A village perched high in the Scottish uplands has inched closer to a historic deal with one of the UK’s most powerful landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch, to buy out nearly all the land surrounding the community. Wanlockhead, a village of about 200 people, has agreed to pay Buccleuch Estates, the duke’s property company, nearly £1.5m for 3,863 acres of moorland, brownfield land and pasture, after four years of negotiation. The village, which boasts that it is Scotland’s highest – a claim disputed by its nearest neighbour, the village of Leadhills – now has six months to raise the money for what activists believe will be the largest buyout of its kind in southern Scotland. This week Wanlockhead Community Trust will finalise its bid to the Scottish Land Fund, a government fund that helps finance buyouts, before launching a public appeal for any extra money it needs. Lincoln Richford, the trust’s chairman, said they expected the land fund would set a deadline of 31 March next year to complete the deal with Buccleuch, allowing the former mining village to invest in tourism, local businesses and visitor attractions such as gold-panning and bird-watching sites. “This buyout can offer so much to our village. We have grassroots support and political support for it. I am confident that funders will also agree that this is a valuable initiative worthy of their support,” he said. It is one of three community buyouts of Buccleuch land in the southern uplands that dominate the horizon just north of the English border. The buyouts have been facilitated by the duke’s executives, highlighting a slow but historic shift in patterns of land ownership in Scotland, which has long been dominated by a small number of wealthy, often absentee owners. Buccleuch has already sold several parcels of land in Newcastleton, once a village tied to the Buccleuch estate. In June the land fund gave Newcastleton £850,000, enough to buy 750 acres around the village from the estate. A third buyout involving one of Buccleuch’s most prized assets, Langholm Moor, to the east of Wanlockhead, is proving harder to complete but may be thrown a fresh lifeline this week. Buccleuch wants £6m for 10,500 acres of Langholm Moor, once one of the UK’s most famous grouse moors – the highest price ever asked in a community buyout. The land fund has offered the Langholm Initiative, which is organising the bid, £1m in funding on condition that it completes the deal by 31 October this year. With support from Buccleuch Estates, Langholm Initiative has asked the land fund to extend the deadline to later in the year. It hopes to create a new nature reserve and restore the moor’s peat beds to help combat climate change. The fund’s board is due to consider the request this week. Last week Langholm Initiative announced it had secured £500,000 from a charitable trust in Dunblane, the Carman Family Foundation. It has raised £210,000 from public donations and has been promised £100,000 by the John Muir Trust, a land access and reform campaign group, but Langholm remains nearly £4.2m short of its target. Kevin Cummings, the initiative’s project leader, said they hoped the land fund would give them more time to raise the money. “We’re going to exhaust every opportunity to seize this once-in-a-lifetime chance for the people of Langholm and for tackling the climate and nature crises,” he said. The Wanlockhead buyout has caused divisions and anxieties: villagers worry about the cost implications of taking over responsibility from the Buccleuchs, and remain unconvinced by the buyout campaigners’ visions for the land they hope to acquire. A village-wide vote last week was far closer than most community buyout ballots. The bid was backed by 69 votes, with 55 against, after a higher than normal turnout of 81%. Second-home owners were excluded, in line with a widely used convention in buyouts to prevent absentee owners affecting decisions. Karen Morrison, one of the villagers who voted against the buyout and organised a petition calling for second-home owners to be given a vote, said she would support it enthusiastically if it went ahead. Even so, she was worried. “Why would the village want to buy thousands of acres and take on all the contamination and such like? If something goes wrong just now, Buccleuch Estates will fix it,” she said. Many villagers felt there was insufficient transparency, she added. Richford said Buccleuch claimed on insurance if something went wrong. “We will have insurance,” he said. “The land is an asset, not a liability.” He welcomed the vote’s high turnout and close result. “The whole basis of this is empowerment, and we can’t start that off by ignoring what people say. That includes the people who voted against, who are equally empowered once this goes through.”