Craig Stirrat

“This village is only a cursed place, if ye make it so! To the rest of us, ‘tis a blessed place!” (Mr Lundie, Brigadoon 1954)

As an early adopter of the Sustainability for Housing Reporting Standard for Social Housing, Grampian Housing Association is committed to ensuring that the rural communities it serves across the North East of Scotland have a sustainable future by working with developers and local authorities to build more affordable homes.

I was therefore delighted to read last week that the Scottish Government has responded to the calls from various advocates in the sector for a new national agency for housing and land delivery – called More Homes Scotland – which is intended to be fully operational by 2028-29.

I was particularly pleased to read that two of the four pillars of the agency will be:

• Rural and island housing, and
• Enabling infrastructure work to unlock stalled sites

Notwithstanding the sustainability challenges facing many rural villages, development often causes tensions amongst existing residents, as illustrated in a recent BBC Scotland news report on the growth of Tarves, in Aberdeenshire, from a rural village to a town (where Grampian has recently delivered over 40 affordable homes by Scotia Homes).

The issues raised in the BBC news article reminded me of the many parallels with the fictional story of Brigadoon. Whilst Brigadoon wasn’t written as a satire of Scottish rural economics, it does unintentionally mirror the emotional truth of communities trying to hold onto themselves in the face of overwhelming external pressures.

Brigadoon is built on a single idea: a rural Scottish village becomes so threatened by outside forces that it chooses to disappear for 100 years at a time to preserve its way of life. That core tension — a community trying to protect its identity from external pressures whilst remaining a sustainable community — is exactly what many rural Scottish communities are dealing with today, though in a far less magical way.

If Brigadoon were written today, it might not be about a village vanishing every 100 years — it might be about a village turning into holiday lets every summer, or a community fighting to stay alive as its young people leave.

If anything, the National Housing Emergency makes Brigadoon feel more poignant today: a fantasy about a village that can simply disappear rather than be transformed by economic forces it can’t control. “Outsiders” often fall in love with the idea of rural Scotland, not the lived reality of those who depend on it.

A modern retelling of Brigadoon practically writes itself: a rural Scottish village fighting to survive the pressures of second home ownership, low turnover of what affordable housing is left, fuel poverty, land scarcity, and local services closing due to depopulation. The emotional core of the original—protecting a way of life from outside forces—maps cleanly onto the real economic forces reshaping rural Scotland today.

The setting for Brigadoon 2026 could be a small village in the Royal Deeside. Instead of vanishing every 100 years, the village “disappears” in a modern sense:

• Homes sit dark most of the year as second homes, Airbnb and Bed & Breakfasts
• Local services close due to depopulation
• The school is down to a handful of pupils
• The last shop is struggling.

The village becomes functionally invisible – a place hundreds of tourists adore but residents can no longer afford to inhabit – the village’s “curse” is economic, not magical. Like many rural communities, the community is trapped in a cycle of:

• low wages
• high housing costs
• limited land supply
• fragile infrastructure
• seasonal employment
• increasing social divide between residents

These pressures mirror real findings that rural Scots face - persistent structural poverty, low wages, and fragile housing markets.

A modern Brigadoon would not be a fantasy about a village escaping time—it would be a drama about a rural community fighting not to be erased by market forces and feeling left behind. The “miracle” would be:

• securing land
• building affordable homes
• retaining young families
• preserving culture and language
• resisting extractive economic pressures

The emotional stakes are the same as the original, but the antagonist is no longer enchantment - it’s economics.

This is where the story aligns with Scotland’s current push to empower local communities and address rural housing shortages through new agencies like More Homes Scotland - supporting locally based housing associations like Grampian Housing Association who work with local authorities and communities to deliver the social rented homes that help create more balanced communities.

Fortunately, I can say Grampian Housing Association’s relationship with rural communities is not a work of fiction, as evidenced by our recent award-winning development in Ballater.

But we’re only scraping the surface of the rural economic inequalities. As many rural communities are still slowly but surely disappearing - not through magic, but through economics – so now more than ever we need More Homes Scotland!