You have to jump through hoops to buy a croft and half a dozen acres, he points out. “But if you want to buy a 50,000-acre estate, there is no vetting at all.”The Highlands and Islands are awesomely beautiful, but the terrain is austere and unforgiving Living off the land is a raw experience The drama on Eigg has tended to obscure hard facts Eigg has no township or village centre. Its homes and crofts are strung out and isolated, occasionally grouped in threes. There are few community facilities and no pub; old men share a nip in parked cars. Socialising centres on the only shop – in reality no more than a shed – and, on the long, dark winter nights, on neighbours’ houses.Scraping a living is hard enough, reformers argue, without the vagaries of landowners, who wield enormous power over accommodation and jobs.

In Eigg, families can only circumvent the laird’s grip on property and land by persuading the few with crofting rights to let them site a caravan on their land while they wait – up to two decades in some cases – for a permanent solution. Over the past 100 years, crofters have secured agricultural land rights which are protected in law and passed from generation to generation; they have a security of tenure that tenants – who are in the majority on Eigg – do not enjoy.In summer, up to 160 people a day visit, mainly bound for the island’s Singing Sands “The beach squeaks, actually,” confides Mr Robertson. “But the tourists expect four verses of ‘Flower of Scotland’.” What employment there is is seasonal, and in winter the pervading whiff of decay, poverty and neglect finally overpowers. This is the land of ramshackle cars, the last stop from the knacker’s yard for vehicles that fail the mainland MOT. With no mains electricity or water supply, only the lucky have generators and some still draw water from outside burns. Maruma was shocked to discover that damp and disrepair forced Dolly Ferguson, 83, to live, eat and sleep in one room of her island home.

He had promised her a new house before any work was done on his own. She is waiting.While Maruma’s manor house lies empty, the handful of pensioners still living on Eigg pray that the long-promised sheltered housing – delayed by discord – will be complete before their own health fails. Old Morag is the latest to be shipped off to a home in Fort William. In the dilapidated community hall, volunteers wade through inches of rainwater in the leaking kitchen to cook and serve pensioners their weekly lunch. Land for a desperately needed new hall is in the gift of the laird. Negotiations have been going on for years.Among the old, there is bitterness against the successors to Lord Runciman, Eigg’s “Golden Age” custodian in the first half of this century.”What would I do? I’d get rid of the whole bloody lot of them,” says Angus MacKinnon, descendant of the island’s Gaelic bards. But despite disenchantment with modern lairds, a yearning for the benign lord and master persists.”Lord Runciman was rich, you see, and so could afford to run it as an interest,” says Mr Mackinnon “It didn’t have to make money.

Everything was spick and span and everyone got a job when they left school.”Could the community do that for itself? His eyes narrow. “I can’t see how they would raise the money.”In his Edinburgh University study, the human ecology lecturer Alistair McIntosh, a founder of the Eigg Trust, argues that Highlanders like Mr Mackinnon suffer a lack of confidence born of three centuries of “cultural trauma”. He compares them with the descendants of Native Americans driven off the land and herded on to reservations. Mr McIntosh, from the Outer Hebrides, believes that only when they regain control of their land will Highlanders recover.Dismissing private landowners as “parasites”, he laments the Eigg Trust’s failure so far to buy the island But he is hopeful. “If you raised the issue of land ownership five years ago, no one could see why it was a problem Now a benign landlord would not be seen as enough. We are not talking nationalisation but community control.”For signs of change he points to the Assynt estate in Sutherland and the historic 1993 buy-out by local crofters of their absentee Scandinavian owner.