mansion of the Kennedys, Earls of Cassilis, on the Ayrshire coast – without a penny of endowment. The castle and its magnificent grounds are now the Trust's most visited property and one of the major tourist attractions in Scotland.

To do its job, the NTS relies principally on membership subscriptions, donations and legacies. Boldness and good management have been rewarded with increasing public support. In 1972 NTS membership reached the 50,000 level. In 1980 it passed the 100,000 mark and in 1990 it went well over 200,000, a testimony to the Trust itself and to the increase in public concern for the environment during the last twenty years. Where the organisation had £100 in its poke in 1931, in 1991 it owns more than 100 properties and commands an income close to £13 million a year.

In its sixty years the NTS has demonstrated pride of place indeed, and it deserves this year's celebrations in its honour.