A small community in the rolling uplands of southern Scotland hopes to create a major new nature reserve, straddling more than 10,000 acres of heather moorland home to hen harriers, black grouse and curlew. The 2,300 villagers of Langholm, a small settlement a few miles north of the English border, hope to buy one of the UK’s most famous grouse moors, owned by one of the UK’s most powerful hereditary landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch. Their goal is to convert Langholm Moor into a model for climate-friendly and sustainable ecological restoration, powered by small-scale wind and solar farms, spurred on by an upsurge in community buyouts across Scotland. But the project faces significant obstacles which, campaigners argue, expose new problems that threaten the Scottish land reform movement’s ambitions. Buccleuch Estates want £6m for Langholm Moor, and the villagers have 16 weeks to find the money. The Scottish Land Fund, a government fund that backs buyouts, has made the Langholm Initiative a time-limited offer of £1m, provided it raises nearly £5m more by 31 October. If it fails to acquire Langholm Moor by that date, the money goes and Buccleuch could put it back on the market. The community is now racing to find other backers. “It’s challenging,” said Kevin Cumming, the project manager, who hopes South of Scotland Enterprise, a new regeneration agency, will contribute to the scheme. There are also other potential bidders in mind. “We’re under huge pressure, and I don’t sleep very often,” said Cumming. “It has massive cultural value to the people of Langholm. We are looking at ecological restoration, to increase biodiversity as much as we can, make it more resistant to climate change and give our children a better future.” The sale of Langholm Moor, famous among conservationists as the site of a 25-year-long research project into the survival of widely persecuted hen harriers on grouse moors, is a significant moment for Scotland’s land reform movement. The Duke of Buccleuch, a hereditary title dating to 1663, was once the UK’s largest private landowner, and the family still holds 217,000 acres of moorland, farms and forestry, and a £250m urban property portfolio. The family’s homes include Drumlanrig castle, an estate dating back to the reign of Robert the Bruce, and the Boughton estate in Northamptonshire. But for the first time in generations, its estate is shrinking at a time when private landowners in Scotland are under intensifying pressure to break up their estates. Last year the Scottish Land Commission, set up by ministers in Edinburgh to accelerate land reform, called for new powers to force landowners to sell to local communities. Buccleuch Estates is supporting three buyouts, at Langholm Moor and of land next to two villages, both built by the Buccleuchs in the 1600s and 1700s. The family is selling 750 acres to villagers in Newcastleton, 16km east of Langholm, and 3,900 acres of moorland around Wanlockhead, a former mining village in the Leadhills said to be Scotland’s highest settlement. They plan to invest heavily in eco-tourism, campsites and bunkhouses; Wanlockhead hopes its low-intensity gold panning business can flourish. Benny Higgins, a former banker appointed last year to chair Buccleuch Estates, and an economics adviser to Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, said the timing of the commission’s interventions and Buccleuch’s decision to sell up was coincidental. Even so, he indicated, the family and company are sensitive to the political climate. Buccleuch’s new agenda, he said, “is to establish collaborative relationships with the communities that we’re in and to make sure, when there are mutual opportunities for us to raise some capital to reinvest in the business and a community is eager to take advantage of that, this is absolutely hand in glove collaboration”. The Newcastleton buyout is essentially sealed: it was granted £850,000 by the SLF earlier this month, allowing the village to raise all the money it needs. It has quietly pioneered community ownership in the south of Scotland. Barbara Elborn, the secretary of the Newcastleton and District Community Trust, said they first bought ground for a sports facility from Buccleuch in 2000; in 2018 they reopened the village’s derelict petrol station, running it as a community enterprise. Wanlockhead has until August to submit its bid to the SLF. The land it wants is expected to cost about £1.4m; Wanlockhead hopes to win nearly all that from the land fund, but it faces stiff competition. The SLF has £10m a year to spend but is now heavily oversubscribed. It will close to new applicants in August, seven months before the end of its financial year, because of the surge in applications. It has 32 active bids, and expects to run out of money in November. Its current funding ends in March 2021, just before May’s Scottish parliament election. Community Land Scotland, an umbrella group for community-ownership, wants to see the SLF’s annual budget doubled, but fears the coronavirus pandemic and widely expected recession will make it harder for the next government to afford it. Campaigners argue that land buyouts are a powerful vehicle for social and economic regeneration, so should be prioritised. Hamish Trench, the Scottish Land Commission’s chief executive, said the Buccleuch buyouts had great significance because they showed community ownership was becoming normalised, but the shortage of financial options for communities trying to buy expensive land was a worry. More options were needed, including state-backed and privately funded social investment finance. “It is no longer acceptable for large areas of land to be traded in a way where those people affected [local communities] cannot influence things,” Trench said. “This is a very important cultural shift, both in terms of transparency and communities being able to acquire land.”