'Our New Crofting Life'

Read all about our journey on our croft. Published June 2026.

'Based mainly on extracts from their diaries, this is a  lavishly illustrated account of the initial experience of  new croft entrants aiming to establish a sustainable  enterprise on a small croft in rural Lewis, keeping rare  breeds of livestock and diversifying into environmental  education, art, and adventure tourism. David and  Izzy approach the formidable challenges they face  with determination and ambition, demonstrating  a pioneering spirit while at the same time being  conscious of the township’s long heritage and  traditions from which they wish to learn. There are also  reflective pieces which give an honest assessment  of the potential financial viability of crofting and its  contribution to wider issues such as rural development,  biodiversity, and addressing climate change'

Published by Islands Book Trust. www.islandsbooktrust.org

We are pleased to share a book review written by Jim Hunter, an award winning author and historian who is the eminent writer on crofting history and helped shape the early days of the Crofters Union, now the Scottish Crofting Federation.

Book Review

James Hunter

Isabella De Santis and David Bartles-Smith, Our New Crofting Life: The Diary and Reflections of New Entrant Crofters on the Isle of Lewis, Islands Book Trust, 164 pp, £15.00

Crofting has never been easy. It wasn’t meant to be. Brought into existence by landlords looking to find a means of accommodating people kicked out of long settled localities the same landords were turning over to sheep farmers, crofts from the start were typically so small as to make it impossible for their occupiers to make adequate livelihoods from farming the parcels of land they’d been allocated. Their croft was a crofting family’s source of some (in the past perhaps all) of their foodstuffs. There might be a bit of money to be made from sales of its livestock. Above all, it was home to generation after generation of the people living on it. That’s why, even when crofts have become unworked or abandoned by folk whose incomes derive from jobs that have taken them elsewhere, those same folk find it so difficult to break their connection with what, to them, remains their croft – in an emotional sense as much as, or more than, a legal one.

That’s one powerful reason (though there’s no lack of others) as to why – irrespective of Crofting Commission efforts to have crofts both lived on and worked – so much croft land is visibly neglected while, at the same time, people (often young people) who’d dearly like to put such land to use can’t get hold of any.

But it doesn’t do, for all that, to conclude that crofting’s had it. There are good, as well as bad, stories to be told about where crofting stands today and where it might be headed in the future. Two recent experiences have made this evident to me.

The first was my being invited to be in Inverness last November for the annual gathering of the Scottish Crofting Federation. I was there because that gathering marked the 40thanniversary of the launch, also in Inverness, of the Scottish Crofters Union. For two years prior to that launch, I’d helped the SCU’s founders – people like the late Angus Macleod from Lewis and the late Roddy Steele from South Uist – get the union up an running. For the next five years I’d be one of the union’s two full-time employees.

The SCU has since evolved into today’s SCF. And from what I heard in Inverness, its office-bearers and its staff wrestle, much as the SCU wrestled long ago, with politicians, civil servants and others for whom crofting – as opposed to large-scale farming – is of peripheral concern. But there was encouragement, too, to be got that day in Inverness. From news of SCF victories on the policy front. From hearing SCF members speak about the innovative and productive things they’re doing with their crofts.

My consequent sense of there being reasons to be optimistic about the crofting future was powerfully reinforced on my reading Our New Crofting Life by SCF members Isabella De Santis and David Bartles-Smith. Subtitled The Diary and Reflections of New Entrant Crofters on the Isle of Lewis, this book is just that. It tells how Izzy and David (which is how they feature in their narrative) left their ‘few parcels of land ... on the edge of the North Pennines’ to take over the tenancy of a bare land croft (one with no house) in the Lewis township of Lemreway.

You could, if you were so inclined, dismiss David and Izzy as a pair of incomer good-lifers muscling into a crofting community which they don’t understand and where their plans are virtually certain to founder on their first running up against crofting realities. But no such dismissal of this couple can survive a reading of their book.

Beautifully and engagingly written, it tells of what they’ve accomplished in Lemreway since their 2021 arrival. ‘Starting with bare land and lots of hope and endeavour,’ Izzy and David write, ‘we sought to bring the croft back to life.’

That hasn’t been straightforward. Despite their careful researching of crofting and croft tenure, they were unprepared for their long wait to get Crofting Commission confirmation that their tenancy of Croft Seventeen, Lemreway, had been approved. Then came two years of living in a caravan while embarking on a great deal of hard work. There was stock fencing to be put in place around fields where long-neglected pasture had to be brought back into use. There was deer fencing to put up around a planned woodland – made up of trees of Lewis provenance. There was a polytunnel to construct and stock with fruit and vegetables. 

And so it continued. Soay sheep are taken to Lewis from David and Izzy’s previous smallholding. Highland cattle and hens – their eggs a source of income – are added to the sheep. Drains are opened. Solar panels and a wind turnbine reduce reliance on bought-in power. There’s diversification into tourism. Izzy, who’s been a veterinary nurse, acquires new clients and becomes a retained firefighter. David finds time to produce paintings that are exhibited in Stornoway’s An Lanntair arts centre and sell increasingly further afield.

In Lemreway, Izzy and David are tenants of the Pairc Trust which, after a long struggle, took the Pairc area of Lewis into community ownership in 2015. And in Lemreway they find people prepared to extend to them no end of help and encouragement. That, as the still new tenants of Croft Seventeen, underline towards the end of what they call their ‘wee book’ has been of critical importance to their success.

‘Our journey has affirmed our original decision to take a chance,’ David and Izzy write. ‘Maybe we have been lucky. We do however believe there is more to it than luck. We have invested everything, not just all our money but all our emotions, hopes and dreams. It is hard and at times scary. Whilst there is so much that we can show and talk about that has endeared us to this journey, the real standout for us has been the community. We have been lucky in Lemreway and Pairc.’

 As this book amply demonstrates, much has been put in place in the last five years on Croft Seventeen. But Izzy and David, I’ve no doubt, still have a lot to do. This nowadays distant observer of crofting thanks them for what they’ve written and wishes them all the very best.

Published by Islands Book Trust. www.islandsbooktrust.org Order your copy from Islands Book Trust now.